The key to successful competitor research is knowing how to find Shopify stores within your niche. But why is that?
You see, competitor research is a crucial process in starting an online business. If you master this skill, you’ll save yourself time, money, and effort in knowing your customers' preferences in your niche. They may be your competitors, but during your startup years, they will be a huge source of learning regarding various e-commerce and marketing strategies to help your business succeed.
Moreover, knowing how to effectively find niche-specific Shopify stores will also be very beneficial if you are an ecommerce content creator as you will be able to give relevant examples to your readers.
So whether you’re a content creator or a Shopify entrepreneur, here are the methods that you can use to discover awesome Shopify stores. Let’s get started!
How To Find Stores On Shopify? [Large List]
There are various ways to find Shopify stores. And the method that you need to use depends on your requirements:
- Are you looking to discover Shopify stores in a specific niche?
- Or do you want to find a large list of Shopify stores regardless of niche?
In this article, we’ll teach you some powerful hacks on both requirements above. So be sure to bookmark this article so you can always get back to it in the future.
Let’s start with the methods of finding Shopify stores in bulk.
BuiltWith
The first and most straightforward way to discover Shopify stores in bulk is by using BuiltWith’s rich list of Shopify stores.
This website does not only provide a list of online stores that are using Shopify. Instead, it also provides important statistics that you might find very useful.
Moreover, BuiltWith also allows users like you to find Shopify stores in specific countries. So if you are looking for US-based Shopify stores, you can simply click the United States in the list of countries and you’ll be presented with a list of stores in the United States.
As you can see in the image below, BuiltWith has more than 2.7 million stores in its database. And we think that’s more than enough for market research.
You also have the option to download the full list. The only caveat is that you must have an account to do it. And a BuiltWith account can be very hefty:
But here’s the thing: you don’t even have to subscribe to a BuiltWith account to benefit from it. You can maximize the information that you can find in its free access.
If you scroll down its general list, you can find Shopify stores that are sorted based on all states of the US. Combine it with some elbow grease and you’ll find a store that suits your research requirements.
Furthermore, you can discover Shopify stores based on the complementary technologies that they use:
This can be useful if you are planning to grow a brand and want to see what other brands in your niche are using alongside their Shopify stores.
Furthermore, BuiltWith has more organized data under Shopify Special Reports. Here, you can discover Shopify Plus stores, B2B stores, those that ship only to specific countries, those that use discount codes, and more.
You can even find a list of stores that only have 10 products or those that have 10,000 products in their store, and everything in between.
Lastly, BuiltWith has sorted its massive list of Shopify stores into various ecommerce categories. Thus, you don’t have to go through the hassle of manually searching just to find your competitors. Simply choose a category and discover online marketplaces in your niche.
WooRank + DataBravo
Like BuiltWith, Woorank + DataBravo is like a website search engine.
However, with only 600,000+ Shopify stores in their database, Data Bravo has significantly fewer websites in their list.
Be that as it may, it would suffice as most top-ranking Shopify stores in every niche are also probably included therein. As such, it’s more than enough for competitor research.
Moreover, if you choose to use DataBravo in its full version, you get to enjoy significantly lower monthly payments compared to BuiltWith.
Furthermore, DataBravo has a more user-friendly and straightforward interface as you can narrow down your search results based on Country, Technology, URL, and Keyword.
The good thing about Data Bravo is that you still get useful results (20 results) despite using only a free account.
To maximize the results from this search engine using a free account, we recommend that you only fill in the Country, Technology (input Shopify to specify the stores), and Keyword.
Regarding keywords, you can experiment with various terms used in your niche. For example, if you are in the clothing business, you can use related terms such as:
- Apparel
- Women’s Clothing
- Men’s Clothing
- Fashion
- And more.
As you can see in the two images below, the search engine returned different results for the keywords “fashion” and “clothing”.
Thus, if you are creative enough with your keywords, you’ll still find valuable information with a free account.
You might want to read more:
Myip.ms
Myip.ms is yet another website search engine that will help you find Shopify stores in bulk. This will be the best tool to use if you want to find Shopify stores that are doing great in their niche.
That’s because with Myip.ms, you can specify the number of visitors per day to the Shopify stores that you are looking for.
Here’s how to find Shopify stores using Myip.ms:
- Set the Web Server Location to Canada (setting this to other countries won’t return any results for Shopify stores)
- Select Shopify, Inc. on IP Owner/Parent IP Owner/Hosting
- Set the range of visitors that you prefer under Popularity. For this example, we set it to 5k - 20k visitors per day to get results that include medium-sized Shopify stores as well as large brands. We recommend that you start your search using this parameter. But you can also set a different range if you want to
- Set higher daily visits if you want to find large Shopify brands
- Set lower daily visits if you want to discover Shopify stores that are just starting out
With these settings in place, we could pull up more than 600 resulting Shopify stores. And unlike BuiltWith and DataBravo, you don’t have to pay for any subscription. You get full access to the list of Shopify stores that you can find.
Moreover, you can find almost 700,000 Shopify stores using this method without being too specific on the daily visits. However, we recommend setting the daily visits to narrow down the results.
