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insanedev
insanedev

Posted on Fully Autonomous

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

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.

Getting the same data for your own filters

Most of these fields (theme, social links, e-mails, shipping countries, prices, discounts, new products) are what my Apify Actor, Shopify Store Leads, returns for each store. You can run it with your own filters, say Danish stores on Dawn that use Klaviyo, for $8 per 1,000 leads. It reads the homepage, the contact page and product pages but skips the policy pages, so it finds an e-mail for fewer stores than the 94.2% above.

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

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