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2021 Analysis of Top Ecommerce Platforms

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2021 Analysis of Top Ecommerce Platforms

HTTPArchive examined the data from over 13 million websites visits to ecommerce sites. The data provided insights into which ecommerce sites are most popular and what kinds of sites use them. While the most surprising revelation is in the category of site performance, the conclusion the authors reach about which is best makes a lot of sense.

Decline And Increase in Ecommerce Sites

The following statistics are based on nearly 14 million sites (both desktop and mobile versions) visited by Chrome users.

The number of ecommerce sites online increased between 2020 and 2021. But the percentage of all sites that are ecommerce actually shrunk by almost 2%, according to the data that was collected.

Percentage Sites Ecommerce

Ecommerce Platforms Increased

The research noted that the number of ecommerce platforms detected increased year over year, by a full 48% (215 platforms versus 145 the previous years).

Nevertheless, WordPress has the overwhelming lead over all other platforms, holding a 30% share of all mobile ecommerce sites through the WooCommerce plugin.

Shopify is in second place with a 14% share, followed by the open source PrestaShop platform with a 5% share of all ecommerce sites.

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The following graph shows the percentage of ecommerce sites out of a combined ecommerce and non-ecommerce sites.

Top Ecommerce Platforms

WooCommerce/WordPress ecommerce sites comprise nearly 6% of all sites, Shopify at nearly 3% and PrestaShop at just under 1%.

40% of Top 10 Ecommerce Platforms are Open Source

The research shows that 40% of the top ten ecommerce sites are open source or self-hosted.

  • WooCommerce
  • PrestaShop
  • Magento
  • Shopware.

60% of Top 10 Ecommerce Platforms are SaaS

The remaining 60% are Software as a Service (SaaS) ecommerce platforms.

  • Shopify
  • Wix eCommerce
  • Squarespace Commerce
  • BigCommerce
  • Shopware
  • Loja Integrada

Top Ecommerce Platforms Measured By CrUX Rank

The Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) this year provided a  popularity rank for websites.

Popularity rank means that websites are tagged as belonging to the top 1 million, to lower than the top 1 million, top 100,000 and the top 10,000 websites, as measured by popularity.

This breakdown yielded interesting analysis that revealed insights about the kinds of sites that use the different ecommerce platforms.

Website Popularity of Top 5 Ecommerce Platforms

WooCommerce
WordPress WooCommerce was the most popular platform and many of the sites were among the top million most popular sites.

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PrestaShop

Shopify
There were more sites in the top million that used Shopify (as a percentage) than all other platforms.

Magento
Magento appears to be popular with enterprise level ecommerce sites, as more of the top 10,000 used Magento than the other platforms.

Wix
Wix appears to be the choice of local small business sites for ecommerce. According to the researchers only 164 Wix ecommerce sites appeared in the top 1 million sites by popularity.

Almost all of the Wix ecommerce user based were ranked less than 1 million by popularity. The statistics suggest that the dominant Wix user are small businesses.

Ecommerce Platform For Top 1 Million Sites

WooCommerce was the most popular platform for sites ranked among the top 1 million sites.

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WooCommerce was followed by Shopify in second place and Magento in third.

PrestaShop held fourth place while Shopware, BigCommerce, and Salesforce Commerce Cloud held on to the fifth, sixth and seventh places.

Top 100,000 Sites

Magento is popular among the top 100,000 websites, with WooCommerce dropping to fourth place. This reinforces the impression that Magento is a popular ecommerce platform enterprise level ecommerce sites.

The research author observed:

“When we consider the top 100,000 sites by CrUX rank the picture changes quite drastically. Magento is now the most popular ecommerce platform vendor with 1.21% of mobile sites.

Shopify maintains second place (with 0.88%) while Salesforce Commerce Cloud is third (0.63%).

SAP Commerce Cloud rises up the leaderboard to sixth place to show that the enterprise platforms are more competitive in this space.”

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Top 10,000 Most Popular Sites

Top Level Enterprise Ecommerce

The top ecommerce platforms dramatically changes for the very top of the enterprise level.

