Who runs North
American ecommerce,
by merchants, GMV,
and migration.

Here is the honest place to start: no single number tells you who runs ecommerce, and anyone who hands you one clean market-share figure is selling you something. I have seen this market from inside the platform, from inside a nine-figure brand that ran stores on more than one of these systems, and from inside a SaaS company that sold into the ecosystem. "Ecommerce platform market share" is really at least three different questions wearing one coat, and they give three different winners.

Count live stores and WooCommerce wins in a landslide. Count dollars processed and Shopify wins by a distance. Count the largest brands and a pile of custom, in-house stacks wins, with Shopify, Salesforce, and Adobe fighting over the rest. Every vendor picks the framing that flatters them, screenshots the chart, and calls it the state of the market. This piece does the opposite. It lays out all three framings, sources every figure, and tells you which one matters for the decision you are actually trying to make.

A note on the numbers before we go further. The platforms do not report on the same basis. Shopify and BigCommerce are public and disclose real figures in their filings, so those are the firmest. Store counts come from third-party crawlers like BuiltWith and Store Leads, which detect technology on live sites, so they disagree at the margins and none of them see private or password-gated stores perfectly. GMV for self-hosted platforms like WooCommerce is genuinely unmeasurable, because there is no central company processing the payments. Where a figure is an estimate or an attribution rather than a disclosed number, I say so. That caveat is not throat-clearing. It is the whole reason this page is worth citing over a vendor's blog.

This is also the reference page for a set of head-to-head comparisons I have written on the individual matchups. If you already know your shortlist, jump to BigCommerce vs Shopify Plus, Salesforce Commerce Cloud vs Shopify Plus, Adobe Commerce vs Shopify Plus, or commercetools vs Shopify. The all-platform scorecard lives in the 2026 ecommerce platform comparison. This page is the data underneath all of them.

Two different markets
are hiding inside
one word.

The single most useful thing in this whole study is a mental split. Stop thinking of "ecommerce platforms" as one market with a leaderboard. Think of it as two markets that happen to share a category name, because the platforms in each one compete for completely different customers and win on completely different things.

The first market is the competitive, enterprise-capable tier: Shopify (including Shopify Plus), BigCommerce, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, and Adobe Commerce (formerly Magento). Add composable players like commercetools at the far end. These platforms are built to run serious commerce: high catalog complexity, B2B, multi-region, real dev teams, real GMV. They have relatively few merchants, but those merchants are large. This is the market where re-platforming decisions get made in boardrooms and where a single logo can represent hundreds of millions in annual sales.

The second market is the high-volume, small-merchant tier: WooCommerce, Wix, Squarespace, and Webflow. These platforms have staggering merchant counts, into the millions, but the average store is tiny: a side hustle, a local shop, a creator selling a handful of SKUs, a portfolio site that flipped on a store button. They win on ease and price of entry, not on commercial weight. WooCommerce alone powers more live stores than every enterprise-tier platform combined, and it is still not where most of the money is.

Here is the part that trips people up, and it is why Shopify is genuinely different. Shopify is the only platform that sits in both markets at once. It has millions of small merchants on its lower plans, which puts it in the long-tail fight with Wix and Squarespace. And it has Shopify Plus, which puts it in the enterprise fight with Salesforce and Adobe. No other platform spans the whole range. WooCommerce cannot credibly serve a Fortune 500 without heavy custom engineering. Salesforce Commerce Cloud will not bother quoting a first-time merchant. Shopify quietly serves both, which is the structural reason it keeps taking share from both directions. The top end of that range is easier to picture as a list, so I keep a running directory of notable brands running on Shopify Plus.

Keep that two-market split in your head for the rest of this piece. Every table below can be read two ways depending on which market you care about, and the mistake most buyers make is looking at a store-count chart (which is really a picture of the long-tail market) and drawing a conclusion about the enterprise market, or the reverse. The rest of this study measures each market on its own terms.

By merchant count,
the leader is not
who you think.

