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The State of Ecommerce in 2023

Updated Mar 24 2023

Ecommerce platform usage has exploded over recent years as the world's economy transitions to online. Our mission is to observe and inform on ecommerce usage trends so that app developers and marketers can help merchants succeed. To that end, we are tracking 11,481,362 live stores running on 100 different ecommerce platforms.

Platform Distribution

Here is a summary of the current state of the ecommerce platforms wars:

  • By merchant count, WooCommerce and Shopify dominate. Shopify is growing slightly faster, appears to have greater mindshare and has larger merchants on average.
  • Magento and PrestaShop are quite close, in terms of merchant count, but the average Magento merchant is much larger.
  • Square Online is the ecommerce platform with the highest percentage growth, though it mostly powers micro-merchants.
  • Salesforce Commerce Cloud powers relatively few stores but their stores are some of the biggest merchants around (Patagonia, PUMA, etc.)

Platform
Active Stores
4,016,603
2,074,232
1,374,867
Wix
642,749
279,224
221,385
215,847
212,414
210,285
189,745
179,169
156,407
89,282
77,313
69,190
66,246
60,301
55,104
47,261
44,084
38,994
37,568
36,641
35,739
33,607
31,073
30,642
30,319
25,992
23,983
22,613
20,587
17,556
17,046
16,861
16,043
15,026
14,976
14,802
14,030
13,948
13,735
13,427
12,678
12,159
10,854
10,150
10,095
9,780
8,962
8,895
8,862
8,711
8,641
8,617
8,521
8,403
7,758
7,325
7,126
6,512
6,383
6,292
6,225
6,048
5,610
5,468
5,259
5,205
Zid
4,931
4,479
4,402
4,368
4,224
4,062
3,687
3,673
3,639
3,545
3,538
3,133
2,961
2,878
2,860
2,725
2,581
2,384

Quarterly Growth

Quarter-over-quarter growth across all platforms has been quite impressive over the last few years. With the world's economy continuing to move online, there is little reason to expect it to change.

Quarter
Active Stores
2017 Q1
86,236
2017 Q2
157,791
2017 Q3
79,458
2017 Q4
78,978
2018 Q1
144,380
2018 Q2
655,960
2018 Q3
250,923
2018 Q4
237,247
2019 Q1
446,511
2019 Q2
255,633
2019 Q3
264,707
2019 Q4
254,866
2020 Q1
329,302
2020 Q2
384,882
2020 Q3
352,373
2020 Q4
531,335
2021 Q1
694,597
2021 Q2
749,932
2021 Q3
719,240
2021 Q4
437,357
2022 Q1
389,629
2022 Q2
463,814
2022 Q3
910,112
2022 Q4
811,668
2023 Q1 (to date)
982,024
Cumulative Stores by Quarter

It's hard to know exactly when a store was first created but we use a heuristic combining DNS and WHOIS data that provides a reasonable approximation.

Top Stores

Here are the top 5 ecommerce stores, across the platforms we track, ordered by worldwide store rank.

Name
Domain
Rank
Platform
Created
Amazon
1
Custom Cart
2016/12/30
Walmart.com
2
Custom Cart
2016/12/30
The Depot
3
HCL Commerce
2016/12/30
Target
4
Custom Cart
2016/12/30
Tripadvisor
5
Custom Cart
2016/12/30

New Stores

Here are the 5 highest-ranked stores added most recently.

Name
Domain
Rank
Platform
Created
PipingRock
29,870
Shopify
2023/03/24
American Furniture of Slidell
39,087
Shopify
2023/03/24
PipingRock
48,121
Shopify
2023/03/24
O.P. Taylor's Toy Store
113,192
Square Online
2023/03/24
www.redvital.com
145,134
WooCommerce
2023/03/24

Category Breakdown

Here are the top 20 industry verticals for stores on the platforms we track.

Category
Stores
Apparel
1,166,022
Home & Garden
761,533
Food & Drink
562,876
Beauty & Fitness
545,987
Arts & Entertainment
423,982
People & Society
381,599
Business & Industrial
311,139
Health
285,049
Sports
262,514
Jobs & Education
209,880
Computers
183,116
Autos & Vehicles
172,251
Toys & Hobbies
157,063
Gifts & Special Events
132,685
Pets & Animals
122,433
Consumer Electronics
118,781
Internet
100,430
Travel
95,110
Books & Literature
77,879

Country Breakdown

Across the platforms we track, the largest install base is within the United States. But the platforms have a solid presence within the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia as well.

Country
Stores
None
3,168,031
United States
2,645,005
United Kingdom
566,131
Brazil
390,144
Germany
314,430
Canada
287,177
Australia
279,974
Korea (the Republic of)
244,962
France
231,144
Russian Federation
215,981

Social Media and Contact Info

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest have significant presence across stores, with Facebook and Instagram especially showing quite strongly.

As expected, email remains an extremely popular communication channel.

Type
Stores
Email
5,725,552
Phone
5,245,851
Instagram
4,530,564
Facebook
4,342,097
Twitter
1,194,664
YouTube
1,133,940
LinkedIn
554,051
Pinterest
528,711
WhatsApp
431,789
Tiktok
309,924

Third-Party Technologies

Many merchants run third-party technologies on their store in addition to apps from their ecommerce platform's App Store. We're tracking 535 different technologies that have 37,130,638 collective installs.

Here are the top 10 third-party technologies, ordered by number of installs, across all stores.

Technology
Stores
3,398,716
3,381,351
3,194,651
2,901,604
2,673,480
1,662,100
1,515,194
1,219,379
1,192,236

Shipping Carriers

Here are the top 10 shipping carriers, ordered by frequency of use, across all stores.

Shipping Carrier
Stores
USPS
511,891
UPS
446,029
Fedex
193,793
Correios
113,807
Royal Mail
94,972
Australia Post
59,849
Canada Post
36,036
Correos
28,306
DHL
23,222
Japan Post
10,232

Top-level Domain Distribution

.com is the most popular top-level domain for ecommerce stores. This is not surprising since alternate top-level domains have only recently been introduced and there is still a certain cachet associated with .com domains.

Top-level Domain
Stores
.com
6,574,209
.co.uk
310,547
.com.br
289,399
.de
251,942
.net
216,153
.shop
207,243
.org
204,116
.ru
196,249
.com.au
172,743
.nl
167,768

Get more insights on stores

Our search interface is easy to use and helps you find the stores that are relevant to you.

You can segment stores on a variety of dimensions:

  • Social Media accounts
  • Email address
  • Phone numbers
  • Country
  • Installed Apps
  • Creation date
  • Platform
  • Top-level domains
  • Domain status
  • Domain type
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