Cloud Vendors, Market Share, and Research for Ecommerce Decision-Makers

Most merchants pick an ecommerce platform without realizing they’re also picking a cloud vendor. Shopify runs on Google Cloud. Adobe Commerce runs on AWS. That choice, made by the platform vendor rather than the merchant, shapes uptime, global load times, and how well the platform handles a traffic spike. This page breaks down the major cloud vendors, where they stand in the market, and which ecommerce platforms run on each one.

Market Share Snapshot

As of early 2026, Amazon Web Services holds about 28% of global cloud infrastructure spending, Microsoft Azure holds about 21%, and Google Cloud holds about 14%, according to Synergy Research Group. Together, these three account for roughly 63% of a market worth over $500 billion a year. The rest is split between Alibaba Cloud, Oracle Cloud, IBM Cloud, and a smaller group of regional and AI-focused providers.

Growth tells a different story than market share. Google Cloud is growing faster than AWS and Azure in percentage terms, largely on the back of AI workloads. AWS still adds the most revenue in absolute dollars each quarter, since a smaller growth rate on a much bigger base still adds up to more money. For a merchant, the practical point is this: AWS is the safest default for scale and breadth, Azure is the strongest option if the business already runs on Microsoft tools, and Google Cloud is closing the gap fast, particularly for data-heavy or AI-driven stores.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

AWS is the largest cloud vendor by both revenue and market share, and the platform most ecommerce infrastructure has been built on for over a decade. Adobe Commerce (Magento) runs on AWS, both the original monolithic platform and Adobe’s newer microservices-based offering. Salesforce named AWS its primary cloud provider in 2016, and Salesforce Commerce Cloud runs on AWS infrastructure as a result.

For a merchant evaluating a platform, AWS-backed infrastructure usually means the widest range of add-on services, from content delivery through CloudFront to managed databases through Aurora. The tradeoff is that AWS-built platforms, like Adobe Commerce, tend to require more setup and more technical management than platforms built for simpler, out-of-box use.

Microsoft Azure

Azure holds the second-largest share of the cloud market and has a specific strength: deep integration with Microsoft’s existing business tools. A company already running Dynamics 365, Power BI, or Active Directory gets a smoother connection to an Azure-based ecommerce setup than to a platform running on a competitor’s cloud.

Few major ecommerce platforms are built natively on Azure the way Shopify is built on Google Cloud, but Azure is a common hosting choice for custom or headless Magento and Shopify deployments run by businesses that want that Microsoft-ecosystem connection. It also has strong compliance certifications, which matters for merchants in regulated industries.

Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

Google Cloud is the fastest-growing of the big three vendors, and it’s the infrastructure Shopify has run on since 2016, when Shopify moved off its own data centers. BigCommerce also runs on Google Cloud. This gives both platforms access to Google’s global network and to Kubernetes, the container orchestration system Google originally built and open-sourced, which both platforms use to handle merchant stores at scale.

For merchants, this shows up as strong performance during traffic spikes, since Shopify’s and BigCommerce’s auto-scaling is built directly on Google’s infrastructure rather than layered on top of a third-party host. Google Cloud also leads in data analytics and AI tooling, which is part of why Shopify’s AI features, like its Shopify Magic tools, run on the same cloud as the storefronts themselves.

Alibaba Cloud

Alibaba Cloud holds around 4% to 6% of the global market, but that figure understates its real position. Inside China, Alibaba Cloud holds over a third of the market, and it’s effectively the only practical option for merchants selling on Chinese marketplaces or hosting a store meant to load quickly for Chinese customers. AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud all have limited presence in China for regulatory reasons.

For a merchant with no China-facing sales, Alibaba Cloud rarely comes up as a choice. For a merchant selling into China, or running a store through Tmall or Taobao, it becomes a practical requirement rather than an option to weigh against the others.

Other Notable Providers

Oracle Cloud and IBM Cloud each hold a small single-digit share of the market, and both are used mostly by large enterprises already running Oracle or IBM software elsewhere in the business. Neither is a common foundation for a standard ecommerce platform, but they show up in custom enterprise builds where a company is migrating an existing Oracle database-driven store into the cloud.

WooCommerce doesn’t run on any single cloud vendor. It’s a plugin on top of WordPress, so the merchant (or their hosting provider) chooses the infrastructure entirely. A WooCommerce store might run on AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, DigitalOcean, or a specialized WordPress host like Kinsta or WP Engine, all of which build their own hosting on top of one of the major cloud vendors underneath.

How Ecommerce Platforms Map to Cloud Vendors

Why This Matters for Decision-Makers

A merchant comparing Shopify and Adobe Commerce isn’t just comparing two pieces of software. They’re indirectly comparing Google Cloud and AWS, since each platform inherits the strengths and limits of its underlying vendor. A store expecting heavy AI-driven personalization or fast global page loads benefits from Google Cloud’s network and tooling, which shows up automatically in a Shopify or BigCommerce store. A store planning a custom, code-heavy build benefits from AWS’s wider service catalog, which is part of why Adobe Commerce and custom Magento builds lean that direction.

This also matters for due diligence. When a platform vendor changes its cloud provider, or a cloud vendor has a major outage, every store built on that platform feels it at the same time. Checking which cloud vendor sits underneath a platform, and reading that vendor’s own status history, gives a merchant a clearer picture of real-world reliability than a platform’s own marketing page.

Takeaway

The cloud market is dominated by three vendors, AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, with Alibaba Cloud holding a strong regional position in China and a handful of smaller providers filling enterprise niches. Most ecommerce platforms build on one of these vendors directly, which means a merchant’s platform choice is also, indirectly, a cloud vendor choice. Knowing which vendor sits behind a platform helps explain why it performs the way it does, and what to expect when that vendor has a bad day.