You land on a Shopify store that looks like it's crushing it: ads everywhere, hundreds of reviews, new products every week. The obvious question: how much does it really sell, and with which theme, apps, ads and emails? Good news: a Shopify store leaks a huge amount of public information. Here is the full method in 7 steps, first with free techniques, then with the tools that save you hours.
Is it legal to spy on a Shopify store?
Yes, as long as you stick to public data. Viewing a page's source code, browsing Meta's Ad Library, subscribing to a newsletter or buying a product: none of that is off-limits. It's competitive research, exactly what big brands do with dedicated teams.
The line is somewhere else: you may not republish what belongs to your competitor. Their photos, product copy, logo and brand are protected, and copying them exposes you to infringement claims. Ideas, marketing angles, prices and strategies, on the other hand, can't be owned. You can download visuals to study them; you can't reuse them as they are.
Step 1: confirm the site runs on Shopify
First, make sure you're actually looking at a Shopify store, otherwise the techniques below won't work. Three checks take ten seconds:
- The source code. Right-click the page, choose "View page source", then search for
cdn.shopify.com. If it appears, it's Shopify. - The admin URL. Add
/adminafter the domain: a Shopify store redirects you to a Shopify login page. - An extension. Wappalyzer or the free TrendTrack Chrome extension show the platform in one click, along with much more.
Step 2: identify its theme and apps
Still in the source code, search for Shopify.theme. You get a small block of data with two fields worth your attention: name, the name the merchant gave the theme, and schema_name, the original theme name. That second field is gold, because many merchants rename their theme to cover their tracks, yet the original name stays visible. If theme_store_id holds a number, the theme comes from the official Theme Store.
For apps, look at the scripts the page loads: Klaviyo for email, Judge.me or Loox for reviews, Rebuy for upsells, Recharge for subscriptions. Extensions such as Wappalyzer, Koala Inspector or TrendTrack detect them automatically.
Why does this matter? Because the app stack reveals the conversion strategy. A store combining photo reviews, bundles and post-purchase upsells is working its average order value. A store with a subscription module is betting on repeat purchases. You read the strategy without anyone explaining it.
Step 3: find its best-sellers and new products
This is where Shopify gets really talkative. Three standard URLs, available on most stores, are all you need:
/collections/all?sort_by=best-sellingshows the catalogue sorted by best sellers, based on the sales data Shopify records. It's one of the most revealing free signals./products.jsonreturns the product list with prices, variants and above all the creation date. Some stores block this address, but many leave it open./sitemap.xmlleads tositemap_products_1.xml, which lists every product with its last-modified date. Perfect for spotting what was just added.
The real signal comes from combining them: a recently added product already sitting among the best sellers is a product taking off. That's exactly what you're looking for.
Step 4: estimate its sales and traffic
The best-known free technique relies on order numbers. Shopify assigns them sequentially. If you place one order on the 1st of the month and another on the 1st of the following month, the gap between the two numbers tells you how many orders were placed in between. Multiply by the average basket you observe and you get a ballpark monthly revenue figure.
The method has limits: it costs two purchases, some merchants add a prefix or change the starting number, and it says nothing about profitability. Pick the cheapest product and treat the result as an estimate, not an exact figure.
For traffic, the free version of Similarweb gives a rough idea for large stores but becomes useless below a few tens of thousands of monthly visits, which covers most of the stores you'll care about.
This is where tools make the difference: TrendTrack estimates revenue and traffic for more than 5 million Shopify stores, with growth history, without you having to buy anything.
Step 5: analyse its ads
Meta's Ad Library is free and open to everyone. Search the brand's Facebook page and you see all its active ads, their launch dates and their variations. For ads delivered in the European Union, the EU Digital Services Act also requires reach information to be shown. For TikTok, the Commercial Content Library plays the same role for ads shown in Europe.
Three things to read:
- Age. An ad running for more than 30 days is very likely profitable. Nobody pays for long to run a creative that loses money.
- Variations. Several versions of the same creative launched together signal an active test, so a product the brand is investing in.