If you rank platforms purely by how many live stores run on them, WooCommerce wins and it is not close. Store Leads tracked roughly 4.3 million live WooCommerce stores in its 2026 data, against about 2.84 million live Shopify stores on the same detection basis (Store Leads, 2026). Globally, WooCommerce powers something like a third of all detected online stores, a figure corroborated across trackers (Red Stag, 2026). By this metric, WooCommerce is the most popular ecommerce platform on earth.

Then you narrow to North America and the ranking flips. In the United States, aggregated BuiltWith and Store Leads tracking puts Shopify first at roughly 30% of detected ecommerce sites, Wix second near 23%, Squarespace third near 16%, and WooCommerce fourth near 14% (MobiLoud, drawing on BuiltWith, Store Leads and Soax, 2026). The same source pegs the US at about 3.17 million tracked stores out of roughly 13.4 million globally, which makes it the single largest national market by a wide margin. So WooCommerce's global crown is built substantially outside North America, in markets where WordPress adoption is high and a free, self-hosted plugin is the default.

Now the important caveat, the one that makes store count the most misleading metric in this whole study. A store is not a business. Store-count charts treat a hobbyist selling three candles a month exactly the same as a brand doing forty million a year. WooCommerce's lead is real, but it is a lead in the number of installs, not in the amount of commerce. A very large share of those 4.3 million WooCommerce stores transact little or nothing. The same is true for Wix and Squarespace, where the ecommerce feature is often a bolt-on to what is really a brochure site or a portfolio.

That is why the enterprise-tier platforms look almost invisible on a store-count chart. Salesforce Commerce Cloud shows roughly 5,600 live stores, Adobe Commerce around 113,000, BigCommerce around 38,000 (Store Leads, 2026). Those are rounding errors next to WooCommerce. But each of those stores is, on average, dramatically larger. Salesforce's 5,600 stores include some of the biggest retail brands in the world. You cannot see that on a bar chart of counts, which is exactly why you need the next section.

The takeaway for a real buyer: ignore the global store-count leaderboard almost entirely. It answers "which platform is installed on the most websites," which is a trivia question, not a business question. What you want to know is where the commerce is, and where businesses like yours end up. For that, keep reading.

By GMV, the picture
inverts, and Shopify
runs away with it.

Gross merchandise volume, the total dollar value of everything sold across a platform, is the metric that actually measures commercial weight. And on GMV, the store-count leaderboard turns upside down. The problem is that only some platforms disclose it, so we have to be careful about what is a hard number and what is an estimate.

Start with the firmest figure in the whole study. Shopify processed $378.4 billion in GMV in 2025, up 29% year over year, on $11.6 billion of revenue, per its Q4 and full-year 2025 results (Shopify investor news, 2025 results). That is a disclosed, audited number from a public company, and it dwarfs every independent platform that reports a comparable figure. For scale, that single-year GMV is larger than the annual retail sales of most countries.

The next disclosed figure comes from the composable end. commercetools reported passing $75 billion in annualized GMV in late 2025, up about 60% year over year, across 600-plus brands and retailers (commercetools press release, 2025). That is real weight concentrated in a tiny number of very large enterprises, which tells you exactly what commercetools is: a platform for a handful of giants, not a market by store count.

Adobe Commerce is harder. Adobe does not break out a clean platform GMV, so the best available figure is BuiltWith's estimate of roughly $173 billion in annual GMV across the Magento and Adobe Commerce installed base, spread over a store count that is shrinking each year (BuiltWith Magento trends). Treat that as a modeled estimate, not a disclosure. It still tells the right story: a declining number of stores, each still substantial, adding up to real volume. The rest of this GMV picture is attribution, because the numbers are not published.

Look at what is missing and why. BigCommerce is public but reports revenue and ARR, not merchant GMV, so there is no clean platform-GMV number to plot. Salesforce Commerce Cloud powers enormous retailers but Salesforce folds it into Digital Cloud reporting and never breaks out a platform GMV, so any figure you see is a guess. And WooCommerce has no GMV at all in the measurable sense, because it is self-hosted software, not a company processing payments. Every WooCommerce store runs its own checkout through its own processor. There is no central ledger. Anyone quoting a precise WooCommerce GMV is extrapolating, and I will not pretend otherwise.

