As the saying goes, “The best things in life are free.” Arguably, free things might not always be the best, but is there anyone who does not like free? Free drinks. Free food. Apparently “free” strikes a chord when it comes to e-commerce platforms too. To be clear, we are talking free independent e-tailing platforms and not stores that are part of a larger retailer ecosystem like eBay, Amazon,...etc. In the latest data from Datanyze based on Alexa, four of the top five e-commerce platforms are free. As of this writing, websites using an e-commerce platform technology, B2C or B2B, in the Alexa top one-million rank in this order: 1) Woo Commerce, 2) Magento, 3) Shopify, 4) PrestaShop and 5) Virtuemart. http://tinyurl.com/jtr22os
According to the Alexa data, the most dominant used e-commerce platform used on the Web today is Woo Commerce. Some of you who are major e-commerce platform vendors, are probably thinking, “Is this a joke? This is not even close to correct.” Or you are thinking, “I am not familiar with Woo Commerce, PrestaShop, or Virtuemart.” Better yet, “Where is Hybris, Websphere, or ATG? Those are big players and ranked highly by research firms.” Yes, those are good points and questions, but it is time to widen our thinking and awareness here. Particularly around platform sizing. As you can see from the pie chart, there are tons of e-commerce platforms as the number of slices is quite high. Is it a crowded market? You bet. At the same time, none of them are a one-size-fits-all solution (although some might claim to be!). It is reasonable to say the top five list is correct if you are considering every segment of e-commerce platforms being used in the top one-million sites crawled by Alexa. Let's take Woo Commerce as an example.
Woo are you kidding?
Woo Commerce is a free e-commerce toolkit for WordPress. When it comes to blogs, how many people have used WordPress? The answer is in the millions. As blogs became popular, many bloggers wanted to be able to sell something (i.e. most commonly an ebook or homemade item) on their blog without investing any money. They wanted a freebie e-commerce turnkey solution specific to their WordPress blog platform. They would use PayPal for payment transactions. No coding or IT integration support team needed. The Woo Commerce solution fit this segment perfectly. In short, this is how Woo Commerce ends up at the top of the Alexa list with millions of blogs using it. Woo Commerce leads the segment that makes up the “micro-commerce” online retail space.
Sailing the seas of platforms
It is important to consider segments of retail sizing when looking at a holistic data list such as Alexa. Also, remember that the most visible solution, is not always the best solution. The most used, versus the most marketed. There are a boat load of e-commerce platforms out there and this can be easily seen if you have been to a trade show like IRCE. There are perhaps four major e-commerce platform segments to consider from an online store sizing and product catalog perspective. Each requiring its own scale of support and infrastructure:
1. Micro-Commerce – Sites with one to a dozen products. Often a one to three person show.
2. Small/Medium Business e-Commerce – Sites with a small business product catalog. Several hundred products. Perhaps a small IT team or outside vendor to maintain the site.
3. Large Company e-Commerce – Sites with a product catalog supporting thousands of products. This is a company with full end-to-end IT support.
4. Large Multi-Divisional Global Enterprise e-Commerce – Sites with complex distribution, perhaps millions of SKUs, or simply multi-channel business enablement.
If you are looking to get your online retail efforts in gear with an e-commerce platform, it is essential to know which of those four segments you fall within (among many other things). It is also fair to say that many commercially available licensed e-commerce platforms for large businesses are very good, examples: Intershop, ATG, Websphere...etc. They are not free as they require licensing. Sometimes they can be quite expensive. Yet in return, most of them will get the job done no matter what the business evolves around. In addition, One now has the option to run their e-commerce completely in the cloud with platforms such as: Shopify, CloudCraze (on Salesforce.com), BigCommerce...etc. For those who have much smaller ventures starting with virtually no budget, free open source platforms such as OpenCart or PrestaShop are perfect for getting things off the ground. In fact, some of these can scale quite well as a business expands. There are newer e-commerce platforms such as Symphony which offers a unique spin on the D2C order fulfillment cycle. Their platform offers a multi-warehouse fulfillment network one can leverage to fulfill all drop ship orders to maximize order-fill rates (major agility!). It would be easy to go on in great detail about all the various e-commerce platforms available and cover the pros and cons of each one. This is a huge industry. For now, this should give an idea of how the current landscape looks in terms of actual implementations across the Web based on the Alexa data.
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About The Author:
Brad Beiermann is a nationally recognized technology executive, author, and speaker with specialization in e-commerce, Agile management, mobile, and start-ups such as Cimstrat.com, ProfessorString.com, HienoteDirectory.com, and others. He has considerable experience as a digital technology management consultant with Fortune 500 companies and the entrepreneurial community. He can be reached at bradb at cimstrat dot com.
