Introducing RivalSonar
RivalSonar finds online stores, estimates their sales and traffic, and shows their best sellers, apps, themes and ads in one place. Here is what it does today and what is still being built.
On this page
RivalSonar is a competitor research tool for ecommerce. It finds online stores, estimates their sales and traffic, and shows what they sell, which apps and themes they run and which ads they pay for. You can then track the stores that matter to you and see what changes from hour to hour.
This post explains what is in the first build, how the numbers are made, and one thing we want to be upfront about: the site currently runs on generated sample data while our crawler fills the real database.
Why we built it
If you sell online, you already do competitor research. You open a rival's store, scroll their best-selling collection, look up their ads in a public ad library, check their page source to guess the theme and try to work out whether they are actually selling anything. It works, but it takes an evening per store, and the answers are scattered across tabs and notes.
RivalSonar puts that work in one place. Each store gets a profile with its estimated sales and traffic, its products, its ads, its apps and tech, and a list of similar stores. You can search across all of them instead of one at a time.
What is in the first build
Stores
- Store explorer. Filter stores by estimated orders, revenue and visits, country, category, theme, installed apps, tracking pixels, ad networks, creation date and whether they are one-product stores.
- Store profiles. Estimated sales and traffic, products, ads, apps and tech, and similar stores on one page.
- Store analyzer. A free tool that gives a quick read of any store address.
Products
- Product explorer and winning products. Search products across stores by best-seller rank, price, estimated orders, trending and newly added.
Ads
- Ad library. Ads from Meta, TikTok, Pinterest and Snapchat with reach where the platform publishes it, an estimated spend, active days and an AI score that sorts ads into testing, scaling or winning. The AI score is in beta.
- Advertisers. Ads grouped by the brand that runs them.
Tracking and research
- Sales tracker. Estimated hourly orders and which products sold for stores you track, with the first report ready after 24 hours.
- Ad tracker. New ads from the stores and advertisers you track.
- Traffic research. Estimated monthly visits, traffic sources, countries and engagement.
- Directories. Themes, Shopify apps and pixels, each linked to the stores that use them.
Workflow
- Collections to save stores, products and ads in lists.
- Saved searches with a daily digest email when something new matches.
- CSV and Excel exports.
- A Chrome extension, in beta, that opens a panel on any store you visit with its platform, theme, apps, pixels, best sellers, estimated sales and ads, plus one-click tracking. More on the extension page.
Which platforms we cover
Shopify comes first, because it is where most independent stores are built. We also cover Wix, Squarespace, BigCommerce, Webflow and headless stores, such as Shopify headless, BigCommerce, Medusa and commercetools. Our post on going beyond Shopify explains why, and what works differently on each platform.
How the numbers are made
Every sales, revenue and traffic number in RivalSonar is an estimate, and we label it that way. No outside tool can see a store's real orders.
In short, we model monthly visits from public traffic rankings, multiply them by a conversion rate adjusted for price band and category, and multiply the resulting orders by an estimated average order value. Stores you track are refined every hour from changes in their public catalogue. Our post on why store sales estimates are wrong walks through the full model and where it is weak.
Where the data comes from
RivalSonar only uses public sources: 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 is not affiliated with Shopify, Meta, TikTok or any other platform we cover.
If you own a store and want it hidden, you can ask on our data removal page.
Sample data for now
Right now, the stores, products and ads you see on the site are generated sample data. Sample stores use .example domains so they can never be mistaken for real businesses. They let you try every module and see how the screens work while our crawler works through the real list of store domains and fills the database.
As real stores arrive, they replace the sample ones. Logos and screenshots for every store are also being built. We will post on the changelog as each part goes live, and we would rather tell you this plainly than let sample numbers pass as real ones.
How pricing works
Every plan comes with monthly credits. Searches, opening a store, product or ad, exports and extension analyses use credits, while tracking uses slots. There is a free plan with monthly credits and no card required. Our post on how credits work explains the details, and current plans are on the pricing page.
Where to start
If you are new to competitor research, these guides are a good first step:
- How to find winning products
- How to research a competitor's Shopify store
- How to estimate any store's sales
We would like to hear what you think. Tell us what is missing, what is confusing and which numbers look wrong.