The honest synthesis: on disclosed numbers, Shopify processes more GMV than any other independent commerce platform serving North America, full stop. The enterprise-tier platforms (Adobe, Salesforce, commercetools, BigCommerce) concentrate large GMV in small store counts. And the long-tail platforms, despite their enormous merchant bases, carry a fraction of the commercial weight their store counts imply. If you flip from Figure 2 to Figure 3, you are watching the same market rearrange itself completely, which is the entire point of separating the two questions.

Slice by traffic tier
and the two markets
separate cleanly.

There is a third way to cut this data that resolves the tension between store count and GMV. Filter by traffic tier. BuiltWith and similar crawlers can rank the ecommerce web by traffic and show you which platforms dominate the top 10,000 sites, the top million, and the whole detected universe. As you climb the tiers, you are effectively filtering out the hobby stores and looking only at the businesses that get real traffic, which correlates strongly with real revenue.

Across all detected sites, you get the long-tail picture from Section 02: Shopify around 30% in the US, Wix around 23%, Squarespace around 16%, WooCommerce around 14%. But watch what happens as you filter up.

At the top 1 million sites by traffic, the rankings shift: Shopify leads at 28.8%, WooCommerce rises to 18.2% (because established businesses running WordPress cluster here, not in the hobby tail), Adobe Commerce appears at around 9%, PrestaShop near 3.5%, and Salesforce Commerce Cloud surfaces at around 2.7%, a platform that barely registers in the all-sites count because it serves so few, but such large, merchants (BuiltWith, 2026).

At the very top, the top 10,000 sites, the picture changes again and tells the enterprise story plainly. Roughly 45% run on custom or proprietary stacks, the Amazons, Walmarts, and Targets that build their own. Among named third-party platforms, Shopify leads at about 22%, Salesforce Commerce Cloud jumps to around 8%, and Adobe Commerce holds around 7% (MobiLoud / BuiltWith, 2026). Wix and Squarespace essentially vanish at this tier, because almost no top-10,000 retailer runs their business on a site builder.

This single table is the clearest evidence for the two-market thesis. Wix and Squarespace own the bottom and disappear at the top. Salesforce and Adobe are invisible at the bottom and prominent at the top. WooCommerce is everywhere but strongest in the messy middle. And Shopify is the only name that stays in the top three at every tier, from the first-time merchant to the top 10,000. That consistency across the entire traffic range is what "spans both markets" looks like in data.

One more read on this table for the enterprise buyer specifically. Notice that among platforms you can actually buy (excluding the custom stacks), the top of the market is a three-way race between Shopify Plus, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, and Adobe Commerce. Those are the three names on almost every serious enterprise re-platforming shortlist, which is exactly why I wrote dedicated head-to-heads on each. If that is your decision, the enterprise ecommerce platform guide and the Shopify Plus enterprise TCO breakdown go deeper on the money.

Every platform,
scored on the metrics
that decide it.

This is the centerpiece of the study: every major platform serving North America, on one grid, across the dimensions that actually matter for a decision. Merchant count, GMV tier, primary segment, net migration direction, and best-fit merchant size. Every cell is either a sourced figure or an explicit attribution to what I have seen operating and advising. Read it top to bottom to see the whole market, or find your own scale and read across.

Sources for the table: live-store counts from Store Leads and BuiltWith (2026); Shopify GMV from its FY2025 results; BigCommerce ARR from its FY2025 investor release; commercetools GMV from its 2025 press release; Adobe GMV estimated by BuiltWith. Net-migration direction is attributed to Store Leads switching data and to what I have seen across the brands I have operated and advised. Best-fit sizing is my own operator judgment, not a vendor claim.

A few honest asterisks on this table. "Best-fit merchant size" is a judgment call, not a hard boundary, and the ranges overlap on purpose because real merchants are messier than a grid. Shopify's "millions of merchants" figure is Shopify's own language; it stopped disclosing an exact count years ago, so the live-store number from crawlers is the auditable one and the total merchant base is larger. And "net migration" is a direction, not a volume, for every row except the ones I quantify in Section 06. With those caveats stated, the shape of the table is solid and the sourcing is real.

