The Wall Street Journal recently published a piece on the use of tracking technologies on the web and how the line between real life identities and online browsing habits are being tracked and shared.
BuiltWith helped out with this research piece by providing information on what sites had some form of social integration and how just by having connections back to social networks like Google+, Twitter and LinkedIn provides them with an unprecedented overview of a persons online behavior.
Online retail is big business; it’s convenient, open 24 hours a day, easy to shop around and for the most part, fun for the consumer.
So as a retailer, finding the right shopping cart system for your e-commerce business can be tricky. There’s a wide variety of offerings out there, some simple and cheap, others complex and expensive. For full disclosure, I (personally) don’t know what the best shopping cart system is to use, however, BuiltWith has years of trends on what shopping carts people are using at any given time, so using that data, here’s the top shopping carts in use today -
Magento is currently the most used shopping cart in the top million sites (as of November 2012). Magento Commerce provides various versions of it’s popular shopping cart software system, from a free downloadable community edition, Magento Go for small businesses and Magento Enterprise versions for medium to large businesses. Brands like Harbor Freight, Snorg Tees and Jet Blue use Magento for their shopping cart systems.
 Harbour Freight – Magento |
 Snorg Tees – Magento |
 View Magento Usage Statistics Information |
 View Top Sites using Magento |
 Download list of websites using Magento |
Yahoo! Store is the second most used ecommerce package on the top million sites. Yahoo! provide a hosted ecommerce solution for retailers looking to get setup on the web without having to run their own hosting systems.
 Cell Phone Shop – Yahoo! Store |
 Scrapbook.com – Yahoo! Store |
View Yahoo! Store Usage Statistics Information |
View Top Sites using Yahoo! Store |
Download list of websites using Yahoo! Store |
The shopping cart systems we come across the most on the entire internet are typically free systems.
ZenCart is one of the largest, another free shopping cart system, written in PHP. It used to be a part of the popular PHP shopping cart programming language osCommerce and was branched out to its own product in 2003, giving it plenty of time to spread across the web.
 Lightinthebox.com – Zen Cart |
 Maggie’s Crochet – Zen Cart |
View Zen Cart Usage Statistics Information |
View Top Sites using Zen Cart |
Download list of websites using Zen Cart |
The top 10,000 sites on the internet are responsible for the majority of the traffic on the web. Many of the shops in the top 10k list are premium retailers that require 99.999% uptime and bullet proof shopping cart systems to ensure their online shops are always working and open.
ATG Commerce, a shopping cart system acquired by Oracle is the most popular premium shopping technology in this group. Brands like American Apparel, Macys and American Eagle rely on ATG’s shopping cart systems.
 Macy’s – ATG |
 Bleacher Report – ATG |
View ATG Commerce Usage Statistics Information |
View Top Sites using ATG Commerce |
Download list of websites using ATG Commerce |
IBM’s WebSphere Commerce is another premium cart technology used by the largest retailers on the web. Bass Pro, Hanes and LL Bean all use their technology to run the ecommerce parts of their websites.
 Target – WebSphere |
 Home Depot – WebSphere |
View IBM WebSphere Usage Statistics Information |
View Top Sites using IBM WebSphere |
Download list of websites using IBM WebSphere |
As for pricing for ATG and WebSphere, it’s all on a quote basis and will depend on the size of your store and requirements.
Over the past year, some of the fastest growing customer base installation shopping cart systems have been –
OpenCart, another PHP based free community driven shopping cart system that can provide premium support when and if you need it. OpenCart has doubled its growth in the past year from 20,000 installations to 40,000.
 Cats Play – OpenCart |
 A Little Hut – OpenCart |
View OpenCart Usage Statistics Information |
View Top Sites using OpenCart |
Download list of websites using OpenCart |
Shopify, a premium hosted shopping cart system has also double in popularity over the past year with nearly 10,000 installations that we’ve tracked, incredible growth for a pay for only solution.
 The Chivery – Shopify |
 GitHub Shop – Shopify |
View Shopify Usage Statistics Information |
View Top Sites using Shopify |
Download list of websites using Shopify |
Hopefully some of the systems listed above should already be in your sights. Your own shopping cart software requirements will play a factor into which one you choose. For example, if you’re technically minded, a self hosted solution will make sense, if you’re not, then a hosted solution with support might be better.
You can always take a look at our e-commerce trends to find out what cart technologies are growing in popularity and which ones are sinking and also find out which ones are the most used across various sectors of the web.
