🕵️ Shopify Store Spy — AliExpress Price Match & Markup

The Shopify store spy that reveals any store's catalog, best sellers and AliExpress markup — as a pay-per-result API

This Shopify store spy extracts the full public catalog of any Shopify store — titles, prices, vendors, images, launch dates and a best-seller rank — and can then look up each product on AliExpress, returning the top 3 matching supplier listings with the price difference and markup percentage against the store price. It is the API version of dropshipping spy tools: the same competitor data that SaaS dashboards sell for $20–99/month, delivered as clean JSON/CSV/Excel you pay per result, run on demand, schedule, or call from your own code.

⚠️ Unofficial tool — not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Shopify or AliExpress in any way. It only reads publicly available store data.

Why use this Shopify store spy?

• 💸 No monthly subscription. Dropshipping spy SaaS tools charge $20–99/month for a dashboard. Here a full 300-product store analysis costs about $0.31 — pay only when you run it.
• 🔌 It's an API, not another dashboard. Get raw JSON/CSV/Excel, schedule daily runs, pipe results into your own app, spreadsheet, or AI agent — no copy-pasting from a web UI.
• 🎯 You only pay for delivered results. Failed runs, errors, and blocked AliExpress lookups are never charged — the pricing is per successful event.
• 📈 Best-seller signal included. Beyond the catalog, you get each product's rank on the store's best-selling collection, so you know what actually carries the store — not just what's listed.

Use cases: who spies on Shopify stores?

• Dropshipping SaaS builders — you're building a product-research or store-spy tool and need the data layer. Call this Actor from your backend instead of building and maintaining Shopify + AliExpress scrapers yourself.
• AliExpress affiliates & dropshippers — find the AliExpress supplier behind a winning Shopify store, see the markup being applