Best Chrome Extensions for Ecommerce Competitive Research

Competitive research for an online store comes down to a few questions: what is the competitor built on, what do they charge, where does their traffic come from, and what ads are they running? Here are well-known tools for each, many of them free.

What a store is built with

• Shopify Theme Detector shows which Shopify theme a store uses and which apps it has installed, which helps when you're choosing a theme or wondering how a competitor does reviews, upsells or subscriptions.
• Wappalyzer identifies the technology behind any site: platform, analytics, payment providers, marketing tools.
• BuiltWith does the same, with a website and extension that list a site's technology.

Prices and price history

• Keepa adds price history charts to Amazon product pages, including deals and stock changes.
• The Camelizer, from camelcamelcamel, shows Amazon price history and can alert you to drops.
• For competitors' own sites, a simple spreadsheet of key products and prices, checked weekly, often beats any tool.

Traffic estimates

Similarweb has an extension that shows estimated traffic, top countries and traffic sources for any site. The numbers are estimates and less reliable for small sites, so use them to compare competitors with each other, not as exact figures.

Competitors' ads

For ad research, the best sources are free websites from the ad platforms themselves, not extensions:

• Meta Ad Library shows the ads any Facebook or Instagram page is running.
• Google Ads Transparency Center shows a company's Google search, YouTube and display ads.
• TikTok Creative Center highlights top-performing ads by industry and country.

Look at which ads have run longest: an ad that stays live for months is probably working.

Design and branding

• Font Detector identifies the fonts on a competitor's pages.
• Color Palette Extractor pulls a site's colors so you can see their palette at a glance.

Smarter shopping, not just research

If you're a buyer rather than a seller, the same tools help: price history extensions show whether a "sale" is really a discount, and checking reviews outside the store's own site gives a more honest picture.

Keep it legitimate

Use these tools to learn, not copy. Borrowing a competitor's product photos, descriptions or brand assets can break copyright and marketplace rules. And check what each extension can access before installing: research tools often ask to read every site you visit.