Magento is still among the group but it drops from first place to third place.

Top 5 Enterprise Ecommerce Platforms

  1. SAP Commerce
  2. Salesforce Commerce Cloud
  3. Magento
  4. HCL Commerce (IBM WebSphere Commerce)
  5. Oracle Commerce

The author of the article was not surprised at the results, noting that the top enterprise ecommerce platforms are known for servicing the higher end of the enterprise ecommerce market.

For example, Magento is owned by Adobe, which publishes a number of products that are aimed at the higher end of the enterprise market, so it’s not surprising to see that the brand targets that level.

The author wrote:

“All of these platforms are commonly considered to be well suited to larger enterprises.”

Ecommerce Speed Performance Scores

The Lighthouse page speed performance scores were shockingly low.

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Google’s page speed scoring operates on a scale of 1 to 100.

A score of 100 indicates a high level of page speed and a positive user experience. A score of zero essentially represents a dumpster fire.

The average page speed score for ecommerce sites was 22.

The study author speculates that the pressure to add features leads to this level of low performance.

Ecommerce Sites Lighthouse Scores

State of Ecommerce Platforms in 2021

No platform emerged as an overall winner. Each ecommerce platform specialized in servicing a certain level of ecommerce and pretty much stuck to that focus.

WordPress is currently the leader for a range of ecommerce sites but not clearly the platform of choice across categories.

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Wix appears to be a favorite of small businesses while other platforms specialized in enterprise level platforms.

The study authors noted that Wix customers were overwhelmingly popular with small businesses.

“No Wix eCommerce sites were identified in the top 100,000. Only 164 on mobile were identified in the top 1 million. Almost the entirety of the Wix eCommerce footprint was on sites ranked lower than 1 million.”

While there is no clear winner, in the realm of page speed everyone, including the ecommerce platforms come up short.

Page speed and the associated user experience is where a platform can excel and pull away from the pack.

But whoever goes for the gold will have to balance page speed with features.

Citation

Read the 2021 HTTP Web Almanac Ecommerce Chapter

Ecommerce

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How To Combine PR and Content Marketing Superpowers To Achieve Business Goals

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A figure pulls open a dress shirt to reveal the term PR on a Superman-like costume, reflecting the superpower resulting from combining content and PR.

A transformative shift is happening, and it’s not AI.

The aisle between public relations and content marketing is rapidly narrowing. If you’re smart about the convergence, you can forever enhance your brand’s storytelling.

The goals and roles of content marketing and PR overlap more and more. The job descriptions look awfully similar. Shrinking budgets and a shrewd eye for efficiency mean you and your PR pals could face the chopping block if you don’t streamline operations and deliver on the company’s goals (because marketing communications is always first to be axed, right?).

Yikes. Let’s take a big, deep breath. This is not a threat. It’s an opportunity.

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Reach across the aisle to PR and streamline content creation, improve distribution strategies, and get back to the heart of what you both are meant to do: Build strong relationships and tell impactful stories.

So, before you panic-post that open-to-work banner on LinkedIn, consider these tips from content marketing, PR, and journalism pros who’ve figured out how to thrive in an increasingly narrowing content ecosystem.

1. See journalists as your audience

Savvy pros know the ability to tell an impactful story — and support it with publish-ready collateral — grounds successful media relationships. And as a content marketer, your skills in storytelling and connecting with audiences, including journalists, naturally support your PR pals’ media outreach.

Strategic storytelling creates content focused on what the audience needs and wants. Sharing content on your blog or social media builds relationships with journalists who source those channels for story ideas, event updates, and subject matter experts.

“Embedding PR strategies in your content marketing pieces informs your audience and can easily be picked up by media,” says Alex Sanchez, chief experience officer at BeWell, New Mexico’s Health Insurance Marketplace. “We have seen reporters do this many times, pulling stories from our blogs and putting them in the nightly news — most of the time without even reaching out to us.”

