Which eCommerce Platform is the Most Popular?

There are tons of options when it comes to shopping cart software, and a lot of this choice depends on your budget and business model. Another factor that must be taken into account is the popularity of one platform over another.

Popularity does matter: no one will use an eCommerce platform they’ve never heard of, and people rely on social proof to help make their decisions — the idea being that if so many people use a product, it must be good.

To assess the relative popularity of different shopping carts, we can start out by examining Google search volume. By loading 5 popular shopping cart solutions into Google Trends, we can observe that Shopify is the most-searched eCommerce platform by far, with all others closely together near the bottom. You can also view search popularity by region.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=shopify,bigcommerce,miva%20merchant,volusion,3dcart

What does this mean?

Simply, more people are doing Google searches about Shopify than any other platform. As we mentioned in our Shopify review, so many people have heard of Shopify that they head straight toward it without checking out other platforms. For many people, it’s the only eCommerce platform they’ve heard of, and they equate “opening an online store” with “making a Shopify store,” so when they’re interested in starting their business they search for Shopify.

Google Trends only tells us the number of searches, though — not how many users any one platform has. For that information, we can view this report by Statista on the market share of leading eCommerce platforms. This exposes that despite Shopify’s enormous search volume, it’s roundly beaten in number of users by WooCommerce, even though WooCommerce is searched less often than Shopify. So, we have established that just because most entrepreneurs are looking for Shopify, that doesn’t mean most of them are using it.

And this data certainly doesn’t tell us how many of those online store owners are happy with the platform they’ve chosen. It’s quite possible that many of those WooCommerce users have chosen it solely because it’s free, and have plans to move to another platform once their budget allows.

The ultimate lesson we can take away from this information is that popularity has many facets.

Search volume and market share are easy to look up, but things like customer satisfaction are a lot harder — frequently, users only leave reviews if they have a significant problem or a truly great experience, which doesn’t help form a coherent picture of exactly how happy the majority of customers are.

So when you’re making decisions for your own business, like what shopping cart platform to use, don’t look to popularity to give you an answer. Instead, learn all you can about several solutions until you find one that fits your unique business perfectly.