Migration is the tell,
and it runs toward
one platform.

Market share is a snapshot. Migration is the movie, and it tells you where the market is heading, not just where it is. If you want to know which platform is winning, do not ask who is biggest today, ask who merchants are moving toward when they decide their current platform is not good enough. On that question, the data is lopsided.

Store Leads tracks platform switching, and in the 90 days ending May 2026 it recorded 24,809 merchants moving to Shopify from other platforms. The top source was WooCommerce at 9,243 merchants, followed by Wix at 4,110 and Squarespace at 3,383 (Store Leads switching data, 2026). That is roughly 275 stores a day choosing to leave another platform specifically for Shopify, in a single quarter. The flow the other direction, Shopify merchants leaving for WooCommerce or Wix, exists but is a small fraction of it.

Why does WooCommerce lead the outflow so heavily? It is the same reason it leads the store count: there are simply more WooCommerce stores to lose, and the ones that grow past the hobby stage keep running into the same wall. Self-hosting means you own the server, the security patches, the plugin conflicts, and the 2 a.m. outage. That is fine when you are selling a few orders a month and terrible when a real business depends on uptime. Every WooCommerce merchant who crosses into "this is my livelihood now" reconsiders whether they want to be a part-time sysadmin, and a large share of them decide they do not. Shopify's managed model is the answer to a problem WooCommerce creates by design.

Wix and Squarespace lose merchants for a related but different reason: ceiling. They are wonderful for launching, genuinely, and I will defend them for the right merchant in Section 13. But their commerce features top out. When a Squarespace store starts doing real volume and wants serious inventory, subscriptions, multi-channel, or a proper app ecosystem, it hits the edge of what a site builder was designed to do. The natural next step, the one merchants take by the thousands each quarter, is Shopify. If you are feeling that ceiling now, I wrote a whole piece on when to move to Shopify Plus for the bigger version of that decision.

The enterprise migrations are lower in raw count but higher in stakes. The heaviest enterprise outflow I see, both in the data and in my own advisory work, is off Adobe Commerce (Magento). Brands that inherited a Magento build years ago are looking at the maintenance quote, the required developer they cannot fire, and the security-patch treadmill, and deciding to leave. Most of them land on Shopify Plus. I broke that specific decision down in Adobe Commerce vs Shopify Plus. Salesforce Commerce Cloud sees a slower but real outflow driven by total cost of ownership, which I cover in the SFCC head-to-head.

The one platform whose migration story is genuinely mixed is BigCommerce, and it is worth understanding because it is not simple. BigCommerce is deliberately shedding small merchants (its active-store count fell as it chased enterprise) while adding enterprise accounts. So it is losing at the bottom and gaining at the top, on purpose. Whether that trade works is the subject of the BigCommerce vs Shopify Plus piece, and it is the platform I want to look at next.

Shopify: the only
name that wins at
every scale.

I helped build Shopify's Partner Program in the early days, so read this section knowing my history with the company. I am going to be specific and sourced anyway, because the data does not need me to inflate it. Shopify processed $378.4 billion in GMV in 2025 on $11.6 billion of revenue, its first year above both $300 billion in annual GMV and $10 billion in revenue, growing GMV 29% year over year (Shopify FY2025 results). Those are public, audited numbers, and they make Shopify the largest independent commerce platform in North America by commercial weight.

On merchant count, Shopify no longer discloses an exact figure and refers to "millions of merchants." Third-party trackers detect roughly 2.84 million live Shopify storefronts (Store Leads) up to estimates near 4.8 million globally depending on methodology (Yaguara, 2026). In the United States it holds roughly 30% of detected ecommerce sites, the single largest share of any platform. And critically, its share climbs as you filter for traffic: 28.8% of the top 1 million and about 22% of the top 10,000. It is strong everywhere.

