DEV Community: Insane Developer

My Shopify store index got Apify's Rising Star badge. What 950K stores taught me

Insane Developer — Fri, 30 Oct 2026 13:21:10 +0000

I'm a developer from Ukraine building a small data business on Apify. The Store page of my Actor Shopify Store Leads now shows a Rising Star badge. Apify assigns it automatically; there's nothing to apply for. Here is what went into the tool, in case it helps someone building their own.

It runs on my own index

The Actor doesn't resell someone else's database. I keep an index of Shopify stores that I build myself: popular-site lists (Tranco, Chrome UX Report for 42 countries, Common Crawl) go through a DNS check for Shopify's IP range, and every hit is confirmed with the store's own meta.json. The October build holds 951,105 stores. A daily job adds newly found stores, and every run reads the details of the stores it returns live from their storefronts.

The full method is on insanedev.dev/methodology.

What 950K stores look like

I read 765,826 of those storefronts and counted which apps and themes they run.

Judge.me is on more stores than any other review app, and Mailchimp is still on 62,076 of them.

Dawn runs on 21% of the storefronts I read. Debut, a theme from before Online Store 2.0, is still on 29,080.

A third of the stores sell from the US. The biggest niches by keyword are clothing, fashion and jewelry.

Speed came from measuring against the competition

Before every change I run the same query through the top Shopify lead Actors on the Store. The latest run: coffee stores in the US, contacts on, 200 stores. My Actor now returns them in 56 seconds, with an e-mail for most rows plus phones, socials and addresses where the store publishes them. The storefront-reading alternative I compare against took 829 seconds for the same query a day earlier.

Most of the time went into network waits, not parsing. Reading the few contact pages that matter in parallel and pacing requests to Shopify per IP gave most of the gain.

Pricing by the row

Users pay $5.50 per 1,000 leads, and the first 25 are free. Errors, duplicates and empty results are never billed. That rule shaped the code more than anything else: a store that fails to load costs me compute and earns nothing, so it's in my interest to make every read count.

Try it without an account

insanedev.dev/shopify has counts for every app, theme, niche and country in the index, plus a free sample CSV with real contacts (up to 15 stores per list, all from outside the top 50K by traffic). The aggregate counts are also an open dataset on Hugging Face and GitHub under CC BY 4.0.

If you need data from somewhere else, I build custom scrapers and lead lists too: insanedev.dev.

10,000 popular Shopify stores: e-mails, socials, shipping and discounts (October 2026)

Insane Developer — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 00:54:23 +0000

My last post counted which apps the most-visited Shopify stores run. This one covers the rest of the public storefront: contact details, social links, shipping countries, catalogue size, prices and discounts. The first result surprised me most: for a third of the stores, the best e-mail address I found was in the privacy policy or the terms of service.

I'm a developer from Ukraine building a small data business on Apify. The stores come from my own index of 392,504 Shopify stores, found through the Chrome UX Report and Tranco lists.

The sample

These are the first 10,000 stores of my index in popularity order. The Chrome UX Report puts each one among the top 1,000 (418 stores), top 5,000 (4,467) or top 10,000 (5,115, taken in Tranco order) websites of its country, across 42 countries plus the global list. Each country brings its own top sites, so small markets weigh a lot: Australia and New Zealand have 1,377 stores here and the US has 440. Treat the totals as a world average, not a US view.

I read every storefront on 9 October 2026 between 00:11 and 06:49 UTC, from one machine, at no more than four requests per second. For each store that meant the homepage, the first page of /products.json (up to 120 products, most recently published first), one product page, /pages/contact, the privacy policy, and the terms of service if the e-mail, phone or company name was still missing. 9,969 stores answered. Of the other 31, 14 blocked automated visits (I skip those) and 17 were down or unavailable. Shares below are of the 9,969 unless I give another number. Shipping countries and product counts come from each store's public meta.json, read when the index was built around the end of September.

Where stores publish their e-mail address

94.2% of stores publish an e-mail address on at least one of those pages. For each store I keep the page where the best address came from, ranking the store's own domain first and general mailboxes ahead of privacy or HR ones:

Page	Stores	Share
Homepage	4,896	49.1%
Contact page	1,318	13.2%
Privacy policy	2,556	25.6%
Terms of service	621	6.2%
No e-mail found	578	5.8%

The homepage or the contact page gives you an address for at least 62.3% of stores. It's "at least" because a store whose best address sits in the privacy policy can still have a weaker one on its homepage. For the 31.9% whose best address came from a policy page, that address is rarely a privacy mailbox: info@ leads with 751 of 3,177, and privacy-type addresses make up under 5%. So when you look for a store's e-mail by hand, check the privacy policy.

Phones are less common: 66.2% of stores publish one somewhere, 53.4% on the homepage or contact page. WhatsApp chat links are on 14.2% of stores (counted on every page I read, policy pages included), anywhere from none in Canada to 52.2% in the Middle East.

