WooCommerce vs Shopify: Market Share, Statistics and More Key Facts

In the ecommerce industry today, there are two platforms worth discussing: WooCommerce vs Shopify.

These are the two leading ecommerce platforms in the world. Both allow non-technical people to build beautiful, conversion-optimized, fully-functional ecommerce websites, and build an online store from the ground up.

There are a lot of similarities between Shopify and WooCommerce. There are also some key differences, which come into play in deciding your preferred ecommerce platform.

This post will examine the two, with a focus on data, such as the market share and other important statistics related to WooCommerce and Shopify.

Skip Ahead:

1. WooCommerce Market Share
2. Key WooCommerce Statistics in 2022
3. Shopify Market Share
4. Key Shopify Statistics in 2022
5. WooCommerce vs Shopify: What’s the Best Ecommerce Platform?

WooCommerce Market Share

WooCommerce occupies 25% of the ecommerce website market share. This makes up more than 3.5 million ecommerce websites powered by WooCommerce.

You can see the breakdown of ecommerce website market share in the table below:

Note that the data above relates to sites using WooCommerce checkout. The total number of live websites using WooCommerce elements (but which may or may not use WooCommerce checkout) is over 6.5 million.

Of the top 1 million ecommerce websites on the internet, the WooCommerce market share rises to 26%, making it the most popular ecommerce platform among high-traffic ecommerce websites.

About WooCommerce

For those unfamiliar, WooCommerce is a popular ecommerce plugin for the WordPress platform, which itself is the most popular content management system (CMS) worldwide, holding 64.3% of the CMS market share.

Including all websites, including those with no CMS, WordPress powers 43% of the entire internet. This adds up to more than 35 million sites using WordPress. Over 10% of these sites also use WooCommerce.

There is a huge ecosystem of WordPress themes, plugins, services and third-party tools, and within this, another ecosystem specifically for WooCommerce plugins and extensions.

So while WooCommerce is in reality just a sub-platform of WordPress, it is itself one of the top ecommerce platforms in its own right, as shown by the WooCommerce market share statistics above.

Find more CMS market share statistics in this post.

Key WooCommerce Statistics in 2022

Let’s look a little more into some WooCommerce statistics, that gives us an idea of the size and scope of the WooCommerce platform.

• WooCommerce’s market share among ecommerce platforms: 25%
• The WooCommerce market share from the top 1 million ecommerce sites: 26%
• Over 3.5 million websites use WooCommerce checkout.
• Over 6.5 million websites use some kind of WooCommerce elements.
• The first version of the WooCommerce plugin was launched on September 27, 2011, and included nine extensions and six themes.
• It took 16 months for WooCommerce to reach 500,000 downloads, and an additional 137 days to reach a total of 1 million downloads.
• WooCommerce reached the mark of 5 million total downloads in November 2014.
• Currently, the WooCommerce plugin has been downloaded over 211 million times.
• Over 10% of all WordPress sites use WooCommerce.
• Conservative estimates put the total Gross Merchandise Volume (GMV) from WooCommerce stores at $11.8 billion in 2019.
• Matt Mullenweg stated that, in 2020, the total sales from WooCommerce stores was more than $20 billion.
• The WooCommerce plugin is available in 66 languages.
• There are more than 1,500 WooCommerce themes on the WordPress theme directory, and more than 6,000 WooCommerce plugins on the WordPress plugin directory.
• CodeCanyon features an additional 1,400 WooCommerce plugins.
• ThemeForest has over 1,300 WooCommerce themes available.
• The WooCommerce Extensions Store features over 700 free and paid extensions.
• There have been more than 1,100 contributors to WooCommerce on the GitHub repository, with over 350 releases and 50,000 total commits.
• WooCommerce is the most popular WordPress sub-platform, with 20.3% market share – ahead of Elementor (17.8%) and WP Bakery (14.1%).

Data sources:

WooCommerce
WooCommerce/WooSesh
BuiltWith
WordPress
CodeCanyon
ThemeForest
GitHub
W3Techs

Shopify Market Share

So how about the other one of the two most popular ecommerce platforms: Shopify?

We can revisit the ecommerce platform market share data from earlier: 

This data shows Shopify holding 28% of the total ecommerce platform market share, making it the most popular ecommerce platform on the internet today.

