Shopify is the largest e-commerce platform in the United States, with a 30 percent market share among all US websites that use e-commerce technologies. According to BuiltWith, there are 9.2 million e-commerce websites in the US. It is estimated that Shopify stores have been around for a while, as heuristic data combining DNS and WHOIS data provides a reasonable approximation. Social media sites are popular among e-commerce brands, as they allow them to interact with millions of consumers.
Instagram and Facebook are the most used social media sites, followed by Twitter, Pinterest and YouTube. Email is also a popular communication channel for merchants, and many of them provide a phone number for customers to contact them instantly. It is relatively easy to identify the country in which an e-commerce store operates, but few stores offer a location at the state or municipal level and even fewer provide a mailing address. The top-level domain distribution for Shopify stores in the United States shows that the platform is popular in 175 countries around the world.
The e-commerce software market continues to grow and there are an increasing number of popular e-commerce platforms offering strong competition to Shopify. The company is becoming more profitable, popular and complete (in terms of features) with each passing year. Website builders based on content management systems (CMS), such as WordPress and Joomla, have historically been much more popular than Shopify. The most popular products on the shopping platform include vitamins, books, covers for mobile phones and shoes.
Some of the most successful Shopify stores include Whole Foods Market, RedBull, Kylie Cosmetics, Hyatt Hotels and Penguin Books. Shopify app store apps are very popular with merchants, as well as third-party apps.
