According to Shopify, the best e-commerce platform is Shopify. On its blog, the company has published at least 60 different ranked listicles, including '10 Best Ecommerce Platforms for Small Business in 2026,' '11 Best Ecommerce Platforms for Your Business in 2026,' 'The 11 Best Cheap Ecommerce Platforms for Small Business (2026),' and 'Best Ecommerce Software 2026: Compare 11 Top Platforms.' The competitors that come in second and beyond vary, but the No. 1 pick is always Shopify. If rankings produced by the very company at the top of the list seem unlikely to fool anyone, that's because humans probably aren't the target audience. Chatbots are. When I recently asked ChatGPT for the 'best way to set up an online storefront,' the AI tool identified Shopify as the first option. It wasn't immediately clear how ChatGPT arrived at that recommendation, but a list of citations that accompanied the answer yielded a clue: Shopify's own rankings. For the quarter century that Google has been...
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