CMS and eCommerce Trend Predictions for 2013

The popularity of free and open source CMS software and ecommerce applications has risen rapidly over the last year or so. Magento, PrestaShop and OpenCart have all performed well over the last 12 months, and the future looks bright for 2013 as well.
More and more website owners are looking to open source solutions for managing their websites, partly because of the low cost of ownership, and also because of the fast pace of development and the generally good security of open source platforms.
So, what does the future hold for 2013? Some analysts believe that 2013 will be the year that the cloud really takes off. Cloud solutions are nothing new, but uptake has been slow until recently because of the uncertainty surrounding cloud hosting. Now that there are well-known and established companies offering cloud hosted solutions, more people are adopting them.
Free hosted blogging solutions such as WordPress.org have been around for a long time, are stable, and are reliable. Hosted solutions such as Volusion and Shopify are attracting a lot of positive attention and are a great option for smaller companies that are not able to manage their own servers. Solutions such as Magento Go are ideal for smaller merchants, and we can expect to see a lot of people adopt that solution over the course of this year.
The shopping cart market is nearing saturation, with dozens of open source and low cost self-hosted carts and shopping solutions vying for people’s attention. It’s likely that the shopping cart market will follow the same trend as the blogging and CMS market, and will contract to just a few key players holding most of the attention. Whether that will happen this year, or in a few year’s time, is anyone’s guess.