Shopify competitor research

How to See Any Shopify Store's Products, Prices, and Stock (Free, No Tools)

You do not need a scraper, a Chrome extension, or a paid tool to see what a competitor sells on Shopify. Almost every Shopify store publishes its entire product catalog — titles, variants, prices, and stock status — at a public URL. Here is exactly how to read it, and where the manual approach quietly falls apart.

The 10-second version: append /products.json

Take any Shopify store's URL and add /products.json to the end of the domain. That is it. The store returns a clean, structured JSON file listing its products. Try it with a store you already know:

https://www.allbirds.com/products.json

This is not a hack or a loophole. It is a standard Shopify endpoint that powers storefront search and third-party apps, and it is public by design. If a store runs on Shopify, this URL almost always works.

What you actually get back

The response is a list of products, each with the fields that matter most for competitor research. For every product you can read:

• Title and product type — the exact name and category, useful for spotting new lines and capsules.
• Every variant — each size and color, with its own price and compare_at_price, so you can see both the current price and whether it is on sale.
• Availability — the available flag tells you whether a variant is in stock or sold out right now.
• created_at and published_at — timestamps that reveal exactly when a product went live, so you can date their most recent drops.

Want the whole catalog rather than the first page? The endpoint is paginated. Add a page parameter and pull up to 250 products at a time:

https://www.allbirds.com/products.json?limit=250&page=1

Increment page until you get an empty list, and you have read the entire public catalog — every SKU, every price, every stock status — without logging into anything.

How to turn raw JSON into a pricing read

Raw JSON is not exactly a boardroom report, but a few minutes with it tells you a lot about a competitor:

• Catalog size — how many products and variants they carry, a proxy for assortment depth.
• Price range and typical price — the floor, ceiling, and middle of where they actually sell.
• On-sale pressure — how many variants have a compare_at_price above the current price, i.e. how discount-heavy they are right now.
• Stock gaps — which hero items are sold out, which can open a short window for you to price into.
• Freshness — how recently they launched, based on the newest published_at dates.

Pull this for your three closest competitors and you have a genuine snapshot of where you sit on price and assortment — far more useful than eyeballing a few collection pages.

Where the manual method breaks down

The shopify products.json trick is great for a one-time look. It stops being practical the moment you want to do this consistently, which is the entire point of competitor research. Here is where it falls apart:

• It is a single snapshot. The endpoint shows today's prices, not what changed since last week — and the change is the signal you actually want.
• Some stores rename or relocate the feed, return 403s, or sit behind a separate .myshopify.com domain, so discovery is fiddly.
• Paginating and parsing JSON by hand across 5-10 competitors, every few days, is exactly the recurring chore you were trying to avoid.
• By the time you notice a price drop in a manual pull, the competitor may have had a head start of days.

In other words: the public feed answers "what are they selling right now?" It does not answer "what did they change, and when?" — which is the question that protects your margin.

The shortcut: let it run for you

PriceRack is built directly on top of this public data. It reads the same product feeds, but on a schedule, then compares each pull to the last one and tells you only what changed: price moves, new SKUs, and items going in and out of stock. You get a clean daily email instead of a folder of JSON files.

If you just want to see the snapshot for your own competitors right now — catalog size, price range, on-sale count, and stock gaps, computed for you — you can run a free instant audit in about 30 seconds. No login, no card, no scraping by hand.