A third ship to only one country

34.2% of stores list exactly one shipping country in meta.json, and for 2,979 of those 3,409 stores it is their own country. At the other end, 15.9% ship to the whole world (a rest-of-world zone or 200+ countries).

Region	Stores	Ship to one country	WhatsApp link
Europe (without UK & IE)	4,280	24.1%	10.8%
Australia & New Zealand	1,377	35.1%	0.9%
Asia (without India)	898	43.5%	16.6%
UK & Ireland	891	16.7%	6.6%
Middle East	655	63.2%	52.2%
US	440	28.6%	2.7%
South Africa	378	59.8%	20.6%
Canada	372	50.0%	0.0%
India	362	49.2%	43.9%
Latin America	316	70.6%	44.6%

European stores mostly ship to more than one country: a single shipping country is listed by 9.4% of Spanish stores and 8.7% of French ones. In Israel it is 75.7%, in Mexico 69.5%. WhatsApp links are on more than half of Middle Eastern stores (mostly Israel, the UAE and Turkey), 44.6% of Latin American ones (Mexico and Brazil) and 43.9% of Indian ones, and on none of the 372 Canadian stores.

Instagram is ahead of Facebook, TikTok ahead of YouTube

Instagram is linked from 86.0% of stores and Facebook from 79.0%. TikTok (45.7%) is ahead of YouTube (40.1%), then come Pinterest at 22.4%, X at 15.8% and LinkedIn at 12.9%. Threads is on 64 stores (0.6%). One store in ten links no social profile at all. I count links to a profile; share buttons don't count.

In India, where TikTok is blocked, TikTok links show up on 0.6% of stores. YouTube is on 66.9% of Indian stores, well above any other region (the next highest is 44.3%).

Catalogues are big

The median store has 978 published products. Only 5.5% have fewer than 50, and 479 stores (4.8%) show 25,001, the cap on Shopify's public count. The middle half of stores have between 297 and 3,383 products.

For prices I take the cheapest variant of each of the first 120 products and use the median. Converted to US dollars at the ECB rates of 9 October, the median store's median price is $47.65. A quarter of stores are under $22.34, a quarter are above $110.43, and 13.0% have a median above $250. This covers the 9,566 stores with a product sample in a currency the ECB lists; stores pricing in AED, SAR, TWD, PKR and a few others are left out.

Almost every store published a product in the last 30 days

Of the 9,828 stores with a product sample, 92.1% had published at least one product in the 30 days before I read them. For 73.7% the newest product was under a week old, and the median store's newest product was 1.5 days old. Only 2.2% had published nothing for 90 days.

Read this as catalogue activity, not as launches. Shopify sets a new publish date when a product is published again. On one large store I checked by hand, eight products created between August 2025 and March 2026 all had publish times within 15 seconds of each other on 25 September. For 34.5% of stores, all 120 sampled products had a date from the last 30 days. That can be a big catalogue that really adds that much, or a bulk re-publish, and my data can't tell the two apart.

Three in four show a strikethrough price

75.4% of stores have at least one product with a compare-at price above the selling price among the first 120 they list. A quarter (25.4%) discount half or more of them, and 590 stores (6.0%) discount every one. In the median store, 11.7% of the sampled products are on sale.

Four in five don't run a free Shopify theme

Shopify's own free themes run 21.9% of the 9,918 stores whose theme name I could read: Dawn 13.2%, the newer Horizon family 4.5%, older free themes such as Debut 1.9%. The other 78.1% run something else: a theme from the Theme Store or a marketplace, or a custom build. The sample has 1,557 distinct theme names. The 20 most common cover 54.0% of stores, and 1,102 stores (11.1%) use a name that no other store in the sample has, which usually means a custom or renamed theme.

AI coding agents wrote the analysis script and drafted this post under my review; every number here comes from the script's output.

What apps the most-visited Shopify stores run (October 2026)

Insane Developer — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 08:43:14 +0000

I read the storefronts of 11,386 Shopify stores that rank among the 10,000 most-visited websites of their own country, in 63 countries, and recorded which apps load on the homepage and one product page. Klaviyo is on half of them. Judge.me leads reviews everywhere except the UK. Attentive is on 17% of top US stores and 0.3% of EU ones, and Afterpay shows up mostly in Australia and New Zealand.

The sample

Stores come from my own index of 392,504 Shopify stores. A store counts as "most visited" when the Chrome UX Report puts it in the top 1,000, 5,000 or 10,000 websites of its country. 12,147 stores in the index meet that bar; 11,386 of them answered when I read them on 9 October 2026. The rest were down, unavailable or blocked.
An app counts as present when its script or widget shows up in the page HTML. Apps that only run in the admin, at checkout or on the server are invisible this way, so every number here is a lower bound. I check 69 apps, not the whole App Store.
Each country contributes the Shopify stores in its own top 10,000, so small markets weigh as much as big ones: Australia (842 stores) and New Zealand (819) are the largest groups, Denmark has 673 and the US 460. The overall numbers are a world average, not a US view; the regional table below splits them.

