MonsterCommerce Losing Market Share?
Hosted Shopping Cart Solution Report (Feb. 2007)
MonsterCommerce Losing Market Share?
Every time MonsterCommerce releases an update to their shopping cart solution our forum sees an increase of merchants looking for a new solution. Why this happens is best saved for its own blog entry but most tend to be moving to 3dCart because of their easy to use user interface and more robust feature list. A few of their larger stores seem to prefer Volusion. Both are great solutions (in my opinion) and offer a better product (overall) than MonsterCommerce.
I’ve found this site to be interesting:
This shows as a drop of domains (or stores)under MonsterCommerce’s control. Monster has lost 84 store so far this year and about 300 since June 2006. This could show a drop in clients – most likely it does. Or could be explained by a system change brought on by the Network Solution buyout. Only MonsterCommerce knows…
Conversely…
Volusion appears heading in the opposite direction than MonsterCommerce. Volusion has gained about 250 stores so far this year and about 1,400 stores since June 2006. Those are jaw dropping positive numbers for Volusion.
3dCart is also gaining ground. They’ve added 61 stores so far this year.
While these numbers are bound to fluctuate naturally over the course of the year, I think this data points to a trend of client loss over at MonsterCommerce. This could explain the increase of MC clients looking to move to another solution in our forum. eCartReviews Forums
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Hello Brian,
I wanted to say first that I commend you on your site and this blog. Along with the forums, you have created a good resource for ecommerce merchants.
That being said, I wanted to post some information concerning the information about MonsterCommerce market share. You have found a good resource at WebHosting.info that potentially shows some accurate information about the sites that are pointed at MC's name servers. However, even that page has a link from it labeled "Methodology and Limitations" that lists quite a few reasons why their information cannot be taken as measuring the overall health of a company.
Simply put, your guess that it might be a system change from the Network Solutions merger is most accurate from my point of view. A few months after the NetSol acquisition, new ecommerce sites were set up on NetSol servers rather than MC's hosted servers at Rackspace. From that point on, new clients were instructed to point their DNS to NetSol. The drop you see in the chart can be attributed to the trickle of clients on the older system either cancelling or migrating to the new system.
It would be interesting to see older graphs going back to 2003 or so. At some point prior to version 4.0, MC instructed all clients to point their DNS to Rackspace and managed the settings through their system. As the company expanded, it became clear their own DNS servers would improve service levels. If there were graphs available from this time, you'd see the purple line skyrocket up pretty quickly as clients switched over to the new system. See this FAQ concerning current DNS settings compared to the old one.
I can't really divulge the internal numbers, but I can tell you that the number of MC clients is still climbing quite steadily. In fact, with the release of the NetSol / MonsterCommerce Standard E-Commerce software product, selling online has become easier and more accessible for clients with limited time and limited budgets. Eventually (long down the road), all clients will likely be migrated over to the NetSol DNS servers so the graph you reference will no longer show anything valuable. Try NetSol's graph for comparison.
I'd be a liar if I were to say there aren't problems and areas that need improvement, of course. But don't count the Monster out yet.
Thanks again!
Thanks for the excellent feedback ArcoJedi.
The data stated may indeed be only empirical. IMHO MC has a long road to hoe to become competitive with some of the smaller (yet more feature-rich and innovative) shopping cart solutions. Sure it can be done but it may take scrapping the entire platform and stating anew. Regardless, I hope a rebound does occur. The larger the field of viable cart solutions the better!