Savva Field guide
How to research competitor Shopify stores — legally and free (2026)
Every Shopify store publishes far more about itself than its owner realises: the full catalog, what sells best, which ads are paying, which apps run the site. Here's how to read all of it — with public data only.
Ground rule first: everything below uses data competitors publish themselves — public pages, public feeds, public ad archives. That's ordinary competitive research, the same thing they can do to you (and probably are). What we won't teach: scraping behind logins, lifting their photos and copy verbatim, or posing as a customer to pump their support. You want their lessons, not their assets.
1. Read the full catalog: /products.json
Nearly every Shopify store exposes its catalog as a public feed. Take any store's domain and open:
theirstore.com/products.json?limit=250
You'll see every product with titles, prices, variants, images and publish dates — the store's whole assortment strategy in one file. Things to note:
- Price architecture: where's the entry price, where's the premium, do they use compare-at prices (fake or real anchoring)?
- Publish dates: a burst of new products last month = they're testing; nothing new for a year = a store on autopilot.
- Variant depth: lots of bundles and multipacks usually means they've learned average order value the hard way.
2. See what actually sells: best-selling sort
Open any of their collections and add the sort parameter:
theirstore.com/collections/all?sort_by=best-selling
The first two rows are their money-makers. Cross-reference with step 1: if a product is a best seller and was published recently, that's a product currently winning — worth understanding why (price? angle? the product itself?). Some stores disable these defaults; most never think to.
3. See which ads are paying: Meta Ad Library
The single most underused free tool in e-commerce. Go to Meta's Ad Library (facebook.com/ads/library), search the brand, and you see every active ad they run on Facebook and Instagram — creative, copy, and launch date.
- Age is the signal. An ad running for 3+ months is almost certainly profitable — nobody pays to lose money for a quarter. Study its hook, angle and offer.
- Count the variations. Ten versions of one ad = they're scaling it. One lonely ad = they're testing (or dying).
- Note what they DON'T advertise. Best sellers with zero ads often mean organic or repeat-purchase demand — a different lesson.
4. Estimate their size — honestly
You cannot see a store's revenue, and anyone selling you a precise number is guessing. You can build an honest bracket:
traffic (SimilarWeb) × conversion 1–3% × their AOV = revenue range
A store with ~50k monthly visits and a $60 average order is somewhere between $30k and $90k a month. That's a wide bracket — but it's honest, and it's enough to know whether you're studying a giant or a peer.
5. Read their app stack from the page source
Right-click → View Page Source on their home page, then search for names: klaviyo, judge.me, loox, rebuy, gorgias. Their app stack is their operations playbook: reviews app = they invest in social proof; Klaviyo = email revenue; subscription apps = they've solved retention. It also tells you what their pages carry — and why they might be slow.
6. Turn it into moves (or it was tourism)
- Price position: set yours deliberately against their architecture — don't discover you're 40% above the market by accident.
- Offer gaps: what do their product pages answer that yours don't? Copy the coverage, never the copy.
- Creative angles: their long-running ads are validated angles for your creatives — rebuild the pattern with your product, don't clone the ad.
- Re-check monthly. New products, price moves and fresh ad batches are how you see a competitor's strategy change in near real time.
The honest bottom line: competitor research is free and public — the cost is discipline. Doing this monthly across 3–5 competitors, keeping snapshots, and noticing changes is what separates research from tourism. It's also exactly the kind of repetitive watching that's better delegated than skipped.
Or get the whole report from one URL
Savva's X-Ray runs this entire playbook on any Shopify store you point it at — catalog, best sellers, active ads, honest revenue bracket — in about two minutes, and can re-check your competitors weekly so you see what changed. Free to try.
X-Ray a storeCommon questions
Is it legal to research competitor Shopify stores?
Everything here uses data the store publishes publicly: its pages, its catalog feed, ads in Meta's public Ad Library, code visible in any browser. That's ordinary competitive research. Not okay: scraping behind logins, copying photos and copy verbatim, or misrepresenting yourself to their support.
How can I see a Shopify store's best selling products?
Open any collection and add ?sort_by=best-selling to the URL. Combined with the public /products.json feed you can see what a store sells and what it sells most of — unless they've disabled these defaults.
Can I see how much revenue a Shopify store makes?
Not exactly — precise numbers are guesses. Build an honest range instead: estimated traffic × a typical 1–3% conversion rate × their average order value. Treat it as a bracket, not a fact.
How do I see what ads a competitor is running?
Meta's Ad Library is public and free: search the brand name to see every active Facebook and Instagram ad with launch dates. Ads running for months are almost certainly profitable — study those angles.