Methodology

Where the data comes from

Store Detector maintains an index of 312,903 active Shopify stores across 208 countries. Records are built from public storefront data — the pages, scripts and metadata a store serves to any visitor — combined with third-party traffic estimates. The index is fed and refreshed by the Store Detector Chrome extension and our own crawlers.

How stores are ranked

Ranking pages order stores by SimilarWeb traffic rank (lower is better). Where a store has no traffic rank, it is placed after ranked stores and ordered by combined social following. Every list shows the complete set we hold for that country and niche — we do not pad lists to hit a round number, so a page showing 97 stores is showing all 97 we track.

Traffic and revenue are estimates

The traffic and revenue figures on this site are estimates, not reported sales. No third party can see a store's real revenue. Visit estimates are modelled from third-party traffic data; revenue figures are derived from those visits together with observed product pricing. They are useful for comparison and sizing, not for accounting.

Store profiles carry an explicit confidence level:

• High — a multi-month traffic series is available for the store.
• Medium — a traffic rank exists, but no visit series.
• Low — limited data; treat as indicative only.

Product prices are per store, and are not averaged

A store's average product price is recorded in that store's own currency — a Philippine store in pesos, a British one in pounds. Store profiles therefore show the price with its own currency symbol, and we do not show an average product price on any country, category or niche ranking.

That is deliberate. The stores ranked on a single country page routinely trade in several currencies — a UAE ranking spans twelve — so a figure averaged across them would not be a price in any currency at all.

There is also a known defect worth stating plainly. Shopify serves a storefront's prices in a currency chosen from the visitor's own locale, so a price we collected may have been converted into a currency other than the store's own before we recorded it. Where that happened, the figure is a genuine price wearing the wrong currency label, and it reads far too high. The inflation differs from store to store, so it cannot be corrected by arithmetic — only by re-reading the storefront — and no cutoff separates it from stores that really are expensive. We omit values that could not be a price in any currency, but some inflated figures remain. Treat a store's average price as a rough indication of its price band, not a precise figure, and compare prices between stores only within the same currency.

How niches are assigned

Each store has one primary category and may carry several sub-niches. A niche page only includes a store when its primary category matches that niche's parent category — so a large electronics retailer that happens to stock some skincare does not appear in a skincare ranking. This trims a small number of stores from each list in exchange for lists that reflect what a store actually sells.

What we exclude

• Stores that are inactive, duplicated in the index, or serving a password page.
• Stores flagged as dropshipping-template sites, which distort traffic rankings.
• Service-type categories, which do not map cleanly to a single retail niche.

Coverage and known limitations

• Shopify only. These rankings cover Shopify-powered stores. A market's largest retailers may run on other platforms or marketplaces and will not appear.
• Discovery bias. Our index grows through crawling and extension usage, so coverage is deeper in markets and niches where the extension is widely used.
• Categorisation is automated. Categories and sub-niches are assigned by a classifier and are occasionally wrong.
• Lag. Stores are re-checked on a rolling basis; a store may have changed theme, apps or status since it was last inspected. Every profile shows its last-checked date.

Corrections

If a store is listed incorrectly, mis-categorised, or should not be included, email support@storedetector.com and we will fix the record on the next refresh.