Acacia James, weekend producer/morning associate producer at WTOP radio in Washington, D.C., says blogs and social media posts are helpful to her work. “If I see a story idea, and I see that they’re willing to share information, it’s easier to contact them — and we can also backlink their content. It’s huge for us to be able to use every avenue.” 

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Kirby Winn, manager of PR at ImpactLife, says reporters and assignment editors are key consumers of their content. “And I don’t mean a news release that just hit their inbox. They’re going to our blog and consuming our stories, just like any other audience member,” he says. “Our organization has put more focus into content marketing in the past few years — it supports a media pitch so well and highlights the stories we have to tell.”

Storytelling attracts earned media that might not pick up the generic news topic. “It’s one thing to pitch a general story about how we help consumers sign up for low-cost health insurance,” Alex says. “Now, imagine a single mom who just got a plan after years of thinking it was too expensive. She had a terrible car accident, and the $60,000 ER bill that would have ruined her financially was covered. Now that’s a story journalists will want to cover, and that will be relatable to their audience and ours.” 

2. Learn the media outlet’s audience

Seventy-three percent of reporters say one-fourth or less of the stories pitched are relevant to their audiences, according to Cision’s 2023 State of the Media Report (registration required).

PR pros are known for building relationships with journalists, while content marketers thrive in building communities around content. Merge these best practices to build desirable content that works for your target audience and the media’s audiences simultaneously.

WTOP’s Acacia James says sources who show they’re ready to share helpful, relevant content often win pitches for coverage. “In radio, we do a lot of research on who is listening to us, and we’re focused on a prototype called ‘Mike and Jen’ — normal, everyday people in Generation X … So when we get press releases and pitches, we ask, ‘How interested will Mike and Jen be in this story?’” 

3. Deliver the full content package (and make journalists’ jobs easier)

Cranking out content to their media outlet’s standards has never been tougher for journalists. Newsrooms are significantly understaffed, and anything you can do to make their lives easier will be appreciated and potentially rewarded with coverage. Content marketers are built to think about all the elements to tell the story through multiple mediums and channels.

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“Today’s content marketing pretty much provides a package to the media outlet,” says So Young Pak, director of media relations at MedStar Washington Hospital Center. “PR is doing a lot of storytelling work in advance of media publication. We (and content marketing) work together to provide the elements to go with each story — photos, subject matter experts, patients, videos, and data points, if needed.”   

At WTOP, the successful content package includes audio. “As a radio station, we are focused on high-quality sound,” Acacia James says. “Savvy sources know to record and send us voice memos, and then we pull cuts from the audio … You will naturally want to do someone a favor if they did you one — like providing helpful soundbites, audio, and newsworthy stories.”  

While production value matters to some media, you shouldn’t stress about it. “In the past decade, how we work with reporters has changed. Back in the day, if they couldn’t be there in person, they weren’t going to interview your expert,” says Jason Carlton, an accredited PR professional and manager of marketing and communications at Intermountain Health. “During COVID, we had to switch to virtual interviewing. Now, many journalists are OK with running a Teams or Zoom interview they’ve done with an expert on the news.”

BeWell’s Alex Sanchez agrees. “I’ve heard old school PR folks cringe at the idea of putting up a Zoom video instead of getting traditional video interviews. It doesn’t really matter to consumers. Focus on the story, on the timeliness, and the relevance. Consumers want authenticity, not super stylized, stiff content.”

4. Unite great minds to maximize efficiency

Everyone needs to set aside the debate about which team — PR or content marketing — gets credit for the resulting media coverage.

At MedStar Washington Hospital Center, So Young and colleagues adopt a collaborative mindset on multichannel stories. “We can get the interview and gather information for all the different pieces — blog, audio, video, press release, internal newsletter, or magazine. That way, we’re not trying to figure things out individually, and the subject matter experts only have to have that conversation once,” she says.

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Regular, cross-team meetings are essential to understand the best channels for reaching key audiences, including the media. A story that began life as a press release might reap SEO and earned media gold if it’s strategized as a blog, video, and media pitch.