There are a few things that are lacking from Myip.ms:
- You cannot filter the results based on the country where the stores are operating.
- You cannot find Shopify stores based on specific categories
As such, Myip.ms provides unsorted and uncategorized results. The best filtering you get is the Popularity. Be that as it may, you get full access to their list for free. And that, in itself, is a great deal if you ask us.
Now that we’re done with the methods of finding Shopify stores in general, we’ll talk about how to find Shopify stores in your specific niche in the next section.
How To Find A Shopify Store In Your Specific Niche?
If you are looking for specificity in your research, try these three methods to find Shopify stores based on the industry.
Store Leads
Store Leads is one of the websites that we often visit when writing articles like this or when looking for facts based on real-time data.
Although there is a monthly subscription to access all of their data, most users will find lots of valuable information with free access.
With this free access, you can find statistics from more than 100 ecommerce platforms and more than 12 million active stores across all platforms worldwide.
Of course, this big data includes giants such as Shopify, WooCommerce, Wix, and more.
Regarding Shopify, most users will find their list extremely detailed as it not only provides superficial information. Instead, they analyze Shopify stores at a larger scale to identify crucial information such as:
- Social media usage on Shopify stores
- Top apps used on Shopify stores
- Top countries for Shopify stores
- Shopify growth in various aspects
- And more.
Most importantly, they have information on the top categories of Shopify stores and the top stores in each category.
If you look at the image below, you’ll see that Apparel is the leading category in Shopify as there are more than 500k live stores as of this writing.
If we click on the Apparel category, we’ll be redirected to a page where Store Leads further analyzes data for this specific category.
Scroll further down and you’ll be able to find Shopify stores for this category – both seasoned and newly launched stores.
If you are trying to find Shopify stores in specific categories under Apparel, you’ll be able to do that by searching the subcategories.
Let’s look at the Children’s clothing subcategory and see the Shopify stores under that.
Here you go. We now have a list of the top-ranking stores worldwide and the top newly-launched stores under the Children’s clothing category.
If you want to find data (regarding Shopify stores) that is organized so that you can make them useful to your business research, Store Leads is undoubtedly one of the best websites that will help you do that – for free.
Search Other Blogs On Google
When researching, remember that the world’s most powerful search engine is always within your reach. (And it’s most likely the reason why you found this article).
Now, there are two ways how to find Shopify stores on Google:
Use Google search operators such as allinurl, intext, or intitle, and more
But let’s be honest, Google search operators can be a pain in the bottom to use. Especially when you have no prior idea of how to use them. Additionally, they return search results that are sometimes not helpful for a rudimentary task such as finding a list of Shopify stores.
Hence, the second option:
Search existing blogs about top Shopify stores.
This is the easiest, most straightforward way to find Shopify stores. Because other content creators have already spent the time curating their list of Shopify stores.
All you have to do is find their blogs and, poof!, you have a list.
In the example below, we just search for the “top Shopify jewelry stores,” and Google itself provides a list of top Shopify jewelers in its database.
But if that’s not enough, you can scroll down to see the list of blogs with the same content that satisfies your search.
Just like that, you’ve found Shopify stores for your specific niche! Thank goodness for Google!
Shopify Plus Customer Stories
To top off this list, we have Shopify Plus’ customer stories. Here, you’ll find Shopify stores that have reached a certain level of success.
And if you ask us, this is a great place to look for brands in your category and draw inspiration from them.
Simply select the industry, and you’ll find several brands that are using Shopify Plus.
After selecting a brand, you can read case studies about them that will teach you how to solve problems of similar nature in the future. And since these are well-known brands, you can head to their website and learn a thing or two about how they manage their ecommerce business.
More Success Stories From Shopify
If Shopify Plus brands are a bit too far-fetched in your current situation, perhaps looking for medium-sized businesses is the best way to go. That way, you get to set realistic expectations for your startup.
You can head on to Shopify Success Stories to find small to medium-sized Shopify stores.
Simply choose a category, and you’ll find successful Shopify stores in that niche.
Choose a brand, and you’ll be redirected to an article in which Shopify store owners talk about their brand. They talk about how they managed to get their first online sales, and the tools they use, and they also have some golden advice for new Shopify store owners.
Bonus: Know The Themes Your Competitors Are Using
You'll stumble upon those with exceptional web designs after finding the Shopify stores for your market research. And you might wonder what theme they are using. Well, you don’t have to guess.
We have a tool called Shopify Theme Detector By PageFly.
Our tool will help you identify the theme of an online store by analyzing the web page source code. And with just a click, you’ll know the secret behind their spectacular design.
Conclusion
There you have it! You now know how to find Shopify stores like a real expert. Now that you have this knowledge, you can execute your market research to draw inspiration from other successful Shopify stores.
For sure, you’ll stumble upon unique stores throughout your research. Some will leave you in awe with the sheer beauty of their web designs – make sure to bookmark those as they might come in handy in the future.
And of course, make sure to bookmark this article as well so you don’t have to scour the internet again in searching for Shopify stores.
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