RESEARCH
Dutch webshops fill 42% of their product fields. The platform barely matters.
We measured 8,565 Dutch webshops, 20,458,719 products between them. On average 42.4% of product fields hold a value. For 6,332 shops, 74 percent of the total, it is less than half.
MEASURED, NOT ESTIMATED · SOURCE AND METHOD AT THE BOTTOM
THE RESULT WE DID NOT EXPECT
Switching platform does not fix this.
We expected large differences between platforms. There are hardly any. Between the two largest sits a little over one percentage point. A shop with empty fields does not get them filled by moving, because the platform is not what leaves them empty.
| Platform | Shops | Average filled |
|---|---|---|
| Shopify | 343 | 49.0% |
| WooCommerce | 5,363 | 47.8% |
| Lightspeed | 107 | 44.2% |
| OXID | 43 | 34.3% |
| JouwWeb | 1,439 | 28.2% |
This table uses the 11 fields that no platform hides. That is not a detail: some platforms do not expose a field like gtin or weight at all, and judging those shops on a field their system cannot show would produce a comparison that measures nothing. Using all sixteen fields would judge Shopify on three fields fewer than JouwWeb.
WHICH FIELD IS EMPTY
The gap is not in the title. It is in everything people filter on.
Title, description and image are there almost everywhere. Exactly the fields a visitor searches and filters with, and the ones a comparison site or a language model needs to understand a product, are empty.
| Field | Filled | Measured in |
|---|---|---|
| reviews | 1.6% | 8,287 |
| contents | 1.9% | 4,461 |
| material | 5.0% | 8,565 |
| size | 6.6% | 8,565 |
| weight | 9.7% | 6,154 |
| dimensions | 10.6% | 6,369 |
| colour | 10.7% | 8,565 |
| attributes | 13.8% | 8,565 |
| gtin | 17.3% | 3,635 |
| brand | 22.2% | 8,565 |
Material is empty on nineteen out of twenty products. Colour on nine out of ten. Those are not edge cases; they are the first two filters in almost every shop.
HOW WE MEASURED
The method, including what is wrong with it.
Where the shops come from
From Common Crawl, a public archive of the web. Three crawls merged, Dutch domains only, only addresses with a product path. Not a purchased list and not a customer base.
What was measured
Per shop a sample of product pages, from the outside, the way a visitor or a search engine sees them. Per field we count the percentage of products holding a value. The shop score is the average across those fields.
What is not in here
No shop names, no domains, no contact details, and no group smaller than twenty-five shops. This is an aggregate over a market, not a list of shops.
Three limits you should know before citing this. Platform detection works on markers in the html, and for some shops the platform could not be identified; those are absent from the platform table, and that group holds relatively many large catalogues. The measurement looks at what a shop publishes, not at what sits in its system: a shop can have material filled in and simply not show it. And a sample is not a census.
We sell the filling of these fields. That does not make us an independent party, which is why the method is here in full and the limits are not left out. Anyone who wants to check the numbers against their own shop can: the scan does on a single shop exactly what was done here on eight thousand.
PLEASE REUSE
Use these numbers.
You may reuse anything on this page in your own article, presentation or report, crediting this page as the source. Carry the measurement date and the limits above with it, because a number without a method becomes folklore within a year.
Questions about the method, or a breakdown that is not here: hi@skuply.io.