Shopify Store Competitor & Similar-Site Finder

Find the top competitor and similar-site domains for any Shopify (or other) e-commerce store in seconds. Get ranked competitor domains, root domain, favicon and traffic rank — no coding, no manual guesswork. Use it as a one-off Actor run, a ready-made Task, a REST API, or a tool for AI agents via the Apify MCP server.

What does Shopify Store Competitor do?

Give it a store's URL (or bare domain) and it returns a ranked list of the sites most similar to it — the domains e-commerce brands actually compete with for traffic and customers. Each result includes:

• Domain – the full competitor domain.
• DomainWithoutSub – the root domain, with any subdomain removed.
• Favicon – a URL to the competitor site's favicon, for quick visual scanning.
• Rank – the competitor's global traffic rank (lower is more popular).

Why use this instead of guessing competitors manually?

Manually researching "who competes with this store" means opening a dozen tabs, cross-checking traffic-estimation tools, and guessing. This Actor automates that lookup: it queries Pinto Studio's own Data API (no third-party credentials or scraping setup required on your end) and returns a clean, ranked list in seconds — ready to feed into a spreadsheet, a dashboard, or an AI agent's research pipeline.

Input parameters

Field	Type	Required	Description
url	string	Yes	The URL (or bare domain) of the store you want competitors for, e.g. https://kyliecosmetics.com/ or just kyliecosmetics.com.
limit	integer	No (default 10)	Maximum number of competitor results to return (1-50).

Example input

{
  "url": "https://kyliecosmetics.com/",
  "limit": 10
}

Example output (dataset item)

{
  "Domain": "narscosmetics.com",
  "DomainWithoutSub": "narscosmetics.com",
  "Favicon": "https://site-images.similarcdn.com/image?url=narscosmetics.com&t=2&s=1&h=...",
  "Rank": 61921
}

Every run also writes a run summary to the key-value store under the OUTPUT key, and each dataset item follows the published dataset schema, so results render as a clean table in Apify Console and in any tool that reads Apify's Actor output schema.

Ready-made Tasks

This Actor ships with pre-configured Apify Tasks you can run immediately or trigger via the API without writing any input JSON yourself:

• Kylie Cosmetics Competitors – the default example: top 10 competitors of kyliecosmetics.com.
• Gymshark Top 5 Competitors – top 5 competitors of gymshark.com.
• Allbirds Full Competitor List – up to 20 competitors of allbirds.com.
• Fashion Nova Top 3 Competitors – top 3 competitors of fashionnova.com, passed as a bare domain (no https:// needed).

Run it with the Apify API (curl)

curl "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/pintostudio~shopify-store-competitor/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=<YOUR_API_TOKEN>" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"url": "kyliecosmetics.com", "limit": 10}'

Live HTTP API (Standby mode)

This Actor also runs as an always-on web server (Standby mode), so you can call it like a normal REST API without starting a new run each time:

$curl "https://pintostudio--shopify-store-competitor.apify.actor/competitors?url=kyliecosmetics.com&limit=10"

The endpoint, parameters and response shape are fully described by the Actor's published OpenAPI schema, so any OpenAPI-aware client or code generator can consume it directly.

Use it from AI agents (MCP)

Shopify Store Competitor can be called by Claude, ChatGPT and other MCP-compatible agents through the Apify MCP Server, so an agent can research a brand's competitors as one of its tools instead of guessing from stale training data:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "apify": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@apify/actors-mcp-server", "--actors", "pintostudio/shopify-store-competitor"],
      "env": {
        "APIFY_TOKEN": "YOUR_TOKEN"
      }
    }
  }
}

Frequently asked questions

Does this only work for Shopify stores?

No. While it's built and tested with Shopify-powered brands in mind, it works for any e-commerce (or general) website — pass any URL or domain and you'll get its closest competitor / similar-site matches.

How is "competitor" or "similar site" defined?

Results are ranked by traffic-similarity data: sites whose visitor overlap and market position most closely resemble the target store, ordered by global traffic rank.

Can I limit how many results I get back?

Yes. Set limit (1-50) in the input, or as a query parameter on the Standby HTTP API. The default is 10.

Do I need my own API key or Similarweb account?

No. This Actor calls Pinto Studio's own Data API behind the scenes — you don't need to sign up for or configure any third-party service yourself.

Can I pass just a domain instead of a full URL?

Yes. kyliecosmetics.com and https://kyliecosmetics.com/ both work — the Actor normalizes the input automatically.

Can I call this without starting a new Actor run each time?

Yes. The Actor supports Standby mode, which keeps an HTTP server warm so GET /competitors requests are answered immediately, the same way you'd call any REST API.

Can AI agents use this Actor as a tool?

Yes. It is compatible with the Apify MCP Server, so agents built with Claude, the OpenAI Agents SDK, LangChain or similar frameworks can call it directly for competitor research instead of relying on outdated training data.

What happens if a store has no close competitor data available?

The run still succeeds; it returns as many results as are available (which may be fewer than limit, or zero for very obscure domains) rather than failing the whole run.