The Plus story is the one that matters for this study's two-market thesis. Shopify Plus, the enterprise tier, shows roughly 46,000 live sites per BuiltWith and represents about 6.7% of the top 1 million ecommerce sites (BuiltWith Shopify Plus). That is the fastest-growing enterprise book in commerce, and it is where the migrations off Adobe and Salesforce are landing. Plus is priced as a flat platform fee (with a variable component at very high GMV) rather than the percentage-of-GMV model the legacy enterprise platforms use, which is the structural cost advantage I quantify in the Shopify Plus TCO analysis.

What makes Shopify structurally hard to beat is not any single feature. It is the combination that no competitor replicates: a genuinely good product at the small end, a genuinely capable product at the enterprise end, the largest app ecosystem in commerce, the deepest pool of agencies and developers who know the platform, and the highest-converting checkout in the industry by most measures. When I advise a brand on their stack, the reason I land on Shopify for the overwhelming majority is not fanboyism, it is that the surrounding ecosystem (apps, talent, integrations, documentation) compounds into an advantage the raw platform comparison misses. The Shopify tech stack by revenue piece maps what that ecosystem looks like at each stage.

The honest limit on Shopify: at the very bleeding edge of custom commerce, a brand with a genuinely unusual model (a marketplace, a heavily configured B2B quoting engine, a commerce experience that does not look like a store at all) can outgrow even Plus and need a composable architecture. That is a real exception and I cover it in Section 11. But it is an exception measured in a few hundred companies across North America, not the thousands of merchants who talk themselves into thinking they are one of them. For roughly 99% of merchants, at any scale in the two-market framing, Shopify is the right answer. The data in this study is the reason I can say that without hedging.

BigCommerce: a
deliberate retreat
up-market.

BigCommerce is the most interesting story in the competitive tier because it is a public company executing a visible pivot, and the numbers let you watch it happen. As of December 31, 2025, BigCommerce reported total ARR of $359.1 million, up just 3% year over year, but with a telling split underneath: enterprise-account ARR of $287.2 million, up 10%, now representing 80% of total ARR, up from 75% a year earlier. Enterprise accounts numbered 6,648, up 13% (BigCommerce FY2025 results).

Read those numbers together and the strategy is obvious. Overall growth is nearly flat, but the enterprise slice is growing while the small-merchant slice shrinks. BigCommerce's detected live-store count has actually fallen, to roughly 38,000, as it deliberately trades long-tail volume for larger enterprise contracts (Store Leads, 2026). This is a company that has decided it cannot win the small-merchant war against Shopify and Wix, so it is retreating to defensible enterprise ground. That is a rational move, and it is also a concession.

The strategic problem for BigCommerce in 2026 is that it recently gave up its single best argument. For years its pitch was "no platform transaction fees," a real differentiator against the percentage-of-sales models. BigCommerce has since introduced a percentage-based transaction fee, which removes that edge. Once you strip that away, the genuine remaining strength is Feedonomics, the product-feed management company BigCommerce acquired, which is best-in-class for merchants who live and die by marketplace and comparison-shopping feeds. If that is a hard requirement for you, BigCommerce has a real, specific advantage.

For everyone else, my read is straightforward and I do not manufacture balance on it: Shopify Plus wins the head-to-head in nearly every dimension that matters, from app ecosystem to checkout conversion to hiring supply to total cost of ownership. BigCommerce is a competent platform run by capable people, and it is not where I would send a merchant who is not tethered to Feedonomics-grade feed management. The full scoring, including realistic all-in monthly costs at $5M, $20M, and $50M in GMV, is in BigCommerce vs Shopify Plus. The short version: a real platform, a narrow remaining edge, and Shopify Plus as the answer for the large majority.

Salesforce Commerce
Cloud: a platform
priced as a commitment.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud, still called Demandware in the crawler data, is the purest example of the enterprise tier. Store Leads detects roughly 5,559 live stores on it, a count that actually declined about 5% year over year in early 2026 (Store Leads Demandware report, 2026). Five and a half thousand stores would be invisible on any store-count chart. But it holds around 2.7% of the top 1 million sites and roughly 8% of the top 10,000, because those five thousand stores include some of the largest B2C retailers in the world.