Most common apps

App	Share of stores
Klaviyo	51.2%
Google Tag Manager	42.8%
Judge.me	33.5%
Microsoft Clarity	31.9%
Triple Whale	10.8%
Gorgias	10.3%
Meta Pixel	10.0%
Trustpilot widget	9.4%
PayPal messaging	9.3%
Yotpo	7.5%

The median store runs 3 of the apps I check (mean 3.3); 92% run at least one. Stores in their country's top 1,000 run 3.7 on average, stores ranked 5,000 to 10,000 run 3.2.

Category leaders

Share of all stores, and in brackets the share of stores that use the category at all.

Email and SMS (60.6% of stores): Klaviyo 51.2% (84%), Mailchimp 6.6%, Omnisend 5.1%, Attentive 2.1%.
Reviews (53.3%): Judge.me 33.5% (63%), Trustpilot widget 9.4%, Yotpo 7.5%, Loox 6.1%, Okendo 3.2%, Reviews.io 3.1%, Stamped 2.3%.
Support and chat (15.9%): Gorgias 10.3% (65%), Zendesk 2.9%, Tidio 1.7%, Re:amaze 1.0%.
Upsell and personalisation (12.1%): LimeSpot 7.1%, Rebuy 4.0%, Nosto 1.6%.
Search and filters (7.5%): Boost Commerce 4.1%, Searchanise 3.1%, Klevu 0.3%, Algolia 0.1%.
Loyalty (5.2%): Smile.io 2.2%, LoyaltyLion 2.0%, Rise.ai 1.2%.
Subscriptions (3.2%): Recharge 1.7%, Appstle 1.4%, Skio 0.2%.

Differences by region

App	US	Canada	UK & IE	EU	AU & NZ	India	Other Asia	LatAm	Africa
Klaviyo	65.0	66.8	62.3	57.9	64.2	6.6	28.4	36.2	28.3
Attentive	17.0	7.9	6.3	0.3	2.1	0.6	0.4	0.9	0.0
Judge.me	18.9	26.9	23.8	36.6	27.6	69.4	31.1	36.2	45.4
Yotpo	18.9	16.6	10.9	4.7	14.0	1.1	5.7	2.2	3.0
Okendo	9.6	4.7	3.5	1.2	11.1	0.0	1.1	1.3	0.6
Gorgias	15.9	24.5	14.9	8.6	23.2	0.3	2.1	4.1	2.6
Triple Whale	26.7	13.5	14.9	11.1	12.3	3.9	5.6	8.8	2.4
Afterpay	5.9	5.8	5.1	0.1	25.8	0.0	0.8	0.0	0.0
Klarna	3.5	2.6	7.0	2.5	1.4	0.0	0.9	0.0	0.0
Mailchimp	3.7	8.4	7.2	4.0	9.3	3.6	7.1	12.6	16.0

Percent of stores in each region. Stores per region: US 460, Canada 379, UK & Ireland 1,008, EU 4,470, Australia & NZ 1,661, India 363, other Asia 1,670, Latin America 318, Africa 463.

Klaviyo is on 58 to 67% of top stores in English-speaking markets and the EU. In India it's on 6.6% of top stores; there the common setup is Google Tag Manager, Judge.me and Microsoft Clarity.
17% of top US stores load Attentive, against 0.3% in the EU.
The UK and Ireland are the only region where Judge.me isn't the top review app: the Trustpilot widget is on 29.7% of stores there, Judge.me on 23.8%.
Afterpay is on 25.8% of top Australian and New Zealand stores and on 0.1% in the EU.
Triple Whale is on 26.7% of top US stores, nearly twice its share in any other region (UK & Ireland 14.9%).
In Africa, Mailchimp (16.0%) and Omnisend (13.2%) together come close to Klaviyo (28.3%).

Stores pick one app per job

Two apps that do the same job rarely load on the same store. Lift below 1 means they show up together less often than chance would predict.

Judge.me and Okendo: 0.08
Gorgias and Zendesk: 0.29
Judge.me and Yotpo: 0.35
Klaviyo and Omnisend: 0.36

Apps that complement each other show the opposite: Triple Whale and Elevar 1.9, Recharge and Klaviyo 1.75, Gorgias and Klaviyo 1.69. Only 1.6% of stores with a helpdesk run two of them, and 1.8% of stores with a loyalty app run two.

If you sell an app, a store that already runs a competitor would have to replace it, so pitch a switch.

Themes

Dawn, Shopify's free theme, is on 13.3% of these stores. Then Impulse 5.2%, Prestige 5.0%, Horizon 3.4%, Impact 3.3%, Enterprise 3.1%. Many stores rename their theme, so the long tail is noisy.

The stores come from my own index of Shopify stores. Ask in the comments if you want a number I didn't include; the aggregate tables are in a JSON file I can share.

I wrote the analysis script and this post with help from an AI assistant; the numbers come straight from the data.

insanedev, a developer from Ukraine