Shopify adoption by site popularity tier

Caveats: Shopify adoption by site popularity tier

• Two measurements, three bases; do not merge or compare them as one series. W3Techs' percentages are shares of "all the websites whose content management system we know" at ranks up to N. The Web Almanac ecommerce share is Shopify's share of the ecommerce platform detections in the tier, and its all-sites share divides by every desktop site crawled in the tier. Neither source counts merchants, stores or revenue.
• W3Techs numbers are one reading taken on October 13, 2026 and change daily. No history was captured. W3Techs' terms permit quoting with a dated reference and, online, a link to the original page. Cite as "W3Techs.com, 13 October 2026" with a link to the ranking page. All rights in the site belong to its owner, so only the quoted figures are reproduced.
• Rank lists differ. W3Techs uses "ranking data provided by Google in the Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) as well as a customized version of the Tranco list". The Web Almanac uses the CrUX rank magnitude of each site, with cumulative tiers. A site's tier can differ between the two sources.
• Detection methods differ. W3Techs says "If we find a technology on any of the pages, it is considered to be used by the website" and "We do not consider subdomains to be separate websites", so a Shopify store on a subdomain counts as Shopify use by the whole site. The Web Almanac crawls the home page and one other page per site and client, and "If the store is hosted in a subdirectory, it may be missed." These differences are one reason the top-tier shares differ: W3Techs shows 5.3% of known-CMS sites in the top 1,000, and the Web Almanac shows 0 of 6 detected ecommerce sites.
• The Web Almanac top 1,000 tier is a very small sample: 633 desktop sites, 6 of them detected as ecommerce (Amazon Webstore 3, Magento 2, Pattern by Etsy 1), none Shopify. One site would move that share by about 17 points.
• Web Almanac denominator. The sheet's ecommerce share is Shopify's sites divided by the sum of the per-platform site counts in the tier, so a site detected with two ecommerce platforms counts twice. Recomputing reproduces the published value for all 2,159 rows of the sheet. Dividing by distinct ecommerce sites gives slightly higher shares (524,617 / 2,419,801 is 21.7% against the published 21.5%). The sheet rounds tier shares to whole percents except the All tier, where the chapter prints 21.5%, and sharePctRecomputed gives one decimal from the sheet's own counts.
• Mobile figures are not included. The chapter's mobile table shows Shopify at 25.3% of ecommerce sites, but that pivot divides mobile site counts by the desktop denominator. The sheet's own mobile column shows 21% for the same row.
• Detection and definitions. The Web Almanac uses HTTP Archive's fork of Wappalyzer v6.10.65. "All detection tools, including Wappalyzer, have their limitations", headless stores are harder to detect, and crawl geography matters. A site counts as ecommerce if it uses a known ecommerce platform or a technology that strongly implies an online store. W3Techs' disclaimer says it may not detect technologies "used only on some pages of a websites" and that its sample is not all websites.
• The Web Almanac figures are the July 2025 crawl (chapter published 2026/01/15). The 2026 edition's ecommerce chapter was not yet published on October 13, 2026. The results sheet is a live Google Sheet and the SQL was read from the main branch, so both could change after that date. The license of HTTP Archive's raw crawl data was not verified; the chapter footer reads "Licensed under Apache 2.0".