Beyond Shopify, why we track Wix, Squarespace, BigCommerce and headless stores

Most store research tools are Shopify research tools. That makes sense, since Shopify is where a large share of independent online stores are built, and Shopify stores expose a lot of useful public data. RivalSonar starts with Shopify too.

But if you only look at Shopify, you miss competitors. A design-led brand may run on Squarespace. A local business may sell through Wix. A larger catalogue may sit on BigCommerce. A fast-growing brand may have rebuilt its storefront as a headless site. Your customers do not care which platform a store uses, so your research should not either.

Which platforms we cover

• Shopify, our first and deepest coverage
• Wix
• Squarespace
• BigCommerce
• Webflow
• Headless stores, such as Shopify headless, BigCommerce headless, Medusa and commercetools

WooCommerce is on our roadmap, without a date.

Why it matters for research

Competitors are not only on Shopify

When you research a niche, the stores that sell to your customers may be on any platform. If your tool cannot see them, you underestimate the competition and may think a niche is emptier than it is.

Larger brands often leave Shopify's default storefront

As brands grow, some move their storefront to a headless setup for speed and design freedom, even if Shopify or BigCommerce still runs their checkout behind the scenes. These are often the biggest stores in a niche, and they are exactly the ones you want to study.

Platform choice says something about the business

A store on Squarespace or Webflow is often design-led and content-heavy. A store on BigCommerce often has a larger catalogue. A headless store usually has a development team. The platform is a clue about how the business is run.

What is the same on every platform

For every store we cover, RivalSonar builds the same core profile:

• estimated monthly visits from public traffic rankings
• estimated orders and revenue from those visits, using a conversion rate adjusted by price band and category and an estimated average order value
• products found through public storefront pages, sitemaps and product feeds
• ads from public ad libraries that point to the store
• detected tracking pixels and ad networks

Every sales, revenue and traffic figure is an estimate on every platform.

What differs by platform

Themes and apps are mostly a Shopify idea

A Shopify theme has a name and often a version that shows up in the public page source, and Shopify apps leave recognisable scripts and blocks on the storefront. That is why our themes and apps directories are richest for Shopify.

Other platforms work differently. Wix and Squarespace have templates, but stores change them so much after the first setup that the template name tells you less. Their add-ons are often built into the platform rather than installed from a separate app marketplace. On these platforms we focus on what we can detect reliably, such as pixels, ad networks and the product catalogue.

Product data varies

Shopify stores usually publish rich public catalogue data, including product titles, variants, prices and dates, and often a best-selling sort order on collections. Other platforms publish less in some places and more in others. Where a platform has no public best-selling order, our split of orders across products leans more on other signals, so per-product estimates are less certain.

Headless stores have fewer markers

A headless storefront is a custom site. It does not load a standard theme, and many app scripts look different or are absent. To recognise the platform behind it, we look for other public clues, such as calls to a commerce platform's public storefront API, the checkout domain and public product feeds. Theme and app details are often not available for headless stores, and we leave them blank rather than guess.

How we collect it

The rules are the same on every platform. We only read public storefront pages, public sitemaps, public product feeds, public ad libraries and public traffic rankings. We never log into stores, never bypass bot protection and never collect shoppers' personal data. RivalSonar is independent and not affiliated with Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, BigCommerce, Webflow or any other platform.

Store owners on any platform can ask us to hide their store on our data removal page.

What comes next

WooCommerce coverage is planned, along with TikTok Shop and Amazon sellers. We will announce each on the changelog when it is ready.

If you want to check a store's platform yourself, the Chrome extension shows it in a panel on any store you visit, and the guide on researching a competitor's store shows how to find it by hand.