WooCommerce Market Share Should be Top Ecommerce Plugin, But Is It?

Considering WordPress powers a whopping 43.2% of all websites on the Internet, it would make sense to guess that WooCommerce is also the most popular online store solution.

But as I’ve previously seen in our research on Squarespace and Shopify, there might be differences between what you expect, and what the market share actually looks like.

So once again, I’ve trawled through statistics websites to try to gauge how popular WooCommerce truly is.

How big is WooCommerce’s market share?

WooCommerce has a worldwide market share of 29% among all the websites using ecommerce technology (according to BuiltWith). This puts them far ahead of Shopify (19%), Magento (8%), BigCommerce and many other big ecommerce platforms.

Since we last checked the numbers a year ago, WooCommerce actually gained market share (+ 3 percentage points) while Shopify lost 3 percentage points.

The numbers below only count the top 1 million sites on the Internet, but they should be a pretty good indicator of how close the two competitors are:

Top ecommerce Usage (in the top 1 million Sites)

WooCommerce Is the Most Popular Ecommerce Plugin Ever

As you can see from this pie chart, courtesy of BuiltWith, we are indeed looking at a monster of popularity, completely annihilating its nearest competitor Ecwid, with a 92% share versus 7%. In fact, the WooCommerce plugin runs on more than 14% of all the websites BuiltWith has analyzed, which includes non-ecommerce sites as well.

And if you still need numbers about WooCommerce’s popularity, WordPress says there are currently over 5 million active installations worldwide. Pretty impressive.

It Has Been Downloaded Almost 90M Times

This stat comes straight from the WooCommerce landing page (when they were still showing a download counter). At the time of writing, it said 89,365,986 downloads.

WooCommerce total downloads

Anyway, this is mostly a marketing stat for them because downloads don’t always mean people keep the installation. But it still is an impressive number.

There Are About 2,500 Plugins for It

That’s right, you can add plugins to a plugin, and developers are making the most of it with WooCommerce. There’s close to 350 of them available on the WooCommerce online store, at least 2,000 of them on CodeCanyon and 980 on the WordPress.org plugin directory.

Now it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re all great, by any means, but it goes to show how popular WooCommerce is.

The Company That Owns It Raised More Than $697m

That would be Automattic.inc, the company that also owns WordPress(.com). According to Crunchbase, their last series D round, completed in September 2019, brought up the total to $697.9M in 10 funding rounds.

Automattic.inc is funded by 22 investors, and does not disclose its earnings. The last numbers I could find were from 2016, when they pulled in $50M in profits, according to Investopedia.

But WooCommerce is Nowhere Near As Profitable as Shopify

I’m going to go a limb here, because the actual earnings of Automattic aren’t publicly available, and because even if they were, we wouldn’t know how much of it comes from WordPress, WooCommerce, or the dozens of other products they own.

But here’s my calculation: Automattic is valued at $3.B. Shopify, is now worth $40.3B, which is more than eBay. So there’s no way WooCommerce is as profitable as Shopify, unless I’m missing something!

Nor Is It As Searched For in Google

This last statistic is coming from Google Trends. It’s not the most accurate source, but it does help get an idea of how search-worthy these ecommerce companies are.

Google Trends comparison of ecommerce platforms

The biggest surprise is how much more Shopify is typed into Google than WooCommerce. I can’t really account for that, except maybe it’s because people find their way to WooCommerce via WordPress, whereas Shopify is only accessible from, well, Shopify.com. Also, quite a few of those people might also be after information about Shopify’s share price.

Key Takeaway: Watch Out For Shopify Vs WooCommerce

So after finding all these statistics, I have to say I’m not surprised WooCommerce is so popular, but I didn’t imagine it would be such a close battle with Shopify.

My initial thought was that Shopify and Woocommerce operate in different worlds, as one is fully dedicated to ecommerce, whereas the other is an extension for people who already have a site.

But maybe it’s not like that at all, and if the numbers are right in this post, Shopify is being much more aggressive with its growth than WooCommerce. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Canadian online store company soon dethrones it as the most popular ecommerce solution in the world.

The authors

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Josep Garcia

Content Manager

Hi there, I am Josep Garcia. Since 2014 I've been testing and writing about website builders and hosting services, and I share all my learnings at Tooltester.com. Today I am not an active staff member anymore, but I do hope you enjoyed this article. And if you have any questions, please leave me a comment below.

Robert Brandl

Founder and CEO

Hi, my name is Robert Brandl! I used to work in a digital marketing agency where I managed website and email marketing projects. To optimize my client's campaigns, I always had to find the optimal web tools. Tooltester offers this knowledge to you, hopefully saving you endless hours of research.

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