The defining feature of Salesforce Commerce Cloud is its pricing model: it charges a percentage of GMV, generally reported in the 1% to 3% range depending on volume and functionality, negotiated deal by deal (industry pricing analysis, 2026). Salesforce does not publish these percentages, which is itself telling. A percentage-of-GMV model means your platform bill grows in lockstep with your success, forever. On a large retailer, a couple of points of GMV is an enormous, permanent line item, and it is the number that drives most of the re-platforming conversations I have with enterprises on SFCC.

Where Salesforce Commerce Cloud genuinely wins is the deep Salesforce estate. If a company already runs Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Marketing Cloud, and has built its whole customer operation inside Salesforce, then Commerce Cloud's native integration into that estate is a real, hard-to-replicate advantage. That is the narrow, legitimate case for it, along with certain compliance-heavy enterprise requirements. For those companies, the political and architectural gravity of "keep it all in Salesforce" is rational.

For most large brands, though, the SFCC shortlist is more political than technical, and the three-year total cost of ownership comparison against Shopify Plus is not close once you account for the GMV-percentage bleed, the implementation timeline, and the speed of making changes. I walk the whole comparison, including migration timelines I have seen firsthand, in Salesforce Commerce Cloud vs Shopify Plus. The pattern across the enterprise platforms is consistent: real capability, real cost, and a shrinking case against a Shopify Plus that keeps closing the feature gap while staying dramatically cheaper to run.

Adobe Commerce: the
infrastructure tax
brands keep leaving.

Adobe Commerce, the platform everyone still calls Magento, is the single largest source of enterprise migration to Shopify Plus, and the data shows why. It powers roughly 113,000 live stores by Store Leads' count, or as many as ~162,000 including the free Magento Open Source edition by BuiltWith's broader detection, with an estimated $173 billion in GMV across the installed base (BuiltWith Magento trends, 2026). Critically, that store count is declining year over year. Adobe Commerce is a large installed base that is slowly emptying out.

Two versions of the product matter. Magento Open Source is free, self-hosted software, which sounds appealing until you price the hosting, security patching, and specialized developers it requires. Adobe Commerce is the managed, licensed version, reported to start near $22,000 per year and scale up with revenue (MobiLoud, 2026). Either way, the real cost of Magento is rarely the license. It is the developer you cannot fire, the maintenance quote that lands every year, and the security-patch treadmill that never stops. That is the "infrastructure tax" framing, and it is not rhetoric, it is the actual P&L of running the platform.

Magento still has a genuine, narrow strength: for a brand with an extraordinarily complex catalog, deeply custom pricing logic, or a mature Magento build that a competent team already maintains well, the platform can handle complexity that hosted systems handle less gracefully. The honest case to stay on Adobe Commerce is "we have the team, the build works, and re-platforming risk outweighs the ongoing cost." That case exists. It is just far rarer than the number of brands currently paying the tax because leaving feels hard.

The reason most Magento searches in 2026 are really re-platforming searches is that the maintenance math stopped working. When a brand books time with me about their Magento build, the conversation is almost never "should we upgrade Magento," it is "we know we are leaving, help us do it without losing SEO or breaking checkout during peak." The full migration playbook, including the 90-day risk window and the URL and rankings preservation work, is in Adobe Commerce vs Shopify Plus. The market has already voted with its feet, and the trackers are counting the departures.

commercetools: the
most sophisticated
right, and wrong, choice.

commercetools is the composable, MACH-architecture platform (microservices, API-first, cloud-native, headless) at the far end of the enterprise tier, and its numbers perfectly illustrate why store count is a useless metric for the enterprise market. It serves only a few hundred brands, yet it reports passing $75 billion in annualized GMV, up about 60% year over year, and it surpassed the $100 million live-ARR "Centaur" milestone (commercetools, 2025). That is enormous commercial weight concentrated in a tiny, elite customer base. A store-count chart would show commercetools as essentially nonexistent. A GMV chart shows a giant.

