Top Shopping Cart Migration Trends: Inside Data from a Leading Migration Service

The popularity of certain things does not always equal their quality – pop music is the first example that comes to mind ;). However, when a business solution, tool or a technology gets widespread among businesspeople, there’s usually a good reason for it. Can you think of any business product or solution that became extremely popular (for more than a year) for no given reason?

Unlike a new pop single, the shopping cart you use to power an online store has a direct effect on your business activity and income. Thus, the more people that prefer a particular e-Commerce platform over other platforms, the more credible, qualitative and solid it usually is.

At Cart2Cart, we’ve provided e-merchants with the service of an automated shopping cart migration for over 6 years now. During this period, we’ve performed thousands of migrations, and collected tons of insight data on the popularity and trends regarding e-Commerce shopping carts. And yet, we have never made it public. Until now.

Today, we are going to share some of our in-house stats and reveal what stimulates e-merchants to re-platform, and what have been the top shopping carts store owners have been migrating to during the last few years.

Please note: the following data is by no means promoting any shopping platforms, despite the fact that Cart2Cat has partner relations with a number of them.

Why Do Merchants Perform Shopping Cart Migration?

All in all, there are a multitude of reasons why merchants decide to undergo platform migration. However, the most common ones are the following:

• the current platform is out-dated or no longer supported by the developers;
• the solution does not provide the functionality needed for further business growth;
• the shopping cart does not offer a competitive advantage;
• the platform does not suit the merchant’s business model;
• the cart appears to be too basic or overcomplicated for a particular user, etc.

With the rise of advanced migration solutions, platform migration has stopped being expensive, long lasting and intimidating. Now, it’s a common procedure among store owners. With all that mind, what are the shopping carts businesspeople are moving to?

Shopping Carts Merchants are Migrating to the Most

As for the most popular target carts among Cart2Cart clients, we see that the top five solutions make up 87% of the migrations in total. As such, the other 63 shopping cart solutions supported by the service generated only 13% of store database transfers. This is the Pareto principle (commonly referred to the 80/20 rule) in action.

As illustrated above, Magento is a prevailing choice for more than one-third of migrations, taking first place with 35%. Then comes WooCommerce that outdistances PrestaShop, counting for 21% and 16% of migrations each correspondingly. Shopify is the fourth most popular target cart among Cart2Cart clients, and the first among hosted ones – its nearest hosted competitor (Bigcommerce) is almost three times less popular. OpenCart ends the top five most popular shopping carts list with 7% of all migrations.

However, it’s important to note that the graph includes shopping cart upgrades too.

Since nearly 9% of migrations to Magento were, in fact, platform upgrades, a real percentage of merchants that switched to Magento counts for 25%. The genuine percentage of migrations to PrestaShop from other platforms can be cut down too – from 16% to 11.7%.

The top five migration solutions are still the same after taking into consideration shopping cart upgrades (but the gap between them is smaller).

Top Shopping Cart Migration Trends Over the Last 5 Years

The market of e-Commerce solutions has been quite turbulent over the last few years. Many of the shopping carts that were running the show a few years ago, gave place to their competitors. Here’s a graph illustrating the trends of platform movement from those using the Cart2Cart service from 2009 through 2014.

Looking at the graph of the most popular platforms over the last few years, we’d like you to pay special attention to WooCommerce. Launched only in 2011, WooCommerce demonstrates a phenomenal trend for growth in customer demand, gradually outpacing other shopping carts.

As for other solutions, we see that Magento has been keeping the leading role all the way through these Cart2Cart records from 2009 to 2014. Both PrestaShop and Shopify are steadily growing in number too, while OpenCart has suffered a slight decline after its peak in March 2013.

Open-Source vs Hosted

Since the selection between open-source and hosted platforms has always brought the most confusion for online store owners, we believe that this might be another piece of inside information that could come in handy for you. Here’s a ratio of the migration popularity of those two e-Commerce solution types.

Unsurprisingly, most of the merchants opt for open-source platforms when performing a shopping cart migration, choosing hosted ones as a target cart in only 15% of cases. As for  the specific migration pairs, we may see the following picture:

Though hosted solution giants such as Shopify and Bigcommerce are rapidly increasing their user bases, Cart2Cart clients tend to move from hosted to open source solutions 6% more than vice versa.

In general, a prevailing number of the database transfers – 71% to be precise – are performed within open-source migration pairs. On the other hand, only 9% of migrations happen between hosted e-Commerce solutions.

The Bottom Line

Now, packed with knowledge on shopping cart migration trends, you’ll be a bit more conscious about the current state of the market and the migration possibilities. Some make the news and make waves in your social media newsfeeds more than others, but these are the stats. 

Magento is still the king, however will it stay that way? WooCommerce’s popularity is growing and there is no way to argue with that. Shopify went public this past year. Do they have big plans for 2016 and beyond? PrestaShop could potentially see its stake in the market move out of the top three this time next year if Shopify takes the next step forward in its growth.

What solution are you using? Have you in the past considered or currently considered making a migration? Do these stats back up your thoughts on moving or staying with your current solution? The folks of Cart2Cart and StoreYa would love to hear your thoughts.

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