Shopping Cart Popularity Survey

In October 2003, I asked subscribers to my various newsletters to tell me what shopping cart they used. Of 425 responses, I received 395 useable responses. 

Keep in mind that my readers are typically small businesses, so this survey will be skewed on the side of single product stores. Of the hundreds of thousands of shopping cart users, this is just a tiny sample. But let me tell you what this small survey tells us.

First, PayPal and 1ShoppingCart are in the top three cart choices. These are carts designed for people with a few products, not hundreds or thousands of SKUs. 

Second, it is significant the custom programmed e-commerce applications comprise the third largest group of responses. A significant number of companies have such specialized products or services that they have written their own software.

Third, Miva Merchant is the clear leader among the small business online store applications designed for hundreds to thousands of products. This is probably because of Miva's effective marketing through hosting services, their continual product development, the ability to modify and customize a Miva store, and the availability of third-party plug-ins to do just about anything you want. In the last year Yahoo! Store (now Yahoo! Merchant Solutions) lost ground after they instituted pricing that was perceived as being higher than previously. Other applications that have been around a long time are still leaders: StoreFront, Americart, and ShopSite. Mal's e-commerce seems to be getting more attention, as is osCommerce, an open source product that can be used in huge stores. 

That eBay comes in at only 1% doesn't mean much, except that my readers aren't into auctions. But many millions of people are. 

What is very significant is that a large group of users are employing small, less-known shopping cart systems. This tells us that web hosting services and merchant account ISOs (Independent Sales Organizations) make it cost-effective for many small companies to obtain shopping cart solutions without having to look farther. The shopping cart market hasn't contracted; if anything it has expanded in the last 5 years.

Note: the asterisk indicates a winner of the Web Commerce Today E-Commerce Award of Merit 2004.