When researching competitors, one thing I often find useful is knowing which Shopify apps are powering a store.
For example, you might come across a store with a really good bundle, upsell, review widget, wishlist, or subscription experience and wonder: “Which app are they using for this?”
We built a free Shopify App Detector at Nexfal that lets you enter a Shopify store URL and check which apps it can detect.
It can be useful for:
- Competitor research
- Finding apps for specific store features
- Getting inspiration from successful Shopify stores
- Understanding how other stores are building their storefronts
I’d also love to know what other information Shopify merchants would find useful in a tool like this.
Hi @jay-raval Welcome To Shopify Community So Detecting theme name/version alongside the apps would add a lot of value, knowing whether a well-executed store is running Dawn heavily customized vs a premium theme changes how someone approaches replicating that look, apps alone don’t tell the full story of how a feature was actually built. Page speed/performance score comparison would be useful too, since it’s common to find a store with an impressive feature stack that’s actually running slow because of app bloat, that context helps merchants make a more informed decision about whether an app is worth the tradeoff rather than just knowing it exists. Hope this helps solve your problem, and if it does, don’t forget to like and mark it as the solution. Thank you!
Thanks for the feedback. Some of the points you mentioned are interesting, but they’re a bit outside the scope of this post. The main purpose of the tool is to detect Shopify apps used by a store, rather than analyze themes or performance.
Appreciate the suggestions nonetheless.
Hi @jay-raval So Fair enough, makes sense to keep the scope focused rather than trying to cover everything at once. Staying narrow and doing app detection really well is probably the better call anyway, easier for people to trust and rely on a tool that does one thing accurately than one that tries to be a full store-analysis suite.
Answering the actual question at the end of your post, what else would be useful in a tool like this, from the other side of the same problem. I crawl the App Store rather than storefronts, 10,870 live apps with full review history for 912 of them, so I see the half that detection cannot reach.
Detection tells a merchant which app is installed. What they do next is decide whether to install it themselves, and that is where the context is missing.
Is it still alive. Apps go dark quietly, and “this store uses it” is bad advice if the listing disappeared two months ago.
Is it good, or just big. 90.7% of all App Store reviews are 5 stars, so the star rating separates almost nothing. The signal is in the 1 and 2 star ones, and across 60,278 reviews, 19.2% of those are billing complaints, surprise charges and charges after uninstall. That is exactly the thing someone copying another store’s stack will not find out until month three.
What does it cost at this store’s size. Pricing tiers are what make a detected stack copyable or not.
How long has this store had it. An app installed last week is a much weaker recommendation than one that has been running for two years.
Detection plus “is this thing healthy” is a considerably stronger product than detection alone, and the second half is all public data.
(Disclosure: I build BestAppify, which is the App Store dataset side of this, so that is naturally the angle I would push.)