How to Find Shopify Stores in Your Niche to Study and Learn From

Studying successful stores in your niche shows you what customers expect: how products are photographed, priced, described and shipped. Here's how to find Shopify stores worth studying, and what to look at.

Find stores with Google

• site:myshopify.com "your product": every Shopify store has a myshopify.com address, and some appear in search.
• "powered by shopify" "your product": many stores keep this line in their footer.
• Search your product with words like "shop", "buy" or "handmade", and look at the stores in the results and in Google Shopping.

Other places to look

• Ad libraries: Meta's Ad Library shows ads brands are running now. Search your product type to find active stores and see how they advertise.
• Shopify's own showcases: the Theme Store shows example stores for each theme, and Shopify's blog features merchant stories.
• The Shop app: browse brands by category.
• Social media: search hashtags for your niche and follow the links in brand profiles.

Confirm it's on Shopify

Shopify Theme Detector tells you if a store runs on Shopify, and shows its theme and the apps it finds. That's useful for spotting which themes and apps successful stores in your niche have in common. See detecting a store's apps.

What to study

• Homepage: what they lead with, and how quickly you understand what they sell.
• Product pages: photos, description length, reviews, size guides and delivery information.
• Prices and shipping: free shipping thresholds, return policies and bundles.
• Trust: about page, contact details, real reviews.
• Speed and mobile: how fast it loads on a phone. See checking a store's speed.

Keep a simple record

Use a spreadsheet with one row per store: address, theme, main apps, price range, shipping offer and one thing they do well. After ten stores, patterns appear.

Learn, don't copy

Use what you find to understand what works, then do it your way. Copying product photos or descriptions is a quick way to lose trust and break the law. Watch out for dropshipping stores too; they're often not the best models. See spotting dropshipping stores and analyzing a competitor's conversion strategy.

Need Shopify help, not just research? See Shopify design and development.