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Part III Chapter 13

Ecommerce

Hero image of a Web Almanac character at a supermarket checkout loading items from a shopping basket onto the conveyor belt while another character pays with a credit card.

Introduction

Ecommerce is no longer a special case on the web-it is the web. In 2025, buying journeys start in search results, social feeds, and live streams; they continue in voice assistants, messaging apps, and lean‑back surfaces like smart TVs; and increasingly, they can be completed by AI agents acting on a shopper’s behalf. An ecommerce website is still an online store that sells physical or digital products, but it now sits at the intersection of product pages, payments, performance, accessibility, and trust.

When building an online store, there are a few common platform models:

  1. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platforms (e.g., Shopify) minimize the technical knowledge required to run a store by controlling the codebase and abstracting hosting.
  2. Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions (e.g., Adobe Commerce / Magento) provide an optimized technology stack and hosting environment while still allowing full code access.
  3. Self-hosted platforms (e.g., WooCommerce, OpenCart) run on infrastructure managed by the merchant or their agency.
  4. Headless / API-first platforms (e.g., Commercetools, Medusa) provide the commerce backend as a service, while the merchant owns the frontend experience and hosting.
  5. Agentic commerce (agent-ready commerce) layers sit alongside (or on top of) the storefront: structured product data, inventory, policies, identity, and payment flows exposed through APIs and standards so assistants and AI agents can safely discover products and execute purchases-with clear user consent and guardrails.

Platforms may fall into more than one category. For example, some vendors offer SaaS, PaaS, and self-hosted options, and many headless builds still rely on SaaS backends under the hood. The important variables are who controls hosting, who controls the runtime and upgrade path, and how much freedom you have to change the frontend and backend.

Platform detection

We used a tool called Wappalyzer to detect technologies used by websites. It can detect ecommerce platforms, content management systems, JavaScript frameworks, analytics, and more.

For this analysis, we considered a site to be ecommerce if we detected either:

  • Use of a known ecommerce platform, or
  • Use of a technology that strongly implies an online store (for example, enhanced ecommerce analytics).

Limitations

Our methodology has limitations that affect accuracy.

Limitations in recognizing ecommerce sites

  • We can only recognize ecommerce sites when Wappalyzer detects an ecommerce platform or a strong ecommerce signal.
  • Detecting a payment processor alone (e.g., PayPal) is not sufficient to classify a site as ecommerce, because many non‑store sites also take payments.
  • If the store is hosted in a subdirectory (and we only analyze the homepage), it may be missed.
  • Headless implementations reduce platform detectability because the traditional fingerprints in HTML/JS often disappear.

Accuracy of metrics and commentary

  • Apparent trends can be influenced by improvements or regressions in detection, not just industry shifts.
  • Crawl geography matters: results may differ when sites redirect based on location.
  • The underlying site set is drawn from Chrome’s field data ecosystem, which biases toward sites visited by Chrome users.

Overall adoption

19.1%
Figure 13.1. Percent of mobile pages that are ecommerce sites.

In the 2025 dataset, we detected 19.8% of all analyzed desktop sites and 19.1% of all analyzed mobile sites.

That headline number is the first reminder that ecommerce is not just “a vertical”-it’s a major slice of what real users experience on the open web.

Adoption by rank

In general, the most popular sites are more likely to be professionally engineered, heavily optimized, and backed by larger budgets.

The following table shows how the share of sites that are ecommerce increases as we include less‑popular sites.

Rank tier Desktop ecommerce share Mobile ecommerce share
Top 1,000 1.7% 1.4%
Top 10,000 3.7% 3.2%
Top 100,000 7.8% 6.9%
Top 1,000,000 17.0% 15.5%
Top 10,000,000 21.3% 20.7%
Figure 13.2. Top ecommerce platforms by rank.

The pattern is consistent:

  • At the very top of the web (top 1,000), ecommerce is present but rare.
  • By the time you reach the top 10 million, roughly one in five sites is an online store.

Platform market share

Across both desktop and mobile, the platform landscape remains top-heavy: a small set of systems account for the majority of detected stores, while a long tail of niche and regional platforms fills the rest.

The following tables show the share of detected ecommerce sites within ecommerce (platform market share), and also how often each platform appears across all sites in the dataset.

