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Guide · free method
How to check what a competitor’s Shopify store changed this week
Everything you need is on public pages. Here is the ten-minute routine — what to look at, in what order, and what to record so that next week’s check takes two minutes instead of ten.
Why the weekly diff is the whole point
Looking at a rival’s storefront once tells you what they sell. Looking at it on a schedule tells you what they are doing — and that is the part you can act on. A price that has been $48 for a year is context. A price that was $48 last Tuesday and is $39 today is a decision someone made this week, usually for a reason, and usually with a campaign behind it.
So the unit of useful competitive research is not the snapshot. It is the difference between two snapshots. Everything below is organised around producing that difference cheaply.
What actually changes, and where to see it
| What to watch | Where it is visible | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| New products | /collections/all?sort_by=created-descending | Shows where they are betting next, weeks before they promote it |
| Price cuts | Product pages, or the price field in the public JSON | The change most likely to cost you a sale this week |
| Sales and markdowns | A compare_at_price above the live price | Tells you a discount is running even when nothing on the page says “sale” |
| Promo messaging | Announcement bar and homepage hero | Their current offer, in their own words — the thing to answer |
| Catalogue size | Product count on the all-products collection | Expansion or a quiet cull; both are signals |
| Out of stock | Sold-out badges on their bestsellers | The cheapest win available: demand with nowhere to go right now |
The ten-minute routine
- Open their newest products first. Add /collections/all?sort_by=created-descending to their domain. The first row is what they launched most recently. If you recognise everything, nothing shipped since your last check — that is a valid result and it took fifteen seconds.
- Pull the catalogue as data. Most Shopify storefronts serve /products.json?limit=250 publicly. It gives you titles, variants, prices and compare_at_price in one page, which is far faster to scan than clicking products. If it 404s, the merchant has turned it off — use step 1 instead.
- Check for markdowns, not just prices. A variant where compare_at_price is higher than price is on sale right now. This catches discounts that never appear in a banner.
- Read the homepage like a customer. The announcement bar and the hero carry the current offer. Copy the exact wording; you are going to answer it, and answering the real sentence beats answering your memory of it.
- Note the product count. The all-products collection shows how many items are live. One number, tracked weekly, tells you whether they are expanding or pruning.
Keep it to public pages
Everything above is what any shopper can see. Do not try to reach anything behind a login, and if you ever automate this, respect the store’s robots.txt. Our own checker does, which is why it occasionally declines to read a store.
Make next week cheaper than this week
The routine only compounds if you write the readings down. A spreadsheet with one row per week and six columns is enough: date, product count, newest product title, lowest price, number of items on markdown, and the current banner text. After three weeks you stop reading pages and start reading your own diff, which is the point.
Two failure modes to avoid. First, tracking too many stores — three real rivals beat twelve names you never look at. Second, recording impressions instead of values: “prices seem lower” is not something you can compare next week, while “lowest price $39, 14 items on markdown” is.
What to do with a finding
A finding is only worth the time if something follows it. The useful window is short — roughly the 48 hours while their promotion is still running and your customers are still comparing.
- They cut a price. Do not automatically match it. Answer it: bundle, extend a guarantee, or make the shipping promise better. Matching a price you did not choose is how margin leaves quietly.
- They launched a product you also sell. Get your version in front of your list first. Being second to email is worse than being second to launch.
- Their bestseller is sold out. This is the one to act on the same day — run the equivalent of that product to the segment most likely to want it.
- They changed their offer. Read the new banner and decide, deliberately, whether to answer it or ignore it. Both are fine; drifting is not.
Where doing it by hand breaks down
The method above is free and it works. It has three honest limits, and they are the reason tools in this category exist at all.
- It only catches what is true on the day you look. A two-day flash sale that ran between your checks is invisible afterwards.
- It needs you to remember. The week you are busiest is exactly the week a competitor is most likely to move, and the week you will skip.
- Finding the change is the easy half. Writing the response — the email, the ad, the landing copy — is where the hours actually go.
Common questions
Can I see a competitor's Shopify sales or traffic?
No. Nothing public exposes another store's orders, revenue or visitor numbers, and any tool claiming to show them is estimating. What is genuinely public is the storefront itself: products, prices, compare-at prices, collections, and whatever promos are on the page.
How often should I check?
Weekly is the useful rhythm for most stores. Daily checking costs more attention than the findings are worth unless you are in a category that repositions constantly, and monthly is slow enough that you miss the window where reacting to a price change still matters.
Is it legal to look at a competitor's storefront?
Reading a public web page is ordinary competitive research, and it is what every shopper does. Keep it to public pages, do not attempt to access anything behind a login, and respect robots.txt if you automate it.
Does a store always expose /products.json?
Most Shopify storefronts do, because it is on by default, but some merchants disable it or put it behind a proxy. If it 404s or returns nothing useful, fall back to the sorted collection page, which every storefront has.
Try one reading right now, free
Paste a rival’s store address and see what it is running this minute — headline, live promos, product count and price range. No install, no account, nothing to cancel.
Promolexa does the weekly reading for you and drafts the response in your brand voice. Free plan available · Standard $29/month with a 7-day free trial.