Ecommerce Lookalike & Niche Discovery

Type a niche and a country — or paste a reference store — and get back qualified independent ecommerce stores, each optionally enriched with a marketing-signals dossier, shipping intelligence and a decision maker with a verified email.

No API keys, no scraping setup. Describe who you're hunting; get outreach-ready leads.

Why this Actor

Building a prospect list of independent online stores by hand means hours of Googling, opening sites one by one to check they actually sell and ship physical products, and then separately hunting down the owner's email. This Actor runs that whole workflow:

• Discovery — AI-generated localized search queries for your niche or seed store, then a funnel of qualification gates (blacklists, storefront-platform detection, an AI check that the site really sells physical shipped goods) filters hundreds of candidates down to real independent stores
• Signals dossier (addon, modular) — pick the signal families you care about: tech stack & domain age, Meta page & active ads, Google Ads activity, Trustpilot reviews, Instagram, traffic & order-volume estimate, LinkedIn headcount. A 0-10 composite score renormalizes over whatever subset you chose, so leads stay comparable
• Shipping intelligence (addon) — which carriers ship the orders, how returns work (self-service portal and its vendor, or plain email), where free shipping starts, pickup/PUDO options and the shipping software behind the store
• Decision maker (addon) — the owner/CEO/founder with an SMTP-verified work email, phone and LinkedIn profile, with a verified generic inbox (info@, contatti@, …) as fallback

Modes

Mode	You provide	You get
Niche	A vertical in plain words + a country ("motorbike helmets and parts", IT)	Independent stores in that niche and market
Lookalike	A seed store domain (vidaxl.nl) + optionally a niche hint	Stores similar to the seed, excluding the seed itself

Supported markets: IT, DE, FR, NL, ES, GB, US — search language, TLD filters and query strategies localize automatically.

Quick start

{
  "mode": "niche",
  "niche": "motorbike helmets and parts",
  "country": "IT",
  "maxResults": 30
}

Lookalike mode:

{
  "mode": "lookalike",
  "seedDomain": "vidaxl.nl",
  "niche": "garden furniture and parasols",
  "country": "NL",
  "maxResults": 40
}

Only the signals you need:

{
  "mode": "niche",
  "niche": "organic skincare",
  "country": "DE",
  "signals": ["reviews", "traffic", "metaAds"],
  "shippingIntel": false,
  "decisionMaker": true
}

Input options

• mode — niche (default) or lookalike
• niche — plain-words vertical; required in niche mode, optional steering in lookalike mode
• seedDomain — reference store; required in lookalike mode
• country — IT, DE, FR, NL, ES, GB, US
• maxResults (default 30) — upper bound on delivered leads; you only pay for delivered leads
• discoveryDepth — quick (one keyword round), standard (adds an AI keyword-expansion round when the first pass falls short), deep (up to three rounds, more search pages — best for narrow niches)
• nicheFocus — how far the AI keyword generation may drift from your niche: strict (stay inside the micro-niche — precision over volume), balanced (default), broad (adjacent verticals and umbrella categories — more leads, less niche-pure)
• signalsAddon / signals — toggle the dossier and pick the modules: techStack, metaAds, googleAds, reviews, instagram, traffic, linkedin
• shippingIntel — carriers, returns, thresholds, shipping software per lead
• decisionMaker — named contact with verified email (+ verifyEmails, includeGenericInbox in Advanced)
• excludeDomains — skip your customers or already-contacted shops
• proxyConfiguration — Apify Proxy for the direct page fetches (shipping intelligence)

Example output

{
  "domain": "casco-moto.it",
  "country": "IT",
  "status": "new",
  "micro_niche": "motorbike helmets and accessories",
  "tier": "tier2",
  "confidence_score": 0.9,
  "traffic_monthly": 85000,
  "platform": "prestashop",
  "composite_score": 8,
  "signals": {
    "composite_score": 8,
    "signals_collected": ["metaAds", "reviews", "techStack", "traffic"],
    "fb_ads_active": true,
    "tools_count": 7,
    "tp_priority_score": 3,
    "dossier": { "tools": ["PrestaShop", "Klaviyo"], "orders_est": 1020, "...": "..." }
  },
  "shipping": {
    "carriers": ["BRT", "GLS"],
    "return_portal_state": "self_service",
    "returns_portal": "Sendcloud",
    "free_shipping_threshold_eur": 49.0,
    "pickup_state": "available"
  },
  "decision_maker": {
    "full_name": "Marco Rossi",
    "role": "CEO & Founder",
    "email": "marco.rossi@casco-moto.it",
    "email_sendable": true,
    "linkedin_url": "https://linkedin.com/in/marcorossi"
  },
  "best_contact_email": "marco.rossi@casco-moto.it",
  "has_contact": true
}

Key output fields

Field	Description
domain, country	Discovered store and inferred HQ country
micro_niche, industry, products_sold	What the store sells, extracted during qualification
tier, confidence_score	Size tier and qualification confidence
platform	Detected storefront platform (Shopify, PrestaShop, Magento, …)
composite_score	0-10 prospect score over the signal modules you selected
signals.dossier	Full raw dossier of the collected signal families
shipping.*	Carriers, returns portal & vendor, free-shipping threshold, pickup, shipping software
decision_maker.*	Name, role, verified email with status, phone, LinkedIn
best_contact_email	The one email to use: decision maker first, generic inbox as fallback

Who uses it

You are	You get
Logistics / shipping SaaS sales	Stores with their carriers, returns setup and current shipping software — plus who to email
Ecommerce agency / SaaS vendor	Niche + market prospect lists scored by ad activity, traffic and tech stack
Lead-gen agency	A full pipeline — discovery, scoring, enrichment, verified contact — in one run
Marketplace / brand doing competitor research	Every independent store in a vertical with traffic and ads intelligence

Reliability & billing

• You only pay for delivered leads. Domains filtered out by the gates are free and listed in the REJECTED_DOMAINS record of the key-value store with the rejection reason
• Each addon is billed as its own event only when it actually produced data for a lead; a verified contact is a separate premium event
• The run's maximum cost limit is honored: the lead target and addon enrichment are capped to what the limit allows before any upstream work is paid for
• The RUN_SUMMARY record gives per-run coverage at a glance: leads delivered, discovery rounds, addon coverage
• Results stream into the dataset progressively — no waiting for the whole run to finish

Limitations

• Niches with very few independent stores may return fewer leads than maxResults even at deep depth — the summary tells you how many rounds ran
• Traffic and order-volume figures are estimates (modeled from public traffic data), best used for ranking rather than as absolutes
• Decision-maker coverage is strongest for European and US companies; catch-all mail servers can't be proven deliverable and are never marked sendable
• Signals depend on public footprints: stores without a Facebook page, Trustpilot profile or Instagram simply score lower on those parts

Questions or feature requests?

Open an issue on the Actor's page — feedback on new markets, signal modules or output fields is welcome.