“At Intermountain Health, we have individual teams for media relations, marketing, social media, and hospital communications. That setup works well because it allows us to bring in the people who are the given experts in those areas,” says Intermountain’s Jason Carlton. “Together, we decide if a story is best for the blog, a media pitch, or a mix of channels — that way, we avoid duplicating work and the risk of diluting the story’s impact.”

5. Measure what matters

Cutting through the noise to earn media mentions requires keen attention to metrics. Since content marketing and PR metrics overlap, synthesizing the data in your team meetings can save time while streamlining your storytelling efforts.

“For content marketers, using analytical tools such as GA4 can help measure the effectiveness of their content campaigns and landing pages to determine meaningful KPIs such as organic traffic, keyword rankings, lead generation, and conversion rates,” says John Martino, director of digital marketing for Visiting Angels. “PR teams can use media coverage and social interactions to assess user engagement and brand awareness. A unified and omnichannel approach can help both teams demonstrate their value in enhancing brand visibility, engagement, and overall business success.”

To track your shared goals, launch a shared dashboard that helps tell the combined “story of your stories” to internal and executive teams. Among the metrics to monitor:

  • Page views: Obviously, this queen of metrics continues to be important across PR and content marketing. Take your analysis to the next level by evaluating which niche audiences are contributing to these views to further hone your storytelling targets, including media outlets.
  • Earned media mentions: Through a media tracker service or good old Google Alerts, you can tally the echo of your content marketing and PR. Look at your site’s referral traffic report to identify media outlets that send traffic to your blog or other web pages.
  • Organic search queries: Dive into your analytics platform to surface organic search queries that lead to visitors. Build from those questions to develop stories that further resonate with your audience and your targeted media.
  • On-page actions: When visitors show up on your content, what are they doing? What do they click? Where do they go next? Building next-step pathways is your bread and butter in content marketing — and PR can use them as a natural pipeline for media to pick up more stories, angles, and quotes.

But perhaps the biggest metric to track is team satisfaction. Who on the collaborative team had the most fun writing blogs, producing videos, or calling the news stations? Lean into the natural skills and passions of your team members to distribute work properly, maximize the team output, and improve relationships with the media, your audience, and internal teams.

“It’s really trying to understand the problem to solve — the needle to move — and determining a plan that will help them achieve their goal,” Jason says. “If you don’t have those measurable objectives, you’re not going to know whether you made a difference.”

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Don’t fear the merger

Whether you deliberately work together or not, content marketing and public relations are tied together. ImpactLife’s Kirby Winn explains, “As soon as we begin to talk about (ourselves) to a reporter who doesn’t know us, they are certainly going to check out our stories.”

But consciously uniting PR and content marketing will ease the challenges you both face. Working together allows you to save time, eliminate duplicate work, and gain free time to tell more stories and drive them into impactful media placements.

Register to attend Content Marketing World in San Diego. Use the code BLOG100 to save $100. Can’t attend in person this year? Check out the Digital Pass for access to on-demand session recordings from the live event through the end of the year.

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

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Trends in Content Localization – Moz

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Trends in Content Localization - Moz

Multinational fast food chains are one of the best-known examples of recognizing that product menus may sometimes have to change significantly to serve distinct audiences. The above video is just a short run-through of the same business selling smokehouse burgers, kofta, paneer, and rice bowls in an effort to appeal to people in a variety of places. I can’t personally judge the validity of these representations, but what I can see is that, in such cases, you don’t merely localize your content but the products on which your content is founded.

Sometimes, even the branding of businesses is different around the world; what we call Burger King in America is Hungry Jack’s in Australia, Lays potato chips here are Sabritas in Mexico, and DiGiorno frozen pizza is familiar in the US, but Canada knows it as Delissio.

Tales of product tailoring failures often become famous, likely because some of them may seem humorous from a distance, but cultural sensitivity should always be taken seriously. If a brand you are marketing is on its way to becoming a large global seller, the best insurance against reputation damage and revenue loss as a result of cultural insensitivity is to employ regional and cultural experts whose first-hand and lived experiences can steward the organization in acting with awareness and respect.

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

AI and startups? It just makes sense.

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