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Hermeny Santos
Hermeny Santos

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I Built a Free Shopify Competitor Intelligence API

#shopify #api #ecommerce #webdev

I Built a Free Shopify Competitor Intelligence API — Here's How

Every Shopify store owner wants to know: What are my competitors charging? What products do they carry? Are they running sales?

There are tools that do this — but they charge $200-500/month. I built a free API that does it in seconds, deployed on Cloudflare Workers.

What It Does

ShopIntel API analyzes any Shopify store's products, prices, and inventory through their public /products.json endpoint. No API keys needed for the target store. No proxies. No browser automation.

7 Endpoints:

  • Analyze — Full store breakdown (product count, price ranges, vendors, categories)
  • Products — List all products with variants and pricing
  • Compare — Side-by-side comparison of two stores
  • Search — Find products by keyword across a store
  • Detect — Check if any URL is a Shopify store
  • Price Changes — Track price differences between snapshots
  • Price Alerts — Flag products that breach price thresholds

Real Example: Analyzing Allbirds 

curl -X POST https://shopintel-api.hermenyjunior7.workers.dev/store/analyze \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"url": "https://allbirds.com"}'
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Response (trimmed):

{
  "success": true,
  "data": {
    "summary": {
      "totalProducts": 700,
      "totalVariants": 7541,
      "averagePrice": 85.04,
      "priceRange": { "min": 2, "max": 500 },
      "onSaleCount": 287,
      "outOfStockCount": 2
    },
    "productTypes": [
      { "name": "Shoes", "count": 564 },
      { "name": "Apparel", "count": 57 },
      { "name": "Socks", "count": 42 }
    ]
  }
}
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700 products analyzed in under 3 seconds. No auth required. Just a URL.

Why Shopify's /products.json Is the Best Scraping Niche

Most scraping businesses are fragile:

  • Google Maps — Anti-bot updates break scrapers monthly
  • Amazon — Aggressive blocking, requires expensive proxies
  • Instagram/TikTok — APIs change constantly

Shopify's /products.json is different:

  1. Intentionally public — Shopify exposes it on every store
  2. Structured JSON — No HTML parsing needed
  3. Stable — Same format for years
  4. No anti-bot — No CAPTCHAs, no IP blocking, no proxies needed
  5. Huge market — 4.8M active Shopify stores

Tech Stack

  • Cloudflare Workers — Serverless, globally distributed, free tier
  • Hono — Ultrafast TypeScript web framework
  • TypeScript — Strict mode, fully typed
  • Vitest — 17 tests, full coverage
  • Cost: $0/month to run

How the Compare Feature Works

The /store/compare endpoint fetches products from two stores in parallel and finds overlapping products by title matching:

curl -X POST https://shopintel-api.hermenyjunior7.workers.dev/store/compare \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "store_a": "https://allbirds.com",
    "store_b": "https://kotn.com"
  }'
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It returns:

  • Product counts for each store
  • Average prices for each store
  • Overlapping products with price differences and percentages

This is gold for e-commerce businesses doing competitive analysis.

Use Cases

  1. Competitor Price Monitoring — Track when competitors change prices
  2. Market Research — Understand what product types dominate a niche
  3. Dropshipping Research — Find products and compare supplier prices
  4. SEO/Marketing — Understand competitor product catalogs
  5. Investment Research — Analyze DTC brand product strategies

Try It Free

API: RapidAPI - ShopIntel API

Source Code: GitHub - shopintel-api

Base URL: https://shopintel-api.hermenyjunior7.workers.dev

Free tier gives you 25 requests/day — enough to analyze a competitor store daily.

Built with Hono + Cloudflare Workers in a weekend. If you found this useful, drop a star on the repo!

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