Why More Than Half of WooCommerce Sites Aren't Real Stores

5.7 Million WooCommerce Sites Analyzed. Only 2.5 Million Are Stores.

WooCommerce is the world's most popular e-commerce plugin. Technology detection tools accurately report millions of domains running it. The problem is what happens downstream: those installation counts get cited as store counts. And they're not the same thing.

WooCommerce is a WordPress plugin. Anyone can install it with two clicks. And millions of websites have it installed without actually selling anything.

We took every accessible WooCommerce domain in our database where we had enough content data to classify - sites that are online, responding, and have analyzable page content - and verified whether each one is genuinely operating as a store, using an AI classifier that reads the actual page - not just the tech stack - and decides whether the site is genuinely selling products.

The result:

More than 56% of classifiable WooCommerce domains are not functioning e-commerce stores. These are live, online websites with WooCommerce code in the HTML - but they're not selling anything.

Why This Happens

WooCommerce isn't like Shopify. You don't sign up for WooCommerce to start a store - you add it to an existing WordPress site. This means:

News sites selling subscriptions. A Malaysian news portal, a German political magazine, a Mexican daily newspaper - they all use WooCommerce to sell digital subscriptions, not physical products. The plugin is active, the checkout works, but nobody's shipping anything.

Blogs with a merch page. A food blogger adds WooCommerce to sell a cookbook PDF. The site is 99% blog content, 1% commerce. Platform detection tools count it as a "WooCommerce store."

Corporate sites with a plugin graveyard. A web developer installs WooCommerce during site setup, never configures it, moves on. The plugin stays in the code. The site shows up in every e-commerce report.

Abandoned projects. Someone starts building a store, gets halfway through, gives up. WooCommerce code is still in the HTML. The "store" has no products, no cart, no checkout - but it counts as a WooCommerce site.

It's Not Just WooCommerce

WooCommerce has the worst false positive rate among major self-hosted platforms, but the pattern extends across the industry:

Legend: 🟢 >80% real | 🟡 25-80% | 🔴 <25%

The pattern is clear: platforms where you sign up specifically to sell have high accuracy. Platforms you bolt onto existing sites don't.

• Shopify (93.3%) - you create a Shopify account to run a store. The vast majority of accessible Shopify sites are real stores
• PrestaShop (90.8%), BigCommerce (86.7%) - dedicated e-commerce platforms with intentional setup
• Magento (78.3%) - the interesting outlier. Dedicated e-commerce software, yet 1 in 5 installations aren't stores. Unlike WooCommerce, these aren't abandoned plugins - they're cinemas selling tickets, telecom companies managing accounts, and SaaS platforms running on enterprise-grade infrastructure
• WooCommerce (43.7%) - a WordPress plugin that gets installed on blogs, corporate sites, and projects that never launch
• Wix (23.1%), Squarespace (13.9%) - website builders where commerce is an optional add-on. Most users never use it

Squarespace is the most striking: only 14% of domains with Squarespace Commerce detected are actually stores. Nearly 6 out of 7 are portfolios, blogs, and business sites that happen to have the commerce module enabled.

It Depends Where You Look

These numbers vary dramatically by country. In Canada, only 31% of WooCommerce sites are stores. In the US, 37%. In Iran, 56%.

Why? In North America, WordPress powers everything - dental offices, churches, personal blogs - and WooCommerce comes preinstalled in popular themes. Half the websites with WooCommerce never intended to sell anything. In Iran or Vietnam, if someone installs WooCommerce, they mean business.

Shopify tells the opposite story: 92 -98% real stores in every country we measured. No one accidentally signs up for Shopify.

How This Distorts Market Share

When you count every accessible domain with e-commerce code as a "store," you get one picture of the market. When you verify which ones are actually selling, you get a very different one:

The biggest shifts:

WooCommerce drops from #1 to #2. Shopify takes a decisive lead when you only count sites that are actually selling. WooCommerce loses over 11 percentage points of market share - not because its stores are bad, but because its platform count is inflated by millions of non-stores.

What This Means

For payment providers and SaaS companies targeting "WooCommerce merchants": your real addressable market is half of what platform detection suggests. If you're buying lead lists based on WooCommerce detection, half the domains will never convert because they're not stores.

For investors evaluating e-commerce platforms: WooCommerce's apparent market leadership disappears after verification. Shopify leads with 35.4% vs WooCommerce's 27.1% when counting only real stores.

For agencies recommending platforms to clients: WooCommerce's market dominance in reports partly reflects WordPress's popularity, not merchant preference. When comparing actual stores, the picture shifts significantly.

For WooCommerce themselves: this isn't necessarily bad news. 2.5 million active stores is still enormous. But understanding the real number matters for honest benchmarking, accurate churn metrics, and realistic growth targets.

How We Measured This

When we say "store," we mean a website where you can buy physical products and have them shipped to you. An electronics shop with DHL delivery - that's a store. A SaaS company selling subscriptions - not a store. A restaurant with its own delivery fleet - not a store. A car dealership where you negotiate in person - not a store. We're counting the businesses that put products in boxes and ship them.

We started with technology fingerprinting - the same approach every platform detection tool uses - to identify WooCommerce domains. We then classified each one using our classification system, which evaluates actual page content - text, structure, product signals, checkout presence - to answer a simple question: is this site selling something?

We only count domains where we had real page content to analyze, excluding ~190,000 where our scraper couldn't reach the content. And here's what gave us confidence in the results: 95% of WooCommerce domains we classified as "not a store" are real websites with real content - 200+ words, proper titles, substantial pages. These aren't broken links or empty placeholders. They're businesses, blogs, portfolios, and projects that happen to have WooCommerce installed. They just don't sell anything.

Data and analysis by ShopRank. We scan 300M+ domains and track 9.1M e-commerce stores across 340+ platforms, updated monthly.