Project: Storepeeker

August - September 2023

Storepeeker is a Shopify spy tool that helps sellers find top-selling stores and products. I built it in 6 weeks and got 60 business users before shutting it down due to a change in Shopify's endpoints.

Go to project

I wanted to build this because, after about 2 years helping Shopify sellers with their stores, I realized that the most common question I got was "What are the best Shopify stores to learn from?" This app answers that question.

First, I wrote a Node.js server to scrape data from Shopify stores, manage tracking lists, and generate sales reports. This took about 2 weeks.

I sent the reports over email to early users to get feedback.

Some store owners shared thier actual sales figures with me so I could test the accuracy of the reports. I was able to get consistently within 10% of the actual sales numbers.

At this point, I felt like the concept was solid, so I built a web app to display the data and let users manage thier own tracking lists. I used with Next.js, Tailwind CSS, and a PostgreSQL db managed by Supabase. I ran most of the web scraping and data processing on a separate AWS EC2 instance using Flask/Python and Express/Javascript. One script had to be optimized so I rewrote it in Rust with the help of a friend. This all took about 4 weeks.

Features

• Track and get accurate estimates of any Shopify store's revenue
• Find the best selling products of any Shopify store
• Export any Shopify store's product list and other data
• See the most popular stores for a given niche

I launched on Twitter and got 100+ likes and 60 signups. I got a lot of great feedback and feature requests.

As I continued to refine the web scraper, the data became very accurate. It was fascinating to monitor popular stores and see when they were seeing the most traffic during the day. The challenge was to turn these data into insights that could help the users of Storepeeker increase sales on their stores.

Then, tragedy struck. After hitting an undocumented Shopify endpoint at over 2,000 requests/minute for a few weeks, Shopify changed the endpoint to make it impossible for me to collect sales numbers.

Not only did this break my app, it broke several other 'shopify spy' apps like dropship.io and simplytrends which had millions of monthly users. I can't be sure that the high volume of my requests triggered the change, but it is possible.

Since sales tracking was the flagship feature of the app, I decided to shut it down. At some point, I might rebuild it with a different approach to estimate sales numbers based on other factors.

I learned about the dangers of building on undocumented APIs. I also learned how to get a product to market quickly and get better feedback from real users.

I shut down the servers so you won't be able to sign up but you can still check out the landing page.

Update (10/29/2023)

I have since found a way to get revenue data again, so I might pick up this project again in the future.