Platform Share of ecommerce sites Share of all sites
WooCommerce 35.9% 7.1%
Shopify 21.2% 4.2%
Squarespace Commerce 9.1% 1.8%
Wix eCommerce 7.8% 1.6%
PrestaShop 3.2% 0.6%
1C-Bitrix 2.4% 0.5%
Magento 2.0% 0.4%
OpenCart 1.1% 0.2%
Cafe24 1.0% 0.2%
BigCommerce 0.7% 0.1%
Figure 13.3. Desktop (top platforms, 2025).
Platform Share of ecommerce sites Share of all sites Detected sites
WooCommerce 37.1% 7.1% 1,099,863
Shopify 20.6% 3.9% 612,387
Wix eCommerce 8.9% 1.7% 262,643
Squarespace Commerce 8.1% 1.5% 239,580
PrestaShop 3.1% 0.6% 92,484
1C-Bitrix 2.8% 0.5% 82,394
Magento 1.8% 0.3% 53,179
OpenCart 1.2% 0.2% 35,493
Tiendanube 0.8% 0.2% 23,333
Square Online 0.7% 0.1% 20,942
Figure 13.4. Mobile (top platforms, 2025).

If you zoom out to the last few years, the story is less about disruption and more about slow consolidation:

  • WooCommerce remains the largest ecosystem, staying roughly flat (about 37.2% → 35.9% of ecommerce sites from 2022 to 2025).
  • Shopify continues to gain share (about 17.7% → 21.2%).
  • Wix eCommerce is the fastest climber in the top 5 (about 4.5% → 7.8%).
  • PrestaShop continues to trend down in share (about 4.6% → 3.2%).

In other words: the default choices are getting more default, and smaller open‑source ecosystems are having to compete harder on developer experience, hosting simplicity, and performance out of the box.

Tops platforms by tier

Different tiers have different top platforms.

Position Top 1,000 Top 10,000 Top 100,000 Top 1,000,000 Top 10,000,000
1 Magento Salesforce Commerce Cloud Shopify Shopify WooCommerce
2 Amazon Webstore Fourthwall Magento WooCommerce Shopify
3 Fourthwall Amazon Webstore Salesforce Commerce Cloud Magento Squarespace Commerce
4 HCL Commerce Magento WooCommerce PrestaShop PrestaShop
5 Pattern by Etsy SAP Commerce Cloud Amazon Webstore 1C-Bitrix Magento
Figure 13.5. TODO.
Position Top 1,000 Top 10,000 Top 100,000 Top 1,000,000 Top 10,000,000
1 Magento Salesforce Commerce Cloud Shopify Shopify WooCommerce
2 Fourthwall Fourthwall Magento WooCommerce Shopify
3 HCL Commerce Amazon Webstore Salesforce Commerce Cloud Magento Squarespace Commerce
4 Amazon Webstore Magento WooCommerce PrestaShop PrestaShop
5 Pattern by Etsy SAP Commerce Cloud Amazon Webstore 1C-Bitrix Wix eCommerce
Figure 13.6. TODO.
  • In the very top ranks, enterprise and bespoke ecosystems show up more often.
  • In the broader web, the long‑tail winners (especially WooCommerce) dominate by volume.

Top platforms by geography

Platform dominance changes by region because of language, local payment rails, agency ecosystems, and the historical footprint of vendors.

Figure 13.7. Top ecommerce platform by country in 2025.
  • On desktop, WooCommerce is the most common platform in 43 of 63 geographies in our country‑level view on the most popular platform.
  • On mobile, WooCommerce leads even more often: 74 of 95.

There are also meaningful regional exceptions:

  • 1C‑Bitrix leads in parts of Eastern Europe and Central Asia (e.g., Russian Federation, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan).
  • Tiendanube stands out in Argentina.
  • Shoptet appears as a leader in Czechia.
  • Cafe24 leads in South Korea.
  • Salla shows up strongly in Saudi Arabia.

Core Web Vitals in ecommerce

Ecommerce sites are unusually sensitive to performance because every extra second compounds: slower category pages reduce product views; slower product pages reduce add‑to‑carts; slower checkout flows reduce conversion.

We use Core Web Vitals (CWV) field metrics to summarize real‑user experience:

  • LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): measures loading performance. It captures how quickly the main content becomes visible. In ecommerce, it often maps to hero imagery, product grids, and critical CSS/JS that blocks rendering.
  • INP (Interaction to Next Paint): measures responsiveness. It captures the delay between a user action (tap/click) and the next visual update. It is sensitive to heavy JavaScript, third-party tags, and main-thread contention.
  • CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): measures visual stability. It captures how much content shifts as the page loads. It’s especially relevant to ecommerce because late-loading product images, personalization widgets, and promo banners can cause mis-clicks.

A site is considered “good” on CWV when it passes all three thresholds.

Figure 13.8. Desktop Core Web Vitals pass rate by platform in 2025.
Figure 13.9. Mobile Core Web Vitals pass rate by platform in 2025.