Among the top 1 million ecommerce sites, Shopify is slightly behind WooCommerce. 20% of these sites use the regular version of Shopify, along with 3% on their enterprise offering, Shopify Plus.

It doesn’t just rank high in terms of ecommerce market share. Shopify is the 2nd largest CMS platform by market share, with 6.2% of the total CMS market share.

This puts it at double the market share of the next closest competitors, Wix and Squarespace, though still far behind WordPress’ market share.

About Shopify

Unlike WooCommerce, which is a sub-platform of the WordPress CMS, Shopify is a standalone website-building platform. That makes it a competitor to both WordPress and WooCommerce in different ways.

And while WordPress is a multi-purpose CMS, suitable for all kinds of websites – from news sites to learning sites and online courses – Shopify is focused primarily on building online stores.

While it offers blogging capabilities, the primary use for Shopify is to allow you to display and sell products online.

Like WordPress, there is a secondary market of plugins, themes, tools, services and extensions for Shopify. These offer Shopify merchants a range of additional capabilities past the stock features of the Shopify platform, such as offering discount codes to site visitors, or building mobile apps for Shopify sites.

Key Shopify Statistics in 2022

Like above, here are some of the most important and/or useful Shopify statistics you need to know.

• There are over 3.9 million live websites using Shopify.
• Of the top 1 million websites on the internet (not just ecommerce websites), 20,000 run on Shopify, making up just over 2% of the total share of this market.
• Nearly 6 million websites have used Shopify – live or historical.
• Shopify had approximately 41,000 users in 2012, growing to nearly 4 million Shopify sellers in 2022.
• There are Shopify stores based in over 175 countries across the world.
• The most common country for Shopify stores is the United States, with 2.5 million stores, followed by the United Kingdom, with 166 thousand stores.
• Shopify merchants generated $175.4 billion GMV in 2021.
• As of the end of 2021, over half of the total GMV generated by Shopify stores came from stores launched in 2019 or later.
• The average conversion rate for Shopify stores is 1.4%.
• The top 10% of Shopify stores have an average conversion rate of 4.7%.
• There are over 7,700 apps on the Shopify App Store.
• The total number of Shopify stores tripled during the COVID-19 pandemic. According to Genius AI, between March 2020 and January 2022, more than 2.5 million new sites went live, an increase of 201.53%.
• Despite China being the largest ecommerce market in the world, there are fewer than 7,000 Shopify stores in the region.
• The five biggest brands on Shopify (as of April 2021) are Anheuser-Busch, Pepsi, Nestlé, Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy (LMVH) and Tesla.
• Other major brands using Shopify include Red Bull, Kraft Heinz, Fitbit, Gymshark and the LA Lakers.

Data sources:

BuiltWith
Shopify
Shopify App Store
Genius AI
Insider Monkey
Littledata

WooCommerce vs Shopify: What’s the Best Ecommerce Platform?

Both WooCommerce and Shopify provide a great platform to build an ecommerce business. Together, they power over half of all the websites in the entire ecommerce industry.

When comparing these two ecommerce technologies, there’s no clear winner. The decision comes largely down to personal preference.

There are more apps and plugins made specifically for Shopify than for WooCommerce. However, this doesn’t include the WordPress plugin market, which includes over 50,000 more plugins and countless more integrations, tools and services.

Shopify is slightly less technical than WooCommerce, though both are easy to use, and don’t need any coding knowledge.

Shopify does require a paid subscription to use, as opposed to WooCommerce, which is free. So this may be an advantage for new and small stores in favor of WooCommerce.

Both ecommerce platforms also make it easy to optimize your site for mobile, which should be a priority for modern websites. It’s also very straightforward with both platforms to convert your site to mobile apps with MobiLoud Canvas – whether your site is on WooCommerce or Shopify.

Canvas helps you build beautiful, professional ecommerce mobile apps. Just look at this example from Only & Sons:

And the John Varvatos mobile app:

Click here to learn more about Canvas, or click here to set up a free personalized demo.

Final Thoughts – Shopify & WooCommerce Statistics, Market Share

There’s plenty of fascinating data to be found about the two top ecommerce platforms today, Shopify and WooCommerce.

You can find in this post statistics about their respective market shares, Shopify and WooCommerce usage statistics, GMV of stores on both platforms, the total number of websites across the internet using each, and much more.

All these statistics shine a light on just how popular ecommerce today – a trend that is unlikely to slow down any time soon.