The composable pitch is real and I will state it fairly. If you have a genuinely unusual commerce model, operate across many brands and regions with divergent requirements, and have an in-house platform engineering team capable of owning a distributed architecture, commercetools gives you a flexibility ceiling that packaged platforms cannot match. For that specific profile, it is the right choice, and the brands that fit it are some of the most sophisticated commerce operations in the world.

The problem is that composable is often the most technically sophisticated wrong choice a brand can make. Most companies that talk themselves into needing commercetools are buying an integration surface, an engineering team, and a perpetual ownership burden that they have mistaken for flexibility. Composable means you assemble and maintain the commerce stack yourself: the pieces are best-in-class, but the assembly, the integration, and the ongoing operation are now your problem, forever. That is a real infrastructure bill, and for the overwhelming majority of brands it buys flexibility they will never use.

Shopify's answer to the composable question is the "native plus selectively headless" middle path: run the platform natively for everything that does not need customization, and go headless with Hydrogen or custom storefronts only where you genuinely need it, using Functions and checkout extensibility to customize without owning the whole stack. For nearly every brand that thinks it needs full composable, that middle path delivers the flexibility they actually need at a fraction of the ownership cost. I lay out the whole decision, and the narrow profile where commercetools genuinely wins, in commercetools vs Shopify and the architecture-level version in headless vs native Shopify.

WooCommerce: the
biggest platform that
isn't a platform.

WooCommerce deserves a careful, fair hearing, because it leads the store-count tables and that lead is genuine. Roughly 4.3 million live stores run on it, about a third of all detected online stores globally (Store Leads, 2026). No other platform is close on count. If the only question were popularity by installs, WooCommerce wins the study outright.

But WooCommerce is not really a platform in the sense the others are. It is an open-source plugin for WordPress. That distinction drives everything. There is no company running your store, no managed hosting, no central checkout, no uptime guarantee, and, as noted earlier, no measurable GMV because there is no central ledger. You (or your host and your developer) own all of it. For a technically comfortable merchant, or one already living in WordPress, that ownership is a feature: total control, no platform fees, infinite plugin flexibility, and no percentage of your sales going to anyone.

For a growing commercial business, that same ownership becomes the liability that shows up in the migration data. WooCommerce is the number-one source of merchants leaving for Shopify (9,243 in a single quarter, per Section 06) precisely because the stores that succeed keep hitting the self-hosting wall: security patches you have to manage, plugin conflicts that break checkout, performance tuning that becomes a part-time job, and the dawning realization that you are running infrastructure instead of running a business. The strength and the weakness are the same fact.

My honest positioning on WooCommerce: it is the right tool for a specific merchant, the WordPress-native, technically capable, cost-sensitive store owner who values control over convenience and is genuinely willing to own the maintenance. That merchant exists and WooCommerce serves them well. But it is the wrong default for most growing brands, which is exactly why the market keeps voting to leave it as those brands scale. If you recognize yourself as the WordPress-native exception, stay. If you recognize yourself as a business that wants to sell, not administer a server, the migration data is telling you where you are headed.

Wix, Squarespace,
Webflow: brilliant
starts, low ceilings.

The site-builder tier deserves respect and a clear-eyed boundary. In the US, Wix holds roughly 23% of detected ecommerce sites (about 1.0 million stores) and Squarespace roughly 16% (about 356,000 stores), making them the second and third most common places to find a US store, ahead of WooCommerce on the all-sites count (MobiLoud, 2026). Webflow has a much smaller ecommerce footprint, concentrated in design-forward content and portfolio sites that added a store. These are enormous merchant bases, and they are almost entirely long-tail.

What these platforms do brilliantly is the start. Wix is the easiest way for a non-technical local business to get a store online. Squarespace produces the best-looking site with the least effort, which is why it dominates among creatives, artists, and service businesses that sell a few products alongside their main offering. Webflow gives designers pixel control that no other builder matches. For a first store, a side project, a portfolio with a shop, or a business where ecommerce is a secondary channel, any of the three is a completely reasonable choice, and I would not talk a merchant out of them for that use.

