Why Brands Are Migrating to Shopify
Shopify has been around since 2006, so has more than 20 years of innovation and evolution under its belt. Over that time it has added features, improved usability and integrated more functionality so that it’s a viable platform for businesses of all sizes, from one-person start-ups to international behemoths like GymShark, Wild Deodorant and Simba.
The platform releases new features every single week. This is one of the key reasons why the primary direction of travel for merchants migrating away from clunkier legacy systems is to Shopify. Some of the common pain points brands tell us they're experiencing on their incumbent platforms include:
Poor usability
High development overhead
Slow site performance
Plugin conflicts
Security or maintenance burden
Expensive upgrades
Scalability issues
Legacy systems
The current ecommerce landscape
36% - WooCommerce
WooCommerce currently has the largest global market share, due to being free, open-sourced software attached to WordPress. A lot of sites on the platform are hobby sites, or inactive.
28% - Shopify
Next is Shopify with around 28%. A key point here is that a lot of its merchants are active and running high-revenue commercial stores on the platform: approximately 2,900,000 distinct live websites. When factoring in regional subdomains and all distinct storefront domains, the ecosystem hits over 6.9 million live storefronts.
6% - Adobe Commerce
Adobe Commerce is third, with around 6% market share, made of broadly larger, enterprise businesses.
30% - Other
Other platforms make up the remaining 30% of the market - BigCommerce, Shopware, PrestaShop and others.
Benefits of Shopify
Ease of use
Merchant-friendly admin
Faster merchandising
Lower operational friction
Performance and speed
Hosting included
CDN infrastructure
Faster storefronts
Reliability and security
PCI compliance
Security management
Uptime (99.9%)
Ecosystem and integrations
App marketplace
APIs
Headless capability
Shopify Plus ecosystem for enterprise businesses
Lower total cost of ownership
Reduced maintenance
Faster development cycles
Fewer technical dependencies
Scalability
International expansion
Omnichannel
High traffic handling
Conversion optimisation
Checkout experience
Shop Pay (a fast, secure accelerated checkout and payment method)
Mobile-first infrastructure
