Top Ecommerce Platforms |  A Global Market Share Breakdown

Whether you are a digital business virtuoso, keeping your edge with a data-driven approach to decision making and your zest to invest in profitable online ventures, or one of the daring entrepreneurs that use hard facts to feed their passion for innovation… taking a good look at the current status and dynamics of the ecommerce-platform industry is going to be helpful.

Here is why:

• The future of retail is online retail e-tail.

  It varies across different cultural landscapes, but consumer behavior has been steadily shifting toward digitized service from the moment it became an option. From roughly $1.9 trillion in 2016.

• Everybody is jumping on the omnichannel bandwagon!

  As mobile devices empower everybody to shop freely, regardless of time and place, traditional retailers of all sizes have been engaged in a digitization race of epic proportions. Equally impressive is the number of e-tail ventures that avoid the brick & mortar model altogether, with cross-border e-tail increasing at a faster pace than ever.

• The advent and proliferation of merchant-dedicated services democratize digital business.

  Many companies functioning as outsourced components of other organizations, including ecommerce businesses, also have adopted the ecommerce approach to digital business. Moreover, they have proved to be quite successful at it: shows that the B2B ecommerce sector brings in three times more revenue than B2C ecommerce.

Before we jump into some ecommerce-platform market-share data, let’s take a brief look at the countries that have proven to be most prolific in the ecommerce industry.

What Are the World’s Largest Ecommerce Markets by Country?

According to a 2017-updated business.com study covering the largest ecommerce national markets, the world’s ten largest ecommerce markets are:

• China:

  $672 billion in annual online sales, accounting for 15.9% of total Chinese retail sales. With an impressive 35% of annual growth, China is also the world’s fastest growing ecommerce market.

• United States:

  $340 billion in annual online sales, which is 7.5% of total American retail sales.

• United Kingdom:

  $99 billion in sales, annually, accounting for a decent 14.5% of total British retail sales.

• Japan:

  $79 billion in annual ecommerce sales, which stands for 5.4% of total retail sales.

• Germany:

  $73 billion in annual e-sales, with an 8.4% share of total retail sales.

• France:

  $43 billion in annual e-sales, which is 5.1% of total French retail sales.

• South Korea:

  $37 billion in annual online sales, bringing in 9.8% of the total retail sales in Korea.

• Canada:

  $30 billion in online sales, with an ecommerce share of total retail sales of 5.7%.

• Russia:

  $20 billion in annual online sales. Russia’s ecommerce industry is still in its infancy, since the ecommerce share of total retail sales reaches only 2%, despite the fact that Russia has the largest population of internet users in Europe.

• Brazil:

  $19 billion in annual online sales. The ecommerce share of total retail sales capped at 2.8% last year, but Brazil is showing great progress, with an annual growth of 22%.

Surely, the leading ecommerce platforms will vary throughout these and other countries, as well as across larger regions. However, at a global level, the top players are quite well established.

Who Are the Top Players on the Global Ecommerce Platform Market?

A 2017 Statista paper covering the global market share of leading ecommerce platforms clearly shows staggering domination by WooCommerce, which is being run on 28 percent of all e-commerce sites worldwide.

However, it is well established that the popularity of WooCommerce among e-shop owners is largely attributed to the apparently unweathering popularity of WordPress, which is still the number one CMS worldwide. WooCommerce functions as a WordPress plugin and basically depends on WordPress’ user base.

A hawk-eyed view of the global market share of leading ecommerce platforms, based on website adoption rates, reveals the following top ten brands:

• WooCommerce | 26%

• Shopify | 20%

• Magento | 9%

• OpenCart | 3%

• BigCommerce | 3%

Here is how they stack up against one another:

A Sneak Peek Behind the Curtains of Ecommerce Platform Distribution

When analyzing the global ecommerce-platform market, it becomes apparent that a few front runners command a solid slice of the market. Their seemingly undisputed leadership does not truly portray the market and its ever-evolving trends.

This insightful Engadget article dives into the intricacies of the ecommerce platform market, and tackles it in terms of distribution and trends, showing that “there are a lot of factors that change what the market share and distribution of e-commerce platforms are.” For example, in terms of site rankings, the market share of platforms varies greatly when you filter between the top 10k, 100k, and 1M sites.

Distribution and shares also vary when we boil it down to regions and, of course, to global growth rates and growth rates across various regions.

Spoiler Alert

We are clearly not done. Our analysis of the ecommerce sector, with a specific focus on ecommerce platforms, will continue in the form of a couple of extra articles based on available regional data.

Next stop: Europe! Spoiler or not, let me tell you that the ecommerce-platform leaderboard looks dramatically different in Europe. In my upcoming analysis I’ll dive deeper into this, but the most popular ecommerce platforms in Europe are Magento, OpenCart, WooCommerce, PrestaShop, and osCommerce.

As a European payment processor and payment gateway, Twispay integrates beautifully with all of these platforms.