Next month the US votes in the presidential election, we’ve dissected the two front runner websites; BarackObama.com and MittRomney.com, to determine what technologies each of them are using to run their online campaigns.
Level 3 - BarackObama.com is hosted on an IP address owned by the Democratic National Committee, it’s nearest upstream provider is Level3 who’s CEO James Q. Crowe is a supporter of the Democratic party.
Amazon Route 53 - Amazon provide a scaleable DNS management system perfect for the website of the POTUS.
Amazon SES - Another Amazon product used by BarackObama.com, this is most probably used to send marketing campaigns to the thousands/millions of people who entered their email address for updates.
Barack’s web team uses a host of different technologies to track visitors to the site. Optimizely is being used for A/B testing, New Relic is being used for server management and monitoring, Google Analytics for user tracking, Chartbeat for live visitor tracking and BrightTag as a tag management solution. The site is also using social insights from Facebook Domain Insights to track visitors. Barack’s team are also using Ethnio to do live visitor interception.
The site is using JQuery and Modernizr which allows the website to use modern HTML5 and CSS3 features that modern browsers provide, whilst also catering for older browsers.
BarackObama.com is a great example of a modern website. In addition to using some of the latest technologies listed above the site ensures it has all of the best meta options attached to it, such as Google Chrome IE Frame and HTML5 DocType, Microdata support and ViewPort support for mobile devices.
Akamai – Romney’s website was previously hosted at Amazon, it is now hosted on the Akamai network. Akamai is an expert in global data delivery and is a good choice for a high traffic site. Interestingly Akamai’s outgoing CEO Paul Sagan has donated over $250,000 to various Democratic fund raisers.
Akamai - Another Akamai technology being used, previously Romney used Dyn for NS hosting.
MittRomney.com uses a variety of mailing platforms to manage its inbound and outbound email. MailChimp has been used for sending campaigns as well as ConstantContact and ExactTarget. They also use McAfee SaaS email services for inbound.
Romney’s team uses Drupal to manage their site. Drupal provides a flexible modular design and is a very popular CMS growing in popularity.
Just like Barack, Romney’s team uses a host of different tools for analytics. New Relic, Optimizely and Facebook Domain Insights are used here as well. Romney uses Search Discovery Satellite for tag management and Google eCommerce Conversion Tracking over Google Analytics. The site also uses Compete tracking and Lotame Crowd Control for advanced marketing based targeting.
jQuery is used throughout Romney’s site as well as a number of jQuery plugins including bgiframe, Colorbox, Cycle, QTip and Form. In addition to these MittRomney.com uses Hover Intent and SuperFish libraries for CSS menus.
MittRomney.com is another well designed site using many of the best web based technologies available. Romney’s website also uses 960.gs grid system for it’s design and has many social integration widgets such as Mollom, Facebook Like, Twitter Follow and ShareThis.
Visually both sites appear very similar, both have a splash screen to try and get your email and zip code and both share the same red, white and blue colours of the United States flag.
From a hosting perspective, Romney’s camp has DNS and Hosting all in the same location, whilst Obama uses a combination of Amazon and Level3. Both providers offer reliable uptime.
Tracking and Analytics wise the site are also both tied, the sites are both using the same array of technologies albeit from different providers in some instances.
The big difference in site implementation is the JavaScript technologies in use, MittRomney.com has lots of various jQuery libraries in use whilst BarackObama.com uses fewer libraries and more wrapped JavaScript functions for custom content, such as JSON and Polyfills for the splash screen.
BarackObama.com has better support for SEO and other various meta attributes that are required in a modern website, such as a canonical content tag, Microdata, Chrome Frame, Meta ViewPort and many more.
In conclusion, from a user perspective the sites are tied in their functionality offering. From a technical perspective BarackObama.com is a slightly better implementation thanks to its conservative use of JavaScript includes and better meta data support.
View both the MittRomney.com and BarackObama.com profiles on BuiltWith.
Adam Griffin at FullContact, a business that syncs contacts and keeps them up to date, have a section on their blog called “Two-Minute Drill“, where they highlight the best sales tool and strategies and provide a 2 minute video of an application they use.
This week they did BuiltWith TrendsPro, the video is embedded below -
Thanks very much FullContact!
A common question we are asked is how do we know what sites are retail sites and which are not?
Looking for Retail Websites (in the wrong place probably) attribution: Joelk75
RetailWith is able to identify retail websites around the world thanks to our parent company, BuiltWith, and their indexation of hundreds of shopping cart systems. We use this information to identify which sites are using particular shopping cart technologies, you are even able to purchase these unique technology related reports on RetailWith.
