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

There are two platforms worth discussing in the ecommerce industry today: 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. We'll look at the following topics:
WooCommerce has 25% market share among ecommerce websites. This makes 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.
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.
Get more CMS market share statistics in this post.
Let’s look a little more into some WooCommerce statistics, that gives us an idea of the size and scope of the WooCommerce platform.
Data sources:
WooCommerce
WooCommerce/WooSesh
BuiltWith
WordPress
CodeCanyon
ThemeForest
GitHub
W3Techs
Shopify has 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.
Let's revisit the ecommerce platform market share data from earlier:
Shopify doesn’t only 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.
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.
Like above, here are some of the most important and/or useful Shopify statistics you need to know.
Data sources:
BuiltWith
Shopify
Shopify App Store
Genius AI
Insider Monkey
Littledata
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 - whether your site is on WooCommerce or Shopify.
MobiLoud 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 MobiLoud, or click here to set up a free personalized demo.
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.