Magento Usage Statistics Feb 2013

Magento Powers 26% of the Top eCommerce Websites

It would be easy to guess that a large number of eCommerce sites are using Magento, but what I didn’t realise is that Magento powers 26% of the top 1 million sites ranked on Alexa.

And… where it gets really interesting, is this number increased 12% in only a four months!

 

Magento Domination February 2013

In the chart below taken from the February 2013 eCommerce survey, Tom Robertshaw identified that Magento accounted for 9063 websites out of the total 34,864 eCommerce sites ranked in the top million sites, coming in at a cool 26.08% domination, outstripping all other eCommerce website platforms by miles.

Magento Usage Statistics Feb 2013

Looking at the chart above, Magento is the clear winner in this, but it’s curious to see that we have Virtuemart, Prestashop, Zen Cart, osCommerce and OpenCart pretty much level-pegging for usage across these sites and the once “stable of eCommerce sites”, X-Cart is literally nowhere to be seen at all nowadays.

12% Jump in Magento Sites Ranked

Seeing Magento topping the list wasn’t really a surprise as we all know how versatile it is, however when we look back at Tom’s earlier survey in October 2012, we see in a window of just 4 months, Magento jump from 8063 sites to 9063 in February or a cool 12% increase of Magento sites appearing in the top million sites.

Curious

The curious thing is, this insight was reported in February and we’re 6 months further on in September, which makes you wonder has Magento has topped the 10,000 sites mark yet?

Let me know what you think in the comments box below.

18 replies
  1. Steve Walsh
    Steve Walsh says:

    Hi Baloo,

    you got me…I probably overshot the mark with “business looking to make an investment and really put the energy into it then it’s hard to go past recommending either Magento” because there are lots of great platform out there and Magento does have a few things which hold it back. But for pure scale and flexibility it’s hard to go past, especially because it’s open source, has a great community and there are endless number of extensions.

    Don’t get me wrong, it’s a real pain sometimes and you mentioned a great point in the development costs, also a lot of the extensions don’t play well together and you have to be pretty careful about how you treat the system.

    I’m not saying that for example WordPress doesn’t have a place, it definitely does, but not at the level that Mage does and they’re both for a different target market I guess that’s what I meant.

    Steve

    Reply
    • Baloo
      Baloo says:

      Hi Steve,
      I agree with what you were saying, I’m just researching for my next steps why Mag has the success. And you got me thinking it might not be better, but just used by business with better budgets.
      I did quite a bit of reading up over the last few days, and am almost convinced I need to take the plunge and learn something new.
      So thanks for your input.

      Regards

      Baloo

      Reply
  2. Baloo
    Baloo says:

    Hey Matt,

    I agree, for large scale sites WooCom (and probably any other WP plugin for the forseeable future) won’t be up to the job. But for the likes of my latest client, who works from home, buys cheap old furniture, paints it, sands the corners and sells it for ten times the price, with never more than a dozen items in her inventory – I’d say it was perfect.
    Very simple for her to manage the site (not that she’s done anything yet) in terms of pages, inventory, pricing etc.
    Other clients for whom I’ve used ZC for tend to give me a call, or email me details of any changes/additions they want.

    Horses for courses I’d say. And I’m learning more and more that Magneto is something I must learn in order to be sucessful. Although I am looking forward to the new – ‘from the ground up’ rebuild of ZC, which is not going to be a simple derivative of os com. But who knows when it’ll be finished: http://www.zen-cart.com/showthread.php?199322-Roadmap-for-v1-5-and-beyond

    Cheers

    Baloo

    Reply
  3. Baloo
    Baloo says:

    I’m curious to know what you think the reasons are behind this?
    One thought, based on what Steve said (“…business looking to make an investment and really put the energy into it then it’s hard to go past recommending either Magento..”), if a business is looking to invest on a larger scale for their ecom setup, then it’s likely they’re more inclined to invest on a larger scale on their marketing too.
    So with that in mind, are we to take from this that Magneto is more sucessful because it’s better, or is it a pattern based on investment?
    When I started my site I did look at Magneto. I have developed successful sites using ZenCart and osc in the past, and after looking briefly into Magneto I opted for ZC for a couple of reasons:
    1, Tight setup budget, and Magneto plug-ins looked like they would require a chunk of budget (not saying they’re not worth it, but not feasible for me).
    2, It seemed complicated. I installed it and really struggled to get going. I know this probably sounds feeble (I’m not a complete dunse – honest), but it didn’t come accross as intuitive at all.

