How to find Shopify stores the day they're created (Certificate Transparency + DNS)

Jo — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 09:01:56 +0000

Most "new Shopify store" lists only see a shop once it has public products. By then the merchant has already picked a theme, apps and partners. I wanted to see stores earlier, so I stopped looking at storefronts and started looking at certificates.

Disclosure: I built the tool described here.

Why Certificate Transparency logs

Every HTTPS certificate issued by a public authority is written to append-only Certificate Transparency (CT) logs. When someone connects a custom domain to Shopify, a certificate is issued for it within minutes, often long before the store opens.

So the signal is:

a domain appears in a CT log for the first time,
its DNS points to Shopify,
the public /meta.json endpoint of the storefront returns the country and currency.

If the storefront still answers with the password page, the store is pre-launch. As of 27 September 2026, 269 of the 614 stores detected (44 %) are in that state.

The pipeline

CT log tail every 2 hours on a small Mac, filtered on fresh domains.
DNS check: keep domains whose records point to Shopify.
RDAP: domain registration date from the public registry.
Niche guess from public product titles once products exist.
Publishing: the result is served by an Apify Actor, billed per result ($0.02 per store), and also exposed as an MCP server for AI agents.

Only business-level public data is kept: domain, store name, country, currency, status, niche, registration date. No emails, no phone numbers, no personal names.

Automating it with n8n

The public repo ships an n8n workflow that runs every morning, asks the Actor for the stores seen in the last 24 hours, and posts each one to a webhook (Clay, Make, Slack, a CRM):

Workflow JSON: integrations/n8n/new-shopify-stores-daily.json
Setup: one Header Auth credential (Authorization: Bearer <your Apify token>), then your webhook URL, filters and maxItems (caps the billed results per run) in the "Set your settings" node.

Try it

Repository and MCP server: https://github.com/yzf75011-ui/prelaunch-radar-mcp
Apify Actor (pay per result): https://apify.com/prelaunch-radar/new-shopify-stores-pre-launch-radar
The whole database in one CSV ($4.99): https://slama13.gumroad.com/l/full-snapshot
Agency Pack, ready-made lists by status, country and niche + market report ($19): https://slama13.gumroad.com/l/ddnncj

Happy to talk about CT log throughput, false positives, or how niches are guessed.

Not affiliated with Shopify Inc. Business-level public data only, no PII.

DEV Community: Jo

How to find Shopify stores the day they're created (Certificate Transparency + DNS)

Why Certificate Transparency logs

The pipeline

Automating it with n8n

Try it