Shirts For Zoom: Which eCommerce Platforms Are Shirt Brands Using?

Of the many changes in the world in these last few weeks, one of them is that the Age of Zoom is now upon us: every “knowledge worker” seems to be working from home and conducting all meetings via video conferencing, with Zoom being the technology of choice du jour.

With an “all video conferencing all the time” work culture, do you know what suddenly takes on greater importance? Your business shirt. (Or whatever clothing top you choose.)

In the pre-Zoom era — which feels like a different world, doesn’t it? When we could walk outside without masks on our faces! — your shirt was just one of many other factors that the people at the other end of the business meeting would judge you by: the office, your entire wardrobe, and the whole background of where the meeting was taking place. But now, for business meetings, you can be wearing whatever pants you want — perhaps none, if you’re feeling adventurous! — since it will be invisible to all. It is your shirt that is the primary way in which you can differentiate yourself, which everyone else will see, and even judge you.

In fact, we feel so confident about this that we’d predict that the online shirt retailers, as well as shirt departments of the major ecommerce department stores like Amazon, will see their shirts sales boom.

But this led us to wonder — since we spend all of our days obsessing over building world-class retail ecommerce sites — what ecommerce platforms are the top men’s business shirts and women’s business tops brands running?

We conducted our research by — partially — trusting Google’s judgment. Googling for phrases like “men’s office shirts” and “women’s offices shirts” as well as other variations and synonyms, and then eliminating the generic retailers of many different brands (I’m looking at you, Amazon), we compiled the top 50 men’s and top 50 women’s shirt brands.

The answers, ladies and gentlemen, have been elucidating. Without further ado:

And across both sexes, this comes out to:

There are a few interesting takeaways from this data:

First, the most popular ecommerce platform for the largest shirt retailers is Salesforce Commerce Cloud, running approximately 1/3rd of all their sites. This makes sense, since Salesforce specializes in, well, large retail ecommerce sites — and office shirts are a subset of this.

Secondly, hot on their heels is Shopify, with about 1/5th of all the sites. While Salesforce Commerce Cloud, which we still fondly remember as Demandware, started top-down, Shopify started bottom up, and is the choice of many of the smaller and up-and-coming ones on the list, such as Mizzen + Main.

Third, there are lots of top office shirt sites running on what we could possibly consider classifying as legacy ecommerce platforms. IBM’s Websphere and Oracle’s ecommerce platforms may have been. In fact, these together form the third largest contingent, after Salesforce Commerce Cloud and Shopify.

Fourth, it is surprising to see some overgrown content management systems on the list. WordPress (including their ecommerce platform, Woocommerce) and Sitecore (via their Sitecore Experience Commerce) are fundamentally CMS and that’s where they shine. But as content and ecommerce become increasingly intertwined, both have developed ecommerce functionality that is widely used by sites on their platforms. The surprising aspect of this is, as sites and companies grow, the common pattern is to migrate to bigger and more comprehensive platforms (like Salesforce Commerce Cloud). Of course, these platforms, with a fair amount of custom work, can be pushed very far. And this is what High Bar Shirts is doing.

The remainder is a mixed bag. We had heard that Lemonstand had gone out of business, but at least one of the sites is still live on their platform (Institchu). Magento makes a strong showing, with 7 out of the 75. Infosys’s Skava and SAP’s Hybris show up, as do some lesser known players like Powerfront, and Australia’s “Oh But We’re Really In Austin” BigCommerce as well.

In conclusion, there is more variety among the top shirt retailers than we expected. While we expect a handful of players to dominate the top stores, there are 15 different platforms behind the top 75. Some platforms are on their way up, some on their way down — but all are performing well enough to power the top office shirts sites.

And what’s more important for you, dear reader, than which platform powers the office shirts site is what office shirt you wear to your next Zoom meeting. Of course, Murphy’s Law may apply and the moment you click buy the Sitecore-running Paul Frederick’s site will probably crash at that one particular moment. 

PS: UV is one of the world’s leading Salesforce Commerce Cloud (Demandware) integrators. Contact us to see how we can work together.