    Incidentally, I have since built a couple of e-com sites for clients using WordPress with the WooCommerce plugin, and am really impressed with it. And completely agree that WP ecom will rapidly be on the up. I’m likely to not use ZC again unless I need something more bespoke.

    Baloo

    Reply
    • Matthew Ogborne
      Matthew Ogborne says:

      Howdy Baloo,

      Sounds like a very similar story to my own. I’ve used OSC & ZenCart for eCommerce sites before. I’m on my 3rd time around with Magento now as I started to work deep with OpenCart for a 2 years or so as the inventory system bent well to a large project I was working on at the time.

      The first time I installed Magento,I was probably like you “wtf is all these settings” and the second time around didn’t go much better. However 3rd time lucky and the things I’ve been able to do with it are just crazy.

      As for WP Ecommerce which is another eCommerce plugin for WP, didn’t like it at all, but WooCommerce, used that for another project over a year ago and even then it was adequate. Seen plenty of theme support for it lately too. However the one struggle with WP based systems is that they have to write the inventory control and order management parts from scratch, so while adequate, they’re not up to the job of multi-channel eCommerce and miss the luxuries you find in Magento.

      Looking forward to catching up with you on Thursday, looks like we’ll have loads to talk about :)

      Matt

      Reply
  4. Steve Walsh
    Steve Walsh says:

    Hey Matt,

    yeah Drupal is a beast that’s for sure I think it really depends on what the end user is looking for. I have used Ubercart a fair bit and its got great functionality also Drupal as a CMS really gives amazing flexibility and power.

    In terms of general CMS’s WordPress is just powering along, for small to medium business sites I would think WordPress accounts for even more, possibly 70-80%. I would suggest pretty much everyone who develops is using it, and from an end user perspective I mean it’s just amazing how simple it is to learn and handle on a daily basis. I think as this is happening the number of WP ecommerce sites is on the rise but I would hazard a guess that most of those WP ecommerce sites are stepping into it before they scale up with a Magento/Drupal installation later on down the track.

    For mine we get enquiries for ecommerce sites all the time and if its a serious business looking to make an investment and really put the energy into it then it’s hard to go past recommending either Magento or Drupal mainly because of the growing number of plugins/extensions and the complete control you have with these systems. I know people complain about the hosting costs and the development time but with a larger site I think it more than evens out due to the extra features these carts provide.

    Interesting to see OsCommerce have a updated their website in the last while and it seems there big updates have happened so it would be good if someone out there could update us on what’s happening in the OsCommerce world as well.

    Steve

    Reply
  5. Steve Walsh
    Steve Walsh says:

    What’s really interesting about this isn’t that Magento has so many sites in the top echelons but that so many websites are still running VirtueMart and OsCommerce. It just goes to show the lag time in updating and upgrading. I haven’t used Virtuemart for aprroximately two years but even back then is was slow, annoying and getting a little outdated so unless there’s been a huge update with a load of new features it would be hard to see many new sites being built with VirtueMart these days. The latest info I could find quickly was that Joomla accounted for 10% off opensource CMS sites:

    http://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/content_management/all

    but I wouldn’t be surprised if that is slowly on the decline and Drupal is moving higher.

    Reply
    • Matthew Ogborne
      Matthew Ogborne says:

      Howdy Steve,

      It’s interesting to see that WordPress is so high in that list, but like you surprised to see Joomla up so high.

      Eww Virtuemart, there is an article on this site about the most horrific shopping experience I have ever had and that site was based on Virtuemart. I found Joomla complicated and inversely WordPress a lot easier to manage & code against. Drupal, never really dug in to be honest, however the developers I know in Bristol, rip it’s guts out on a daily basis and love it to bits.

      Matt

      Reply

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