Some shopping websites do not identify their cart integration as easily, to get around this we find other common identifiers that let us know a site provides some form of shopping functionality, such as cart links, shopping links and items with prices and “add to basket” style functionality.
If you have any questions about the functionality of RetailWith, please contact us, we’re happy to help.
We’ve made some improvements to our data coverage for websites outside of the .com/.net/.org range (where we cover them all). We’ve now covering a much large slice of the internet with additional domains in ccTLD’s such as de, uk, au and ru.
A bigger slice of the internet please. Attribution: Benimoto
Our German coverage has increased by 1.6 million .de domains to 5.5 million resolved domains. Our United Kingdom coverage has increased by 1.1 million .uk domains to 4.6 million and our Australian coverage has increase by 1 million websites to 1.3 million. Russian coverage has also improved by 2 million websites.
Our coverage now stands at 150,331,015 resolvable websites and we look forward to incorporating this additional data into our systems in the next few weeks as well as providing some additional information about how the Internet is built.
Today at 2:25pm AEST BuiltWith will be 5 years old. The site came out of the idea that you could look up a site and it would tell you what technologies the site would be running (what a site was built with).
Here’s the conversation I had with my friend Chris and how bustaname.com helped me find the name that got me to BuiltWith.com -
Chris never did buy surfinggary.com.
Today BuiltWith is in the top 6000 sites on the internet and we’ve moved from simply providing technology lookups to providing Trends for technology usage on over 140 million websites and have 100′s of customers using various tools that we provide from global companies to startups and universities.
Thanks very much for all of the support and here’s looking forward to the next 5 years!
Gary
The retailer lists available at RetailWith may contain thousands of results, making the task of deciding how to tackle the stores from a lead perspective hard. To help solve this issue we provide additional report filters on reports.
The report filters let you narrow down a retail lead list to a smaller list. The filters include -
Site Filter
The ability to filter a list by the appearance of the domain in a site list, such as the Alexa Top Million, Quantcast Top Million, Google Top 10k and more. Useful if you only want to target large sites with high sales.
Category Filter
Many of our stores are tagged with specific categories such as Clothes, Baby, Home, Health etc… and some stores have multiple category tags. This filter lets you return only those stores that match a specific tag.
Region Filter
The region filter lets you separate out retailers and online stores in specific countries. For example, you could narrow the list down to only European stores or maybe only stores in the United Kingdom.
Investment Filter
The investment filter is our own unique way of detecting if the site is using other paid for technologies. Using BuiltWith’s comprehensive technology coverage we can determine if a site has paid for other third party technologies. This filter can help find online retailers paying for technologies.
Hoster Filter
This filter lets you find online stores that are being hosted by particular companies such as GoDaddy, ServInt, Rackspace and many more.
Company Filter
If you want to target stores backed by companies this filter may be useful to you. It only returns the results that have a matching record in the Salesforce database, meaning the site is more likely to be a registered company rather than a single owner site. You can also do a reverse filter here, and search for stores not in the Salesforce database.
If our filters are not enough, our reports are exportable as CSV files, allowing you to download and import them into a spreadsheet system such as Excel or into your CRM and do your own filtering on the results.
We often get questions on Trends about how many sites we cover. We want to cover all of them (the entire web) and we try to do that. It’s possible for us to cover every .com, .net, .org and .info website because the list of these sites are published, however for the rest of the web we have to do our own searching for these sites.
We currently cover 147 million domains, 92.8 million of which are .com, the most popular TLD on the internet, 13.7 million are .net, 8.8 million are .org’s, 7.7 million are .info’s. Then there’s the rest of the web which make up the additional 25 million domains we track.
Domain Coverage
Our domain coverage is continually increasing (it went from 10k to 147 million in 2 years) to bring you the best trends and technology usage coverage available on the web today.
If you want a list of all of the totals for the TLD’s we cover don’t hesitate to contact us.
TrendsPro recently added a new feature. BuiltWith TrendsPro Technology Analysis provides a more detailed view of web technology trends and is a window into what is going on in the world of web technology. It provides an easy to use overview of companies big and small growing and shrinking on the web. The advanced filters let you delve much deeper into usage of technologies than BuiltWith Trends ever has before.
You can use Technology Analysis to find breakout competitors, potential acquisitions and poor performing technologies with customers looking to go elsewhere. Just a few ideas for the usage of this powerful pro user tool.
Checkout BuiltWith TrendsPro and see if it’s the right tool for you and your business.