To stay competitive on Shopify, you need to be one step ahead of the competition, and the best way to do that is by keeping an eye on them. Competitive analysis is the professional way to say spying.

In other words, it’s when you look under the hood of your competitor’s Shopify stores to determine what they’re doing so that you can implement their strategies, learn from their mistakes and emulate their success. 

These days, there are excellent spy tools available for Shopify owners to analyze their competitors and receive vital performance insight. 

In this article, we’ll go over the top 5 Shopify spy tools, examine their best features and explain how you can use these tools to gain the upper hand and receive business insights like: 

  • What theme a competitor is using. 
  • What their best-selling products are.
  • What product variations they’re offering.
  • The amount of traffic they have coming to their stores.
  • Which vendors they’re sourcing products from.

competitive analysis

The 4 Best Shopify Spy Tools

CommerceInspector is one of the best Shopify spy tools available in 2022. The software allows users to view a ton of helpful information about their competitors, such as their best sellers, newest products, ad campaigns, and apps. CommerceInspector features a handy and easy-to-use extension for Google Chrome, displaying helpful dropshipping insights, info about your competitor’s digital and social ads, and more. The Chrome extension is free and handy, but consider investing in the premium membership to get the most out of the platform, starting from only $29 per month. 

Koala Inspector is an industry leader in Shopify spy tools. It provides valuable information such as competitor theme, product popularity, and competitor traffic. The platform also allows you to export products directly to your store, which makes it easy to ensure you have a great lineup of trending products in your inventory. You can also run successful paid ad campaigns directly from the Koala Inspector interface. While Koala Inspector’s free plan allows you to learn vital information about your competition, you’ll get the most use out of the premium plans, which start at $7 a month.

Xpareto is a free spy tool that serves to help business owners learn about a competitor’s rank, their best-selling products, what Facebook campaigns they’re presently running, and how much traffic they attract on a daily and monthly basis. Considering that there’s no charge for using this service, it’s a great place to start when conducting any sort of competitive analysis in 2022. 

Ecomhunt is a platform that every Shopify store owner should use on a daily basis. The platform allows users to track the hottest selling products on Shopify, features an artificial intelligence assistant to help you source products for the best prices, and can display your competitor’s Facebook (Meta) ads with a single click. Ecomhunt also allows users to automatically export top-selling products directly to their store, making a winning lineup of products super simple and straightforward. The cherry on top – the site’s completely free. 

Final Thoughts

To remain competitive in the Shopify market and generate the most revenue, you’ll need to know what your competitors are up to. 

Traditional competitive analysis requires a lot of work. Without spy tools, you would need to manually analyze competitors, create a comprehensive spreadsheet to safe keep information, determine the various types of competitors in your niche and conduct a situational assessment. Spy tools do the heavy lifting so that you can efficiently source the information you need without spending days or weeks researching. The tools above can help you get a leg up on the competition and establish yourself as a leader in your niche.