When you analyze a competitor’s Shopify store, you read someone else’s webshop like an open dashboard. A Shopify store leaks far more than its owner realizes: you can see the bestsellers, the full price list, which apps run underneath and how hard they are pushing ads. For the basics you need no monthly subscription, just a browser and a fixed sequence of steps.
This article hands you that sequence. Concrete, repeatable, in the order I walk through it myself on a fresh competitor. By the end you will know not only what a store sells, but what is working and what is a dead end.
Why reading a competitor’s Shopify store beats a product-research tool
A product-research tool shows you that a product exists. A competitor’s store shows you how someone makes money with it. That is a different level of intelligence.
Daan, who runs a portfolio of 8 impulse-gadget stores, never looks at a single product without reading the store around it. His reasoning: a product sitting in five generic stores tells you nothing, but a product that ranks top in a store with clean branding, four live ads and an upsell flow tells you somebody is serious about it. You only get that context from the store itself.
For the wider playbook on what you do with those products afterward, read finding winning products for dropshipping. Here I stay strictly on reading the competitor.
Technique 1: find the bestsellers through hidden Shopify URLs
The fastest trick first. Almost every Shopify store has collection URLs that sort by sales, even when they appear nowhere in the menu.
Paste these after the competitor’s domain:
/collections/all?sort_by=best-sellingshows the entire catalog in bestseller order/collections/all?sort_by=created-descendingshows the newest additions first
The first one reveals in five seconds which product carries the store. The second tells you what they recently started testing. Revisit a store a few weeks later with the created-descending sort and you see exactly which new products they added, and with the bestseller sort whether those new products are climbing.
Watch one pitfall. Some stores force their real bestseller to the top of a collection through manual sorting to steer the funnel. The best-selling parameter is more reliable than the homepage order, because it runs on actual sales data rather than what the owner wants to push.
Technique 2: pull the full catalog and inventory with /products.json
This is where it gets interesting. Behind every Shopify store sits a public JSON file with the complete product data. Paste /products.json after the domain and you get up to 250 products per page, with titles, variants, prices and often the creation date.
What you extract:
- The full price list without clicking through the site, including variants and compare-at prices (the struck-through “was” price)
- The product count, which tells you whether it is a one-product store or a broad catalog
- Creation dates for products, letting you reconstruct the competitor’s testing speed
Want to go past page 1? Append ?limit=250&page=2 to the URL. A store with 600 products and a cluster of creation dates from the past month is testing aggressively. A store with 12 products and old dates is an established, narrow player.
Emma, who sells beauty and skincare tools across the NL and BE markets, uses this technique to check competitors’ price positioning before she sets her own AOV around EUR49. She pulls the /products.json of three rivals, lines the prices up in a sheet and instantly sees whether she sits in the middle, the bottom or the premium corner.
One caveat: not every store leaves this endpoint open. Some themes or apps block it. If it fails, you fall back on technique 1.
Technique 3: read the price architecture and margin signals
A price list is data. The price architecture is insight. Look past the number to the structure.
Three things to watch:
- The spread between selling price and compare-at price. If everything reads “EUR59.95, was EUR119.95”, the store runs on the discount axis. That usually points to an impulse model with heavy ad spend.
- Bundles and volume discounts. A “buy 2, get 20% off” offer means the owner deliberately steers toward a higher order value. That is an AOV strategy.
- Free-shipping thresholds. Free shipping from an amount that sits just above the average product price means they are nudging customers toward a second item.
Noor, who runs print-on-demand wall art across two stores and earns from AOV and upsell, reads competitors on exactly these three points. Her own AOV sits around EUR31, so when she spots a POD rival lifting customers to EUR50-plus with bundles, she knows where her margin room is. With no inventory risk on POD, the price architecture is the whole game.
What you reconstruct here is their margin thinking. In Ecomtempo your own margins and COGS surface in the margins dashboard, so you can lay the price architecture you read off a competitor straight against your own contribution margin instead of guessing.
Technique 4: detect which Shopify apps run underneath
The apps a competitor uses give away their strategy. A store with a review app, an upsell app and a bundle app tells you they optimize for conversion and order value. A bare store with no apps is either a beginner or someone deliberately staying minimal.
How to see the apps without extra software:
- Open the page source (right-click, “View page source” or Ctrl+U) and use
Ctrl+Fto search for app names. Many apps leave recognizable traces likeloox,judge.me,klaviyo,rebuy,vitalsorrecharge. - Check the footer and the checkout for the widgets that appear. A review carousel, a “frequently bought together” block or a sticky add-to-cart point to specific apps.
- Browser extensions that reveal a site’s tech stack work too, but the page source is free and always available.
Tijmen, who sells padel gear across 4 EU languages, discovered this way that his strongest competitor leaned hard on an email app (Klaviyo). That confirmed his own bet: in this sports niche the money sits in the list you build during the low season, not in the one-off sale. He saw from the pop-up app and the signup incentive that the competitor was doing the same.
Watch the reasoning. It is not about the app as a gadget, it is about what the app’s presence says about the funnel. A recharge subscription app on a pet store means they are playing for repeat purchase. That is strategy, not coincidence.
Technique 5: read ad activity through the Facebook Ad Library
The store tells you what they sell. The ads tell you what they push, for how long, and with which angle. The Facebook Ad Library is the most important free tool for this.
