Shopify spy tools encompass software and services that help a business find out what its competitors’ stores have on offer. The tools offer useful information and intelligence on different elements of the competitors’ stores – such as the products, the price point strategies, marketing endeavors, and performances. Therefore, businesses are provided with data about the strategies of the competitors, which helps in making informed choices, optimizing their operations, and outperforming competitors in the marketplace.
Discover fundamentals and the list of 10+ best Shopify spy tools in the article below.
Contents
Shopify Spy Tools: What Are They?
Although owning a name may sound a little bit shady to hear, actually, Shopify spy tools are a business intelligence tool that is commonly used among eCommerce businesses. You could use questionnaires, research, demography, and so on to obtain customer insights, but when it comes to the competition’s approach, you will have to explore some alternative sources of information.
Waiting to read their reports on some media platforms or radio and television would not do. Neither would it be advisable to conduct direct surveys or research on their stores because, well, in fact, everyone in this marketplace is each other’s competitors.
And then comes the Shopify spy tools that definitely live up to the name.
You can get to know the strategy used by other Shopify sites. They allow you to view such details as sales, revenue generated, products listed, best-sellers, themes, apps, traffic flow, and many other useful metrics. This provides you with an opportunity to assess whether or not a given shop is profitable. It follows that if it appeals to you, you could learn from it to replicate what looks successful, and in case it isn’t attractive, it would enable you to avoid committing its mistakes.
The more information you gain on your competitors, the better informed it becomes for you, and the better decision-maker you could be. Thus, those tools enable you to remain competitive within the industry.
Why You Should Spy on Shopify?
When saying spying sounds like an ethical issue, but if saying competitor research, it’s more familiar to us in doing research. Let’s go through some reasons why we should do this action:
- Follow the Market Trends: By recognizing strategies and performance from your competitors, you can get many insights of the market trends and have a better plan to take this trend to grow your business.
- Enhance Your Marketing Strategy: Understand your competitors and then come up with better strategies to gain your customers.
- Boost Customer Experience: Learning from your competitors to serve your customers the best, giving them a good customer experience. In return, it increases customer satisfaction, and loyalty, which brings a huge opportunity for you to achieve sustainable growth.
Best Shopify Spy Tools – Free & Paid
Check out the collection of best Shopify spy tools both free and paid to do competitor research and gain competitors’ insight:
Best Shopify Spy Tools – Free
Shopify Spy
Shopify Spy is an analytic, free-of-charge scraper of Shopify shops. That shows you the top Shopify stores, their locations, the number of listed items, and the average selling price for a certain product.
This means that you can easily extract valuable insights and product listings from your competitors using Shopify Spy. Data can then be saved in CSV format and opened in Excel for more detailed analyses. This process is fast and detailed, which enables store owners to have access to all product listing fields.
Its multipurpose nature makes it ideal for use by various types of users, and it can be downloaded from Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge, thus allowing users to operate within their convenience range.
In addition, the theme and app suggestions as well as niche tools can also provide you with product ideas.
Key features
- Product Scraper: Through Shopify Spy, one can scrape off the entire product listing from a specific store such as product titles, descriptions, pricing, SKUs, categories, and images among many others.
- CSV Export: Those scraped data can also be saved in CSV format, which one can open in Excel for statistical analysis. It also ensures the data is easily sorted, filtered, and analyzed by various techniques.
- Competitor Analysis: You can scrutinize what your competitors are offering out there, their prices as well and other marketing strategies they employ.
Cons
- It may lack extensive information coverage for all Shopify outlets.
- Limited data accuracy
Xpareto
Xpareto is one of the best free Shopify spy tools. This tool is just a web page with a table for daily traffic, ratings, sales hit of the day, and Facebook ad campaigns.
Xpareto enables users to see what their competitor’s top-selling products are, in order to understand exactly how they came about their strategy. The information displayed is simple to access for users as they just follow several easy steps with this tool. Therefore, you get an opportunity to look directly into other stores’ business models.
Key features
- Cost-efficiency: As a browser-based Shopify spy tool, Xpareto is an excellent choice for businesses because it is cheaper compared to other service providers that charge monthly rates.
- Compatibility: It can be accessed from several web browsers and is more compatible with different operating systems.
- Accurate: Cover data of more than 28,000 stores.
- Easy to use: Scroll through to browse the list, and use keywords or URL to find a specific Shopify store.
