Most of the popular e-commerce platforms are run by companies that can be mainly seen as startups, well usually as succesfull startups, but as startups anyway. Se we thought that it would be interesting to look at how much funding the different platforms / companies have received by the end of 2014. You will notice that out of best known platforms Magento is not listed below, the reason for that is simple: it is owned by eBay (a US company with a market cap of slightly over 70 billion dollars at the end of 2014).
Before going in to the numbers it is good to note couple things: 1) a higher funding doesn’t necessarily mean that much – after all a company usually needs funding only if it is not able to cover it’s expansion or other expenses via revenue generated by the business. On the other hand funding rounds can be seen as vote of confidence from those participating in the rounds. 2) These numbers on this page are publicly published numbers compiled by CrunchBase, so there might be some inaccuracies, although they are most likely at least in the right ballpark.
Bigcommerce – $125 million in funding
Bigcommerce and Shopify have received very close to the same amount of venture capital, however at the moment Bigcommerce “leads” by $3 million. Most recently Bigcommerce has received funding in November 2014 when they got $50 million in their series D round. The series D round saw several very prominent companies as investors, including for an example American Express and SoftBank capital.
Shopify – $122 million in funding
The world’s most popular e-commmerce platform company has most recently received venture funding in December of 2013 when a series C round worth $100 million was announced. The investors participating in that series C round include for an example FirstMark Capital and Insight Venture Partners. It is interesting to note that Shopify has received less funding than Bigcommerce, even though it has more than double the amount of active stores using it’s solution.
Weebly – $35.7 million in funding
Weebly is not really as much an e-commerce platform business as it is an all-around webpage building service. However, they do offer an option to build an online store by using their service, so they might as well be listed on this page. The Weebly’s number is most likely quite a bit too small, as they received an undisclosed amount of funding in 2011 from Sequoia Capital. Almost all of the published $35.7 million is made of a $35 million series C round that took place in April 2014 and saw Sequoia Capital (just like in 2011) and Tencent participating.
Spree Commerce – $6.5 million in funding
Spree Commerce is bit “behind” the above mentioned companies as it has so far raised only a seed round and series A round. The series A round took place in January of 2014 raised $5 million in new venture capital and saw for an example AOL ventures participating in it.
