Who Are This Year’s Leading Online Retailers, and Which Platforms Are They Using?

The top 500 ecommerce brands have been revealed in the UK, along with the most popular ecommerce platforms.

The annual Top500 report was released by Internet Retailing, a leading British site for retail and ecommerce, and carries out in-depth analysis and research in the sector.

The Top500 lists the leading online and multichannel retailers in the United Kingdom, and focuses on retail brands and consumer brands that sell directly to customers. And the mechanics behind the list is more complicated than simply ranking retailers by online sales. Internet Retailing uses a combination of metrics such as web traffic, revenues, networks of stores, brand engagement, merchandising — and of course online sales!

“Get to it already!” I hear some of you scream, while the rest of you have already scrolled past these words. (DON”T IGNORE ME! Pleeease.)

The top 6 ecommerce companies, for which the report labels the “elite retailers”, are the following:

1. Amazon (was that really much of a surprise?)
2. Argos (which for you US-based readers is a quirky catalog retailer in which their stores are full of — you guessed it — catalogs for which you fill out an order form, taken to the checkout for payment, and then you wait for your number to be read out before collecting your item. (And points if you guessed that it is named after the classic Greek city.)
3. Dunelm, a home furnishing retailer that offers 30,000 products in-store and 50,000 products online.
4. John Lewis, an upmarket department store and actually the largest cooperative in the UK.
5. Next up is Marks & Spencer, a worldwide retailer of clothing, home products, and food.
6. And finally, Next, a multinational clothing and home products retailer with around 700 stores.

The report also highlights our appetite for shirts and shoes, given that 40% of the top 500 sell clothing and fashion accessories. We clearly love a fresh shirt and banging heels.

This fashionable insight leads us off the catwalk and into a sideroom, away from the spectacle, where we can begin to ponder what this means for ecommerce platforms in general, and Salesforce Commerce Cloud in particular.

It turns out that the most popular ecommerce platform among the top 500, that is used by 16% of retailers, is Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Coming in second place is Magento Enterprise, which is used by 14.6%. Then there is a bit of a drop off in third place with Amplience and Hybris both on 9.4%, and then is followed by IBM Websphere Commerce (9.2%), Oracle Commerce (6.2%), and Magento (6%).

Here at United Virtualities, this comes as no surprise to us. We know Salesforce Commerce Cloud is fashionable — and sustainably so, given its consistent presence as a leader in hosting world-class brand websites — and particularly so when it comes to clothing and footwear.

As a fashion brand you’re going to have a lot of products to sell — from plain white shirts to customized necklaces, and everything in between. Small-scale platforms simply are not able to handle this demand, and are functionally limited when it comes to adding, deleting, and updating their stock.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud comes with a comprehensive arsenal of functionality to deal with complex situations. In practice this means being able to clearly communicate between the shop floor and warehouse to stay updated on levels of stock, and to manage across all currencies and languages that you operate in. 

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