Cons
- Limited functionality & data, since it is only available as a website
UUSPY
UUSPY – another free Shopify spy tool and Shopify store analyzer available for download as an extension of Google’s Chrome browser. It is used by eCommerce merchants to look into and track competition sales strategies. This will help you identify the top sellers in your competitors, main selling points, and daily sales volumes.
Furthermore, you can keep tabs on how other companies’ sales are performing and also what their current order statuses are.
Key features
- Real-Time Tracking: You can get a sense of how frequently orders are coming in by seeing which orders are being placed in real-time.
- Bestsellers Insights: It allows you to see what are the competitors’ bestsellers and hottest categories, as well as the volume of daily sales.
Cons
- Does not provide paid upgrade options, hence limited functionality.
- Lack of customer support
Shopify Raise
Another option for a Shopify spy tool free is Shopify Raise, which is also available as a free Google Chrome extension. Shopify Raise can be exploited in reviewing one’s competitors and also unscrambling what makes them successful.
You will get a detailed report on the store analysis, products, live sales, reviews, apps, and more with this Shopify store analyzer and Shopify scraper. In case there are products that you wish to incorporate into your store, simply export the product to a CSV file which can then be directly uploaded to your store.
Read more: 10+ Best Shopify Review Apps To Increase Trust & Credibility
Key features
- Product Tag Analysis: You can find information about how your competitors tag their products. This feature is very convenient for file categorization and structuring.
- Export Products: Export & save data in CSV file format. Subsequently, you can upload that directly into your Shopify store.
Cons
- Lack of Shopify theme detector
Best Spy Tools for Shopify – Paid
Koala Inspector
Koala Inspector is one of the best Shopify spy tools, a Google Chrome extension used by eCommerce store owners to conduct real-time competitor analysis on stores and their products. This particular extension depicts a store’s layout, traffic sources, and adverts, among other things.
You will also be able to view multiple suppliers that sell specific products on any Shopify store using Koala Inspector. It offers product research engines, competitor comparison dashboards, and data extraction functionalities.
It is suitable for all dropshippers and Shopify store owners in every product niche. By tracking competitors’ pricing strategies, new products, promotions, and advertisements among others, a business can remain one step ahead of other enterprises competing with it in the marketplace.
Key features
- Free Plan: As its provider said, the free plan is ”free for a lifetime” and it includes all of the features except shop tracking.
- Full-suite Solution: Since it combines all the required data on one platform, merchants can use Koala Inspector as an integrated Shopify store analyzer, which eliminates the necessity to integrate other apps or extensions.
- 24/7 Customer Support: This Shopify spy tool has 24/7 customer support, which gives you a hand where it is needed most to increase your shop’s performance in the best way possible.
Cons
- A limited number of features in the free version
- Free trial only available for paid plans
- Competitor information may not always be accurate or current
Pricing plan
3 days free trial for all paid plans
- Free
- Professional: $7.99/month
- Unlimited: $19.99/month
BuiltWith
BuiltWith is a search engine that searches for unique keywords or phrases on the homepage of the sites and then categorizes them according to the technology used, locations, traffic ranks, and the amount spent by the individual web technologies. Through the use of a tool called BuiltWith Pro, users are allowed to generate customized lead lists based on filtered retail data of over ten million online stores.
This Shopify spy tool may also be used for peeking through the backdoor of the website, exploring your competitors’ optimization tricks geared towards increasing their sales conversion store. This result will point out all the tools and apps used on the site. Here, what matters is that you can copy it better than the original and increase your website conversion.
Key features
- Comprehensive Data Coverage: Data of an estimated 2 million eCommerce sites, categorized on their usage of an eCommerce-related cart or evidence of a custom cart in use
- Meta Data: The process of exporting all metadata related to a report with Excel or CSV allowed it.
- Report Filtering: Allows users to filter their report by technological budgets, geographic location, or type of currency used in certain regions, and generate leads lists through particular state and zip codes.
- Cyber-risk Audit
Cons
- High pricing plan that may not be affordable for small businesses
- Free trial is not available
Pricing plan
- Basic: $295/month
- Pro: $495/month
- Team: $995/month
Shine Commerce
Shine Commerce is one of the downloadable Shopify spy tools that includes extensions and an online app, a dropshipping website full of helpful info.
Formerly known as Commerce Inspector, its free plan is available as a Chrome extension, which shows the best-selling products, recent product releases, and apps used by any Shopify store. This Shopify spy tool’s paid plan offers users data on sales, monthly store visitors and traffic insights, and product launching timeline.
You can use it to peek at your competitors’ advertisement campaigns and popular stores. Businesses would be able to make decisions such as which apps to use to increase efficiency.
