Custom software popular with top German online stores

About 40% of the turnover created by the thousand biggest online stores in Germany was achieved on websites that run on custom software solutions. The second most popular option is Amazon Webstore, with almost 20 percent of total sales. Another popular ecommerce solution in Germany is Hybris.

These conclusions are from a new study by the EHI Retail Institute. In the report, called “Shopsysteme in Deutschland 2015“, EHI analyzed the 1,000 biggest online stores in Germany. The fact that 40.36% of the sales of these stores are generated on websites built with own or customized software shouldn’t be really a surprise.

Ecommerce software solutions in Europe
Because it’s mainly the smaller online stores that use all-in-one subscription, open source or software-as-a-service ecommerce software. In Europe, there are dozens of ecommerce software solutions you can use to start an online store, among them are PrestaShop, Shopify, SEOshop, WordPress and Strato.

Back to the study, it shows that 19.94% of total sales of the top 1,000 German stores is generated on websites built with Amazon Webstore, an all-in-one hosted eCommerce website solution. This is interesting, as the service was terminated in Germany one year ago. Online stores who run on Amazon Webstore do not have to worry, it’s only that there’s no way you can register as a new retailer.

Magento and Hybris
Third place was for Hybris, which accounts for 6.69% of sales. The ranking was based on the proportion of revenues and not the number of stores. So, according to Onlinehändler-News , Magento is used by almost three times more German online stores than Hybris: 129 against 49 stores.

When looking at individual product segments, there are some big differences noticeable. About 87% of online retailers that sell photo, print and print-on-demand products are using ecommerce software that’s built or customized in-house. In the segment of garden products, however, only one in four shops uses a custom software solution.

Also the big stores still need to improve
The researched also analyzed the multichannel usage and it’s shown that of the top 1,000 online stores every second one has a stationary store in Germany. Nevertheless, only 8.7% gives their customers the opportunity to let them pick up their orders via click & collect.