CWV by platform

Platform Origins Good LCP Good INP Good CLS Good CWV
WooCommerce 401,579 45.5% 99.3% 67.7% 33.5%
Shopify 286,618 92.5% 99.3% 82.2% 75.9%
Squarespace Commerce 82,393 90.3% 99.7% 77.6% 69.3%
Wix eCommerce 56,104 76.0% 99.4% 90.4% 68.8%
PrestaShop 46,479 74.5% 98.6% 71.1% 53.7%
Magento 37,153 60.0% 99.0% 55.3% 36.6%
1C-Bitrix 31,699 85.9% 99.4% 79.9% 68.2%
OpenCart 14,476 86.6% 99.1% 80.0% 70.3%
Cafe24 13,557 98.3% 97.6% 47.4% 45.8%
BigCommerce 12,133 91.5% 99.4% 59.5% 55.2%
Figure 13.10. TODO.
Platform Origins Good LCP Good INP Good CLS Good CWV
WooCommerce 401,579 45.5% 99.3% 67.7% 33.5%
Shopify 286,618 92.5% 99.3% 82.2% 75.9%
Squarespace Commerce 82,393 90.3% 99.7% 77.6% 69.3%
Wix eCommerce 56,104 76.0% 99.4% 90.4% 68.8%
PrestaShop 46,479 74.5% 98.6% 71.1% 53.7%
Magento 37,153 60.0% 99.0% 55.3% 36.6%
1C-Bitrix 31,699 85.9% 99.4% 79.9% 68.2%
OpenCart 14,476 86.6% 99.1% 80.0% 70.3%
Cafe24 13,557 98.3% 97.6% 47.4% 45.8%
BigCommerce 12,133 91.5% 99.4% 59.5% 55.2%
Figure 13.11. Mobile (2025, top platforms by origin count).

A few patterns show up repeatedly:

  • INP is generally strong on desktop across most major platforms, suggesting that modern JS stacks and browser improvements are helping responsiveness.
  • LCP is the biggest differentiator-platforms that ship fast themes and tightly controlled app ecosystems tend to score better.
  • WooCommerce has scale, but not automatic speed: its CWV pass rates lag behind SaaS-heavy ecosystems, which is consistent with its infinite customizatio” nature.

Year-over-year movement

Looking at the largest platforms from 2024 → 2025, most ecosystems improved their “good” Core Web Vitals share, but the magnitude differs:

  • Wix eCommerce sees the biggest jump (≈ 16.2% on mobile and 18.8% on desktop).
  • Shopify also improves materially (≈ 7.9% mobile; 5.8% desktop).
  • WooCommerce improves more modestly (≈ 4.9% mobile; 4.1% desktop).

This is the tradeoff you should expect: platforms that centralize more of the stack can deliver performance improvements to millions of stores at once. Platforms that decentralize responsibility (themes, plugins, hosting, agencies) tend to improve more slowly because the bottleneck is coordination.

Lighthouse

Lighthouse is the HTTP Archive’s lab-based audit. Unlike Core Web Vitals (field data), it runs in a controlled environment (simulated device, throttled network/CPU) and produces scores for Performance, Accessibility, SEO, and Best Practices:

  • Performance: Lighthouse Performance is a lab score (0–100) summarizing load and responsiveness under a controlled test profile. It’s most useful for relative comparisons across platforms.
  • Accessibility: Lighthouse Accessibility is based on automated checks (it cannot catch everything), but it’s a useful baseline signal for common issues like missing labels, low contrast, and incorrect semantics.
  • SEO: The Lighthouse SEO score reflects technical SEO fundamentals (e.g., title/meta, basic crawlability signals). High medians are common because these checks are straightforward to pass.
  • Best Practices: Best Practices is a grab bag of security and reliability checks (HTTPS, safe JS patterns, modern APIs). It often reflects platform defaults and theme quality.

Lighthouse is useful for comparisons across large sets of sites, but it won’t perfectly match what real users experience.

Median Lighthouse scores by platform

Platform Sites tested Performance (median) Accessibility (median) SEO (median) Best Practices (median)
WooCommerce 886,516 56 85 92 78
Shopify 486,573 71 88 92 78
Squarespace Commerce 227,616 60 93 92 100
Wix eCommerce 175,056 82 95 100 78
PrestaShop 87,551 53 78 92 78
1C-Bitrix 61,876 51 75 92 56
Magento 58,287 55 76 91 74
OpenCart 26,934 56 79 91 78
Cafe24 22,221 34 71 85 56
BigCommerce 20,120 64 79 92 74
Figure 13.12. Desktop (top platforms by test count).
Platform Sites tested Performance (median) Accessibility (median) SEO (median) Best Practices (median)
WooCommerce 1,116,462 32 85 92 79
Shopify 573,370 43 88 92 79
Wix eCommerce 250,295 52 95 100 79
Squarespace Commerce 243,490 30 94 92 96
PrestaShop 103,104 30 79 92 79
1C-Bitrix 90,214 33 75 92 57
Magento 61,633 31 77 91 75
OpenCart 35,585 35 77 91 79
Mercado Shops 24,413 36 86 92 96
Tiendanube 23,106 58 93 92 75
Figure 13.13. Mobile (top platforms by test count).

