How to Find the Competitors of a Shopify Store

To find the competitors of a Shopify store, start with what its customers see: search Google for its best-selling products and note which other stores show up, and look up which brands advertise next to it. Then widen the net with data. Similar-store lists and a search filtered by the store's category, country and size give you dozens of candidates in minutes. The last step is cutting that list down to the stores that sell the same thing to the same buyer at a similar price.

What counts as a competitor

A competitor sells a product your customer would buy instead. That is narrower than "a store in the same category". A $300 cashmere sweater brand and a $25 fast-fashion store are both apparel, but they rarely lose sales to each other. Before you search, write down three things about the store you are starting from:

• What it sells, in the words a shopper would type, such as "linen bedding" rather than "home".
• Where it sells: the country or countries it ships to and the currency it prices in.
• What it charges: the typical price of its best sellers.

You'll use all three to judge candidates.

What you need

• The store's domain.
• A spreadsheet to collect candidates.
• Optional: an API key for a store data provider, if you want to do the data steps at scale.

Steps

1. List the store's best sellers and their prices.
2. Search Google for those products and record the other stores in the results.
3. Look up the store in the Meta Ad Library and note brands with similar ads.
4. Pull similar stores from a data source.
5. Run a filtered search for stores in the same category, country and size band.
6. Score every candidate on product, market and price, and keep the top ones.

Step 1: list the best sellers

Most Shopify stores let you sort a collection by best-selling. Open /collections/all?sort_by=best-selling on the store and write down the first ten products and their prices. The detailed method, and its limits, is in how to find the best-selling products of a Shopify store. These products are what the store wins on, so they define who it competes with.

Step 2: search for those products

Search Google for each best seller in plain shopper language, for example "organic cotton crib sheet" rather than the brand's product name. Use the Shopping tab too. Record every store that shows up on the first page and sells a similar product. Searching from the store's main market matters, because results change by country.

This is slow, but it finds the competitors that actually take clicks from the store, including ones that are not on Shopify.

Step 3: check the ad libraries

Brands that compete for the same customer often run similar ads. Search the store's name in the Meta Ad Library, look at the products and offers it promotes, and then search for those product terms in the library. The other advertisers that appear are competing for the same audience. How to see the ads a Shopify store is running covers this step in more detail.

Step 4: pull similar stores

Doing steps 2 and 3 by hand gives you depth on a few products. A data source gives you breadth. ShopLens returns similarShops on each store profile: the domains of the 5 to 10 stores most similar to it. The list is empty until the comparison has been computed for that store.

curl -s -H "Authorization: Bearer $SHOPLENS_API_KEY" \
  https://data.shoplens.dev/api/v1/shops/example-store.com \
  | jq '{category, countryCode, estimatedMonthlySales, similarShops}'

{
  "category": "HOME_DECOR",
  "countryCode": "US",
  "estimatedMonthlySales": { "value": "84000.00", "currency": "USD" },
  "similarShops": ["example-linen.com", "example-bedding.com", "example-home.com"]
}

Each domain in similarShops works with the same endpoint, so you can look each one up and repeat the step on the strongest matches. Two rounds usually produce 20 to 40 candidates. Each lookup costs one credit.

Step 5: run a filtered search

The profile from step 4 gives you the store's category, country and size. Use them as filters to find stores that the similarity list missed:

curl -s -G -H "Authorization: Bearer $SHOPLENS_API_KEY" \
  https://data.shoplens.dev/api/v1/shops \
  --data-urlencode "category=HOME_DECOR" \
  --data-urlencode "country=US" \
  --data-urlencode "q=linen" \
  --data-urlencode "minEstimatedMonthlySales=20000" \
  --data-urlencode "maxEstimatedMonthlySales=400000" \
  --data-urlencode "sort=estimatedMonthlySales" \
  --data-urlencode "limit=25"

Set the sales range to a band around the store you started from, such as a quarter of its estimate to five times it. Much smaller stores are rarely a threat, and much larger ones compete on different terms. The q parameter narrows by text. Search costs one credit per store returned. Keep in mind that sales figures are modeled estimates; how to estimate a Shopify store's sales explains how far to trust them.

Step 6: score and cut the list

Put every candidate in your spreadsheet with three scores from 0 to 2:

Keep the candidates that score 5 or 6 as direct competitors. Those that score 3 or 4 are worth watching. Drop the rest.

Reading the overlap

Once the list is scored, look at where the direct competitors overlap with the store you started from and where they don't. A competitor with the same best sellers at a lower price is a threat to watch closely. One with the same audience but a different catalog shows a product line the store could add.

Keeping the list current

A competitor list goes stale faster than people expect. New brands launch, others close or pivot, and a store you scored as a weak match adds the product line that makes it a direct rival. Two habits keep the list useful. Re-run the filtered search from step 5 every quarter with minCreatedAt set to the date of your last run, which returns only the stores created since then. And watch the direct competitors for changes, so a new collection or a price move reaches you the week it happens instead of the next time you do research.

Common mistakes

• Stopping at the category. Category labels are broad. Two stores in "apparel" can have nothing in common.
• Ignoring market. A UK store and a US store selling the same product rarely compete unless both ship internationally.
• Only listing big names. The store you start from often loses sales to brands of a similar size, not to the category leader.
• Doing it once. New stores open every month. Repeat step 5 every quarter, or set up alerts for the stores that matter, as in [how to track competitor prices on Shopify](/blog/track-competitor-prices-shopify).

How to check it worked

Take the top five competitors on your list and search Google for two of your store's best sellers. If most of those five show up in the results or in the ad library for the same products, your list reflects the real market. If none of them appear, go back to step 1 and describe the products the way a shopper would.