How to research a competitor's Shopify store
Everything you can learn about a competitor's Shopify store from public pages: theme, apps, pixels, catalogue, best sellers, ads, traffic and estimated sales, and how to read it all.
On this page
"Spying" sounds shady, but almost everything worth knowing about a competitor's store is published on purpose. Storefront pages, the public product feed, the sitemap, the page source and public ad libraries all tell you how a store is built and what it sells. This guide walks through a full competitor teardown in the order we use ourselves, first by hand and then with RivalSonar where it saves time.
Key takeaways
- Stay on public data. Never log into a competitor's admin, buy their data or try to get around bot protection. You do not need to.
- Confirm the platform first, because the methods differ between Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, BigCommerce and headless stores.
- The page source reveals the theme, many apps and the tracking pixels.
- The product feed and sitemap show the catalogue and when products were added.
- Ads and traffic tell you how the store gets customers. Sales figures from any outside tool are estimates.
Step 1. Confirm the platform
Open the store and view the page source (right-click, then View page source). Search the source for these markers:
- Shopify. References to cdn.shopify.com, a Shopify object in a script, or "myshopify.com".
- Wix. References to static.wixstatic.com or wix.com.
- Squarespace. References to squarespace.com or static1.squarespace.com.
- BigCommerce. References to bigcommerce.com or a cdn11.bigcommerce.com address.
If none of these appear but the store still has a cart, it may be a headless build that uses Shopify, BigCommerce, Medusa or commercetools behind a custom front end. Look at the network requests in your browser's developer tools for calls to those platforms' APIs.
The RivalSonar extension does this check in one click on any store and shows the platform in its panel.
Step 2. Identify the theme
On Shopify, the page source usually contains a Shopify.theme object with the theme name and a theme store ID. If the name has been changed to something like "Copy of Live theme", the theme store ID still points to the original. Asset file names such as theme.css or base.css and the structure of the HTML also give it away once you have seen a few themes.
Why it matters: the theme tells you how much the store invested in design and which layout patterns they chose. An Online Store 2.0 theme with custom sections suggests a team that tests its product pages. For a deeper look at choosing your own theme from this kind of research, read how to pick a Shopify theme from top stores.
Step 3. List the apps
Most Shopify apps load scripts on the storefront. Search the page source for app domains and script names. Common giveaways are review widgets, upsell and bundle widgets, subscription tools, popups and email capture forms, and chat bubbles. Each script domain usually maps to one app vendor.
Apps reveal strategy. A store running a post-purchase upsell app and a bundle app is working hard on average order value. A store with a subscription app is chasing repeat purchases. Our guide on which Shopify apps top stores use shows how to turn this into a shortlist for your own store.
Step 4. Find the pixels and ad networks
Search the source for tracking code. The Meta pixel, TikTok pixel, Pinterest tag, Snapchat pixel and Google tags all have recognisable script names. A tracking pixel only shows that the store measures that channel, not that it spends heavily there, but it tells you where to look next. Stores that also send server-side events through the Conversions API usually take paid traffic seriously.
Step 5. Read the catalogue
Shopify stores publish a product feed at the store address followed by /products.json. It lists products with titles, prices, compare-at prices, variants, tags and the date each product was created or last updated. Add ?limit=250 to see more per page, and &page=2 for the next page.
The sitemap at /sitemap.xml links to product sitemaps with a last-modified date for each product. Together these show:
- how big the catalogue is and how it is priced
- which products are new
- how often the store adds or changes products
- whether the store is a one-product store or a broad catalogue
Some stores turn the feed off or limit it. That is their right, so do not try to get around it.
Step 6. Find the best sellers
Many Shopify stores support a collection URL sorted by best-selling, such as /collections/all?sort_by=best-selling. The order of that list is the store's own ranking of its products by sales. The full method, with its caveats, is in how to find a store's best sellers.
Step 7. Look at their ads
Search the store's name or domain in the Meta Ad Library and in the TikTok Creative Center. Note how many ads are active, how long the oldest active ones have run and which products they push. In RivalSonar, the Store profile pulls the store's Meta, TikTok, Pinterest and Snapchat ads into one tab, with active days and estimated reach and spend.
Long-running ads point to the store's most profitable products and messages. For more on reading them, see how to read ad longevity and reach.
Step 8. Estimate traffic and sales
Traffic and sales are the parts you cannot see directly. Outside tools model them. RivalSonar estimates monthly visits from public traffic rankings, then estimates orders and revenue from those visits. The method and its limits are explained in how to estimate any store's sales. Look at the traffic sources too, since a store that lives on organic search is a very different competitor from one that depends on paid social.
Putting it together
A one-page competitor summary should answer these questions:
| Question | Where the answer comes from |
|---|---|
| What platform and theme? | Page source |
| Which apps and pixels? | Page source |
| How big is the catalogue and how is it priced? | Product feed |
| What sells best? | Best-selling collection, best-seller rank |
| How do they get customers? | Ad libraries, traffic sources |
| Roughly how much do they sell? | Sales estimate, clearly labelled as an estimate |
| Is it growing? | New products, new ads, estimated orders over time |
To keep watching a competitor after the first teardown, add the store to the Sales tracker or Ad tracker. Our guide on tracking competitor sales daily covers that routine.
Stay on the right side of the line
Everything above uses pages a store publishes for anyone to see. Do not create fake orders, log into accounts that are not yours, scrape so hard that you slow a store down or copy product photos and text that you do not have rights to. Research the strategy, then build your own version of it.