A few high-level patterns:

  • SaaS storefronts tend to cluster higher on the Performance category (especially on desktop), consistent with tighter control over themes and defaults.
  • Accessibility medians are generally strong across top platforms, but medians can hide long-tail variance.
  • SEO and Best Practices scores are high for most platforms-where teams usually win or lose is performance and implementation discipline, not basic technical SEO.

Payment providers

Payments are where ecommerce becomes real. They also represent a major dependency surface area: third‑party scripts, redirects, fraud tooling, and compliance constraints.

Figure 13.14. Payment provider distribution on ecommerce sites in 2025.

The following tables show the most commonly detected payment providers in 2025.

Payment provider Share of payment detections Share of all sites Detected sites
PayPal 18.6% 3.9% 485,370
Apple Pay 13.4% 2.8% 350,570
Shop Pay 12.1% 2.5% 316,918
Visa 10.3% 2.1% 268,465
Mastercard 10.3% 2.1% 268,295
American Express 9.2% 1.9% 240,071
Stripe 8.6% 1.8% 225,053
Google Pay 8.3% 1.7% 218,246
Venmo 2.5% 0.5% 65,331
Klarna Checkout 1.2% 0.2% 30,852
Figure 13.15. Desktop (2025, top payment providers).
Payment provider Share of payment detections Share of all sites Detected sites
PayPal 18.8% 3.5% 548,276
Apple Pay 13.4% 2.5% 390,665
Shop Pay 11.9% 2.2% 348,267
Visa 10.6% 2.0% 309,054
Mastercard 10.6% 2.0% 308,874
American Express 9.4% 1.8% 273,942
Google Pay 8.6% 1.6% 250,089
Stripe 7.9% 1.5% 230,914
Venmo 2.3% 0.4% 68,549
Klarna Checkout 1.3% 0.2% 38,175
Figure 13.16. Mobile (2025, top payment providers).

The top 10 payment technologies cover roughly 94.4% of detections on desktop and 94.7% on mobile-another reminder that payments consolidate quickly.

What changed since 2022?

The most noticeable trend is that PayPal’s share of payment detections declines, while wallets and processor‑first ecosystems grow:

  • PayPal falls from ~39% of payment detections in 2022 to ~30% in 2025 (desktop and mobile both show this pattern).
  • Stripe and Google Pay gain share over the same period.
  • Apple Pay and Shop Pay stay relatively stable at high levels.

This does not mean PayPal is dying. It means the payment layer is becoming more diversified-especially as native wallets, link-based checkout, and platform-native accelerators become standard.

Payment providers by geography

Figure 13.17. Top payment provider by country in 2025.
  • On mobile, PayPal is the top payment provider in 70 of 83 geographies in our view.
  • On desktop, leadership is more split: Stripe leads in 31 geographies while PayPal leads in 22.

Notable examples:

  • Apple Pay leads in New Zealand (both desktop and mobile).
  • Braintree stands out in Taiwan.
  • Several African and Middle Eastern markets show Stripe as the most common top provider in this dataset (e.g., Nigeria, Kenya, UAE).

Conclusion

Ecommerce in 2025 remains both concentrated and diverse. A handful of platforms account for most detected ecommerce sites-led by WooCommerce and Shopify-while a long tail of regional and niche systems continues to matter in specific markets. Website rank adds another layer: enterprise-oriented platforms show up disproportionately in higher-traffic tiers, while long-tail sites skew toward easier-to-adopt and lower-cost solutions.

Performance remains a differentiator, not a footnote. Field metrics (Core Web Vitals) and lab audits (Lighthouse) both show that tighter platform control can correlate with better median outcomes, but the gap is not destiny-self-hosted and heavily customized stacks can perform well when engineering discipline is strong. Payment technologies also consolidate quickly: a small set of providers dominates detections, while wallets and processor-first ecosystems keep gaining share.

The next chapter of ecommerce is not just which platform, but which channels: voice, live commerce, and agentic commerce are pushing stores to become faster, more accessible, and more machine-consumable. The winners will be the ones who treat catalog quality, performance, and trust as product features-because increasingly, the shopper may not be a human clicking around a page at all.

Author

  • AmandeepSingh

Citation

BibTeX
@inbook{WebAlmanac.2025.Ecommerce,
author = "AmandeepSingh, AmandeepSingh and Pollard, Barry",
title = "Ecommerce",
booktitle = "The 2025 Web Almanac",
chapter = 13,
publisher = "HTTP Archive",
year = "2025",
language = "English",
url = "https://almanac.httparchive.org/en/2025/ecommerce"
}