The boundary is the ceiling. Every one of these platforms was built as a website builder first and a store second, and it shows the moment commerce becomes the main event. Serious inventory management, subscriptions, a deep app ecosystem, multi-channel selling, advanced shipping and tax logic, real B2B, high-volume checkout: this is where site builders run out of runway. That is not a criticism of what they are, it is a statement of what they are not. And it is why, in the traffic-tier data of Section 04, Wix and Squarespace essentially vanish from the top 10,000: almost no business running real volume runs it on a site builder.

The migration data makes the pattern concrete. Wix and Squarespace together sent roughly 7,500 merchants to Shopify in a single quarter (Section 06). That is not because they are bad products, it is because they are the entry tier, and the entry tier's most successful graduates outgrow it. The healthy way to read this: start on a site builder if that fits where you are, and know that if commerce becomes your main business, there is a well-worn path to Shopify when you hit the ceiling. Thousands of merchants walk it every quarter, and it is the right move when you get there.

What all of this
means if you are
choosing today.

Set down the market-share charts for a second, because your decision is not a market-share decision, it is a fit decision. The whole point of separating the two markets is that the right platform depends entirely on which market you are actually in, and at what scale. Here is how the data translates into a choice.

If you are starting out or running a small store (roughly $0 to a few million in revenue), the real contest is Shopify versus the site builders versus WooCommerce, and the honest answer for most is Shopify. It gives you room to grow into without a re-platform, the best checkout conversion, and the largest ecosystem of help. A site builder is fine if ecommerce is a side channel and design is everything. WooCommerce is fine if you are genuinely WordPress-native and technical. For everyone else in this band, Shopify is the default that saves you a migration later.

If you are mid-market (roughly $5M to $50M), you are choosing inside the competitive tier, and the practical shortlist is Shopify Plus versus BigCommerce, with Adobe Commerce in the conversation only if you already run it. On the merits (cost, ecosystem, talent supply, checkout, speed of change) Shopify Plus wins this band decisively for the large majority, with BigCommerce a real option only if Feedonomics-grade feed management is a hard requirement. This is the band where a re-platform pays back fastest, and where the migration data is heaviest toward Shopify.

If you are enterprise ($50M to hundreds of millions), the shortlist is Shopify Plus versus Salesforce Commerce Cloud versus Adobe Commerce, and occasionally commercetools if your model is genuinely unusual. The decision here is dominated by three-year total cost of ownership and speed-to-change, not the RFP feature grid, and on those axes Shopify Plus keeps winning against the percentage-of-GMV incumbents. The legitimate exceptions are narrow and real: a deep Salesforce estate, an extraordinarily complex catalog with a team that maintains it well, or a truly composable-shaped business. Name your exception honestly, and if you cannot, the answer is Shopify Plus.

The last thing the data says is about direction, and it is the most useful thing for a decision that has to last years. You are not just choosing a platform for today, you are choosing the platform you will still be on in three to five years. Every migration flow in this study points the same way, and platforms that are gaining merchants tend to keep investing, keep attracting talent, and keep widening their ecosystem, while platforms that are bleeding merchants tend to do the opposite. Betting on the direction of the market is usually smarter than betting on a snapshot of it, and the direction here is not ambiguous.

If you want the qualitative, feature-by-feature scoring to sit alongside this quantitative picture, the ecommerce platform comparison scores every platform on one page. And if you are staring at a specific re-platform decision and want it pressure-tested against your real numbers rather than a market chart, that is the kind of call I take. The data tells you where the market is going. The right decision still depends on the shape of your business, which is exactly the conversation worth having before you commit.

The pattern across every framing in this study is the same. Count stores and the long-tail platforms look dominant, but store count measures installs, not commerce. Count GMV and the picture inverts, with Shopify ahead of every independent platform that discloses a number. Filter by traffic and the two markets separate cleanly, with Shopify the only name strong at every tier. Watch the migrations and the direction is unambiguous: merchants move toward Shopify from the long tail and, increasingly, from the legacy enterprise platforms too. Three questions, three framings, and one platform that answers all of them better than any alternative for the overwhelming majority of merchants. That is not a marketing conclusion. It is what the sourced numbers say when you separate them properly.

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