You type in the competitor’s brand name and see every live ad: the creatives, the copy and how long an ad has been running. That runtime is the signal. An ad that has run for six weeks is almost certainly profitable, because nobody keeps a money-losing ad live that long. An angle running in ten variants at once is a proven winner they are stacking creative on.
The full workflow lives in Facebook Ad Library: finding winning products. For competitor analysis you watch specifically for:
- Number of live ads. Many at once points to serious spend and a scaling phase.
- Runtime of the oldest live ad. Long equals profitable equals worth studying.
- The angle and the creative. Which problem do they name, which video style do they use, what is the hook in the first three seconds.
Emma gets the most out of this. She runs 15 to 20 UGC videos a week of which roughly 80% flop, so every confirmed winning angle at a competitor saves her test budget. She copies no creative, she reads the pattern: which type of claim, which opening scene, which audience callout keeps running.
A warning against the copy reflex. A competitor running many ads does not mean the product still has room. A product that pops up everywhere in the Ad Library may already be past its peak. An angle that has run for months in dozens of variants often means the market already knows it, not that there is open room left. Read the runtime as confirmation that something works, not as an invitation to blind-copy the same product.
Technique 6: walk the funnel and upsell flow as a buyer
Data from URLs and the Ad Library takes you far, but you only feel the funnel by walking the path yourself. Add a product to the competitor’s cart and head toward checkout. Not to buy, but to see what happens.
What to watch:
- Cart upsells. Does an “add this” offer appear in the cart?
- Post-purchase offers. Some stores show a one-click upsell right after the first click to buy.
- Email capture. Do you get an abandoned-cart email within the hour? Then you know their retention flow is running, and what it looks like.
Lars, who runs premium pet across the EU with spend between EUR45,000 and EUR80,000 a month, deliberately steers for a low ROAS of 1.9 to 2.4 because his profit sits in LTV and repeat purchase, with an LTV/CAC around 3.8 and 35% repeat. He walks the funnel of premium competitors to see how they organize that repeat purchase: which post-purchase emails, which subscription nudge, which timing. You do not read that whole model from a product list, only by walking the flow yourself.
Technique 7: capture everything in a comparison template
Loose observations evaporate. A fixed template turns them into a weapon. Give each competitor a row in a sheet with these columns:
- Domain and niche
- Product count and creation-date pattern
- Top 3 bestsellers (from the
best-sellingURL) - Price range and AOV strategy (bundle, discount, threshold)
- Detected apps and what they say about the funnel
- Number of live ads and runtime of the oldest ad
- Funnel observations (upsell, email capture)
Walk this again every month for your three most important competitors. The value sits in the change over time. A competitor going from 200 to 350 products is scaling up. One halving its ads is pulling back. You only see that movement if you have a prior reading.
Sanne, who sells home and living with an AOV around EUR42 and a contribution margin near 48%, watched a competitor this way and saw from the funnel that they were playing for repeat purchase in the second month. That lined up exactly with where her own profit sits, and it confirmed her retention approach was right rather than a guess.
For the tooling side of this work, when manual reading no longer scales, the best product research tool for dropshipping gives you the options that take over the heavy analysis.
From analysis to your own numbers
Reading a competitor is half the job. The other half is knowing your own store as sharply as you now read someone else’s. That is where it often pinches: operators fixate on a competitor’s ROAS while they do not know their own true margin.
Ecomtempo crosses your Meta spend with your real Shopify orders, so you see true ROAS instead of the figure Meta reports for itself. On top of that the margins and COGS dashboard gives you the contribution margin per product, and with the Shopify import plus planner you drop a winning product you spotted at a competitor straight into your own store. Want to lay that alongside your competitor analysis? Start through get-started.
Conclusion
When you analyze a competitor’s Shopify store you spend no subscription and no half-day. With the bestseller URLs, the /products.json endpoint, the page source for apps and the Facebook Ad Library you read in half an hour what someone sells, at what price, with which apps and how aggressively. Capture it in a template, repeat it monthly, and you see not just the snapshot but the direction. Combine that with a sharp view of your own margins and you turn from someone who guesses into someone who acts on patterns.
Frequently asked questions
Is it legal to view a competitor’s /products.json?
Yes. It is a public endpoint that Shopify exposes by default for the store itself. You read publicly accessible data, you break into nothing. Copying protected text, photos or brand names is a different story and you should not do it.
How do I know for sure a store runs on Shopify?
Check the page source for cdn.shopify.com or try a typical Shopify URL like /cart or /collections/all. If those work and you see the Shopify CDN references, the store almost certainly runs on Shopify.
What if /products.json and the collection URLs are blocked?
Some stores shield these endpoints with apps or custom themes. Then you fall back on the Facebook Ad Library for ad activity, the page source for the tech stack and walking the funnel by hand. Together those still give you a complete picture.
How often should I re-analyze a competitor?
For your three most important competitors, monthly. The value sits in the change: new products, altered prices, more or fewer ads. A one-off analysis is a photo, a monthly one is a film.
Does heavy ad activity mean a product is worth it?
Not automatically. Many ads show interest, but a product that pops up everywhere may already be saturated. Use the runtime of the oldest live ad as a quality signal: an angle running for months proves it works, while a product surfacing in dozens of stores at once is often past its peak instead.