- The landing page. Click through: you'll find the exact offer pushed in ads, often different from the homepage.
The limit of Meta's library is that it works brand by brand, with no consolidated view of budgets. TrendTrack aggregates EU and UK transparency data to show ad spend and reach per brand, with history, and lets you filter an entire niche rather than a single store.
Step 6: dissect its email marketing
Email is often a store's most profitable channel, and its least visible. To see it, create an address dedicated to research, sign up to the newsletter, add a product to the cart and abandon it. Within two or three weeks you'll receive the welcome sequence, the abandoned-cart reminders, the promotion cadence and the brand's tone of voice.
The limit is obvious: you only see emails sent after you sign up, and one brand at a time. TrendTrack archives email campaigns from many brands, giving you their full history from day one.
Step 7: put the store under surveillance
A one-off analysis ages fast. What really matters are the changes: a new product, a jump in ad budget, a new sales page, an unusual promotion. For free, a Google Alert on the brand name and a page-monitoring tool like Visualping on the "new arrivals" collection will do. With TrendTrack, the Brand Tracker alerts you automatically whenever a tracked brand launches something.
Analyse any Shopify store in one click
Free methods or a tool: which to choose?
Not everything deserves a subscription. Here is what's genuinely enough for each need:
- Confirm Shopify, the theme and the apps — source code or free extension Free
- See best-sellers and new arrivals — standard Shopify URLs Free
- List the active ads of one specific brand — Meta Ad Library Free
- Estimate revenue without buying anything — 5M+ stores analysed TrendTrack
- Know the real ad budget per brand — consolidated spend and reach, with history TrendTrack
- Read competitors' email history — campaigns archived before you signed up TrendTrack
- Monitor 20 competitors or a whole niche — automatic alerts TrendTrack
The rule is simple: if you analyse a store now and then, the free methods are plenty. If you follow several competitors every week, the tool pays for itself in time saved. To compare options, see our ranking of the best e-commerce spy tool.
The 15-minute analysis routine
All these steps look long on paper. In practice, once the method is second nature, a store takes a quarter of an hour. Here is the routine we use, minute by minute:
- Minutes 0 to 2: technical identity. Extension open on the homepage: platform, original theme, installed apps. Note anything unusual straight away, such as a subscription app or a bundle module.
- Minutes 2 to 5: catalogue. Sort by best-selling, then glance at creation dates. Write down the top three products and check whether they're new or long established.
- Minutes 5 to 9: ads. Meta Ad Library on the brand name. Mentally rank creatives by age and click the two oldest to see their landing pages.
- Minutes 9 to 12: offer. On the landing page, note the price, the main promise, the guarantee, the bundles on offer and the upsell that appears after add-to-cart.
- Minutes 12 to 15: summary. Write the sheet: what works for them, why you think so, and the test you'll run. If the store is worth it, subscribe to its newsletter and put it under surveillance.
Repeat the exercise on three or four competitors in the same niche and the common threads emerge on their own: a recurring price point, the same kind of guarantee, a creative format that shows up everywhere. These constants are worth far more than a single winning product, because they describe what your market expects.
The mistakes that turn research into wasted time
- Copying product pages. Beyond the legal risk, Google detects duplicate content and your page will rank behind the original.
- Analysing a single store. One competitor can be an outlier. Three or four stores doing the same thing is a trend.
- Confusing visibility with profitability. Lots of ads doesn't mean lots of profit. Campaign age is a far better indicator than campaign count.
- Collecting without deciding. End each analysis with a short sheet: three takeaways and one concrete test to run on your own store. Otherwise research remains curiosity.
In short
Spying on a Shopify store starts for free: source code for the theme and apps, standard URLs for best-sellers, Meta's library for ads, a newsletter signup for emails. These techniques are enough for a one-off analysis.
When you need to estimate sales without buying anything, see real ad budgets or follow several competitors over time, a tool like TrendTrack does in seconds what would take hours by hand. Start with the free extension, and read our full TrendTrack review if you're considering the platform.