Deepfield, which offers services to build, manage and optimize network infrastructure, studied online shopping infrastructure by sampling internet backbone traffic across a “large cross section of North America and multiple collaborating infrastructure and internet providers.” The goal: To estimate how many users hit these sites daily and determine market share of the sites based on those numbers.

According to Deepfield’s results:

“What is truly impressive is how much larger Amazon shopping is compared to any other online site. Amazon is almost double the next largest shopping competitor, eBay, which enjoys 8.8% of daily Internet users.”

With Amazon, Deepfield includes a raft of smaller Amazon-owned sub-sites like MyHabit, although Zappos, which Amazon bought two years ago, was counted separately.

Deepfield included e-commerce hosting sites — including Shopify — to show how vibrant this market is. Shopify, which offers a web storefront that is used by more than 30,000 sites, garnered 5.4 percent market share among daily users. Quidsi, the company behind diapers.com, soap.com and other sites, also got a healthy 3.1 percent of daily visitors, and was also bought by Amazon in 2010.

Update: (12:45 p.m. PST) The results are summarized in the updated Deepfield chart below:

Feature photo courtesy of Flickr user Shlomi Fish

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Defining work in the digital age: an analysis by GigaOM Pro
• How consumer media will change in 2013
• Social third-quarter 2012: analysis and outlook

Goodsie, a New York City-based start-up that launched a year ago, is vying for a piece of the pie and is now adding some key pieces to help it become a more robust tool for new online sellers. Goodsie allows small businesses to create simple and elegant store fronts without knowing any code. Plans start at $15 a month. The Goodsie platform now hosts 1,200 active store fronts including a number of businesses setting up on Facebook, and its sellers are doing $300,000 in monthly sales.

Now the company is adding an email marketing tool, sales analytics and mobile support that it hopes will broaden its appeal to more online sellers. With the email system, businesses can create simple drag-and-drop emails that target past customers based on order history, purchase amount and geography. Goodsie’s sales analytics will provide real-time tracking or revenue and order volume broken down by product, geography, sales channel, referring source and payment gateway. And the mobile component will allow Goodsie sellers to start tapping smartphone users for the first time, giving them an online store front available through the web. The marketing and analytics tool are part of a new premium tier for Goodsie that sells for $40 a month.

Much of this is catch-up to bigger platforms. But Jonathan Marcus, the founder and CEO of Goodsie, said there is plenty of room for online retail platforms that are easy to use for businesses, who don’t have a lot of technical talent. Now, with the added tools, Goodsie is moving up the food chain, taking its simple approach to sales and equipping it with more services.

“It’s not just about setting up a shop, it’s about managing and growing after you get started,” he said.

Again, a lot of people are looking at this opportunity. Even Etsy is aiming to become a one-stop shop for small businesses, helping them eventually graduate beyond the Etsy marketplace. Marcus said he’s been in talks with Etsy and said there’s an opportunity for Goodsie to help Etsy sellers if Etsy doesn’t want to create its own store front system.

Over the next year, Marcus is looking to keep growing, adding support for big product inventories and adding more features. The goal is to be able to address all but the top 500 online retailers.

Goodsie, which is part of Marcus’ web incubator HiiDef, has its work cut out for it. The challenge will be to see if companies that start with it will want to remain on the platform as their needs grow. But as it adds more tools, there’s a potential business in keeping things simple on the front end while providing more robust business systems on the back end.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• GigaOM Research highs and lows from CES 2013
• How HR can make the case for workforce analytics
• The 2013 task management tools market

The company plans to use the money to expand its team of 70 employees, explore partnerships and acquisitions and build up the number of developers who build off the Shopify platform. Shopify has about 80 apps built by developers such as QuickBooks, Mailchimp and Hubspot, who make their software available to store front owners. Now, Shopify is launching a $1 million fund called the Shopify Fund to encourage more apps on the platform. Through the fund, developers will get between $5,000 and $10,000 to help them build apps for Shopify.

Shopify was founded in 2005 as an online retailer of snowboards but became a broader platform after founders Tobias Lutke and Scott Lake saw the need for a scalable service for other entrepreneurs. The company, which has been growing quickly, raised $7 million last December.

Shopify has been actively trying to encourage entrepreneurs to build on its ecommerce platform. It’s currently in the middle of its second Build a Better Business competition, which is giving out half a million dollars in prizes and giveaways to winners. The first competition helped create 1,400 businesses and collectively raised $3.5 million in revenue over its 6-month contest period. Last year’s winner, iPad case maker DODOcase, is on an annual run rate of $4 to $5 million.

“A lot of great stores are starting and building their business on this platform,” said Harley Finkelstein, Chief Platform Officer for Shopify. “They can scale up and they don’t have to graduate off  the model.”

Shopify, however, is facing new competition from eBay, which just announced X.commerce, a one-store shopping platform, last week at its developer conference. Shopify also competes with Big Commerce and Yahoo Merchant Solutions.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• How consumer media will change in 2013
• GigaOM Research highs and lows from CES 2013
• Social fourth-quarter 2012 analysis

Last year’s contest helped get almost 1,400 businesses off the ground and collectively raised $3.5 million in revenue over its 6-month period. The eventual champion DODOCase, an iPad cover maker, is now on an annual run rate of $4-5 million dollars.

Now Shopify is hoping to kick-start more entrepreneurs, helping them build online retail shops with its software-as-a-service platform. The company already has 13,000 clients using the system and it expects to add a whole lot more through its second competition, which runs from May 1 to December 31.  The increased prize money and considerations should help. Shopify will be handing out a $100,000 grand prize for the store with the most revenue over a two month period. $20,000 each will awarded to six category winners for apparel and jewelry; food and health; sports and hobbies; art and photography; home and office; and other.

The competition isn’t simply about the money. Shopify is teaming with marketing guru Seth Godin, wine video blogger and author Gary Vaynerchuk and angel investor Tim Ferriss, along with sponsors Google, MailChimp and PayPal to offer advice and counseling to start-ups. That along with AdWords credits help bring the total payout to $500,000.The grand winner, for example, will get a lunch with Godin, a power session with Vaynerchuk, dinner with Ferriss and a visit to the Googleplex.

“We got help from good mentors,” said Harley Finkelstein, Chief Platform Officer for Shopify. “This competition is about helping others like we got our start.”

Shopify isn’t just being a good mentor to others. It’s got a big stake in getting companies to adopt its platform. But Shopify is showing how easy it is to get businesses off the ground. It’s an interesting story for a small start-up that began in 2005 as an online retailer of snowboards. Founders Tobias Lutke and Scott Lake took the online platform it built and turned it into a scalable service for other entrepreneurs. Shopify, like Twilio does for communications applications, is another way in which start-ups are able to create businesses quickly and efficiently. And now, Shopify is demonstrating how success can be had in not necessarily being the hot start-up but being the team helping thousands of start-ups get off the ground.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• How HR can make the case for workforce analytics
• Examining the rise of crowd labor platforms in 2012
• Listening platforms: finding the value in social media data