Key features
- Chrome Extension: A free Google Chrome extension can be used for simple Shopify store analytics
- Comprehensive Tracking: Shows complete traceability of your competitors including product catalogs, web traffic, ad creatives, product sales, and even price changes
- Search by Product: Keeps track of stores and products and can peep at almost whichever store metric you may need
Cons
- Free Chrome extension has few features.
- Smaller stores may find the paid options beyond their budget
- No tutorial available
Pricing plan
- Starter: $99/month
- Growth: $199/month
- Pro: $499/month
- Enterprise: Contact for Pricing
PPSPY
PPSPY is an AI-based product research tool for Shopify stores. As a Shopify spy tool, it enables tracking sales of Shopify stores, viewing the latest products released by a store, its ad channels, any tags, and the store’s theme.
This will help you keep track of live sales as well as examine the way your competitors boost their sales. You will also be able to download and export Shopify reviews to import directly into your Shopify shop.
Key features
- Detailed Analysis: PPSPY provides a wide array of data, such as detecting Facebook and TikTok ad pixels, among others.
- Downloadable Shopify Reviews: Allows you to import Shopify reviews from your competitor’s product into your store.
- One-product Store: Look for one-product shops on Shopify. It is an excellent way of coming up with dropshipping store ideas.
Cons
- Ad campaign detection is absent
Pricing plan
- Basic: $19.9/month
- Advanced: $39.9/month
- Unlimited: $99/month
- Enterprise: $299/month
Ahrefs
Ahrefs, as one of the best spy tools for Shopify, actively crawls search engines and websites for data, subsequently providing you with tools that enable the discovery of popular Google and other search engine queries.
Ahrefs equips you with the power to effortlessly perform competitor analysis and conduct keyword research, simplifying the process of enhancing your dropshipping website’s search engine rankings and attracting a higher volume of organic traffic in turn.
Furthermore, through Ahrefs’ capabilities, tracking site performance over time and identifying new content opportunities become easily achievable tasks.
Key features
- Analyze Backlinks: Uncover the strategies your competitors employ for their backlinks.
- Link Building: Check any broken links, ascertain the domain rating, and inspect the top 100 backlinks for any website.
- Site Audit: Conduct a comprehensive website audit to identify any potential SEO issues.
Cons
- No free trial available
- Does not provide search intent data
Pricing plan
- Lite: $129/month
- Standard: $249/month
- Advanced: $449/month
- Enterprise: $14,990/month
Ali Hunter
Ali Hunter is an extension provided to eCommerce store owners that enables them to search for AliExpress suppliers and goods. This combines a collection of beneficial shopping spying capabilities in a single place – like supplier search tools, item research tools, and price assessment.
Additionally, it is possible to locate top products with reviews that are in order using the tool. It helps to make sure that you have enough stock for your clients, thus maintaining their satisfaction.
Key features
- All-in-one Solution: You no longer have to change apps or extensions to perform competitive analysis.
- Price History: Displays top and bottom prices in terms of profit during three to six months, which helps to determine the best selling price.
Cons
- Only works with AliExpress
Pricing plan
- Free
- Basic: $29.9/month
- Advanced: $79.9/month
- Premium: $149.9/month
How to Choose a Shopify Spy Tool
Here are some factors you can consider before choosing a Shopify spy tool to better understand your competitors:
- Include a Comprehensive Analytics Report
- Have A Reasonable Cost and Plans
- Include a Chrome Extension
- Offer Free Trials Before Payment
- Have an Intuitive & Navigable Interface
- Provide Dedicated Support
Final Thoughts
After all, Shopify spy tools are an indispensable resource for eCommerce businesses seeking to win over competitors and raise sales at Shopify. The tools are vital for helping businesses understand what competitors are doing and what kinds of products and market trends are emerging as well as providing useful suggestions for improving business strategies based on what they learn.
Most of the Shopify spy tools listed above give you basic functions even with those that are only available as websites or extensions. The paid tools do the work with abilities that go beyond just a spy tool.
Lastly, BSS Shopify Commerce provides an entire set of Shopify apps, themes, and services that businesses can use on Shopify and easily make sense of the world through data-based intuition.
Other Shopify setups to help you manage your store and boost sales:
- Mastering Shopify Inventory Management
- Best Shopify Review Apps Worth Trying
- Shopify Product Variants
- Pre-Orders on Shopify
- Shopify Countdown Timer
- Shopify Invoice Generator
