I recently decided to look up my local downtown business association as I was looking to do some cold calls to help drum up some business. This led me to creating a notion database where I tracked what I thought the quality of the site was, who built it if there were site credits, and what CMS/platform they were using.
I removed large national corporations (hotel chains, food chains, etc) as these organizations span many states or countries and often have entire teams dedicated to the websites. This left me with about 152 shops, including the downtown business association website. My results came up with the following:
- WordPress: 72
- Squarespace/Weebly: 16
- Shopify: 13
- Wix: 10
- Unknown: 11
- Drupal: 3
- ecwid: 3
- Other (CMS’ with two or less sites): 24
So, it became pretty apparent that WordPress was the frontrunner for a lot of sites, in fact it runs 47% of all the surveyed websites. However, if we look at solely e-commerce, there’s a major shift. Out of the 85 shops, these are major e-commerce platforms:
- Shopify: 16
- Squarespace: 11
- WooCommerce: 9
- Wix: 8
- Mealeo: 5
- DoorDash: 4
- BigCommerce: 3
- Other: 27
Now please note, that I counted anything that deal with shops, tickets, online meal ordering, or donations as e-commerce. What is more interesting is the number of WordPress sites that didn’t use WooCommerce. WooCommerce itself only accounts for 10% of the e-commerce sites, and while there were 35 WordPress sites that have e-commerce and 26 sites, 74% of those sites didn’t use WooCommerce:
- Mealeo: 3
- Wix: 3
- Shopify: 2
- DoorDash: 2
- SpotOn: 2
- Others: 14
I might go in-depth on this more later, such as covering the different shop categories, but overall I’ve found that WordPress is dominant for main websites, but when it comes to e-commerce, Shopify and Squarespace definitely have a more competitive market. Additionally, 63% of WordPress sites that have e-commerce do not use WooCommerce.
All of this leads me to one basic question: Why does WooCommerce fall short for a lot of companies that they search for other avenues?
I have a lot of speculations, such as food delivery platforms for restaurants just aren’t there, area loyalty to certain food delivery platforms, and complex POS integrations. I’m sure there are WooCommerce extensions for these types of concerns, but the cost for all those different extensions can get pricy, to the point where the cost isn’t worth it. All of this is conjecture of course, as I haven’t spoken to any of the owners to see if they can shed on any light as to why they didn’t choose WooCommerce, or even other WordPress e-commerce solutions.