Ecommerce platform usage has exploded over recent years as the world's economy has transitioned to online. Currently (as of May 3rd, 2024 – source Store Leads) there are 13,138,277 live stores running on 100 different ecommerce platforms. With such an astronomical number of businesses thriving online, it is extremely difficult to stand out a retail brand online now. Perhaps the brand is focusing on delivering the best website UX designs, HD product images and SEO (of course google ads is there) to get significant online visits and higher conversions. But is that enough in 2024?
 

13 million other online stores are implementing the same cliche strategy and expecting a magical business growth curve. Unfortunately, most online businesses fail and will continue to fail due to this single reason – a lack of unfair advantage.

How to gain an unfair advantage over your competitors in 2024 and keep a razor-sharp focus to improvise your sales and marketing strategies for the entire decade? Let's dive there in today's newsletter.

Current State of Ecommerce Market

The trillion dollar industry of ecommerce is thriving in a competitive market. The sheer number of online stores is a strong proof for the bold claim. Let's look at the top 44 ecommerce platforms and how many active stores are running there today:

1- WooCommerce 4,714,578

2- Shopify 2,352,589

3- Custom Cart 1,655,821

4- Wix 689,045

5- Squarespace 293,403

6- Bandcamp 261,508

7- Square Online 259,645

8- OpenCart 225,571

9- PrestaShop 210,028

10-Big Cartel 188,972

11-Ecwid 182,834

12-GoDaddy Online Store 164,471

13-Magento 145,732

14-Cafe24 109,547

15-Tiendanube 104,127

16-BASE 74,301

17-Odoo 61,938

18-Takeaway 57,958

19-YouCan 54,216

20-JouwWeb 49,895

21-Mercado Shops 48,114

22-Weebly Commerce 44,731

23-BigCommerce 44,061

24-Loja Integrada 36,130

25-I'm Web 36,099

26-Kajabi 36,046

27-prom 35,643

28-SHOPLINE 34,553

29-Shopware 34,266

30-Thinkific 34,047

31-Spring 33,376

32-Color Me Shop 29,969

33-Shoptet 29,811

34-Teachable 28,895

35-Alibaba Minisite 28,566

36-Tray Commerce 24,341

37-Lightspeed 22,642

38-OEMSaaS 21,815

39-Salla 21,092

40-ePages 20,388

41-BaseKit 17,255

42-Yampi 17,047

43-Menufy 17,005

44-Gumroad 16,439

3D Product Offering Makes a Difference

This is a proven fact that using 3D product experience can increase user engagement and conversion while drastically reduce product return. Shopify is the leading AR provider for their native store owners. Several case studies of Shopify show that business owners are getting benefit from using 3D based product experience associated with AR. Several other ecommerce platforms are running in the race too. Bigcommerce has its own app store where several providers are offering WebAR services to be integrated to the retail stores.

The BIG Opportunity

Store owned AR service like Shopify AR or similar services are restricted to the corresponding platforms only. Implementing AR incurs a cost but that is not always scalable. Especially when retail businesses try to spread across different places (websites, landing pages, ecomm marketplaces, social media etc.), platform specific AR is not always the best solution for the business owners.

This is where WebAR plays a key role. This enables the SMBs to adopt the solution once and integrate it in several channels without spending more or worrying. Thus technological debt reduces while adopting new technology like 3D commerce.

Only 1% of the world's total ecommerce stores has implemented AR/VR services as of now. The number is not small at all. But the potential open market to explore is huge.

How to Grow WebAR business with Ecommerce

Online store owners are looking for maximizing profit returns within a brief time scale. Naturally their focus on ROI remains sharp always with a positive returns on each investment. 3D commerce can look like a costly investment at the beginning but the ROI is greater than any traditional sales and marketing methods (read here).

You can scale your WebAR business while providing an end to end service to the ecomm business owners. AR is a hyped market where the interest is high but the number of eligible people to serve this industry is relatively small. Build a service portfolio with 3D asset building, WebAR, 3D configurator services and offer them as a bundled service with easy integration to the online stores. You can choose any one ecommerce platform to begin with. Any of those above platforms has enough retail stores to fuel your business to a six figure ARR milestone. Of course, with time, you can focus to expand to other ecomm platforms.

If you want to learn more about which industry to focus with web augmented reality, this ebook can definitely help you to learn the basics about building business cases and how to help your customers to accelerate their own business with your procduct.

Hope you had fun while reading this special edition of The Saturday Shiners. Next week, I'll get back with usual content on WebAR.

Stay tuned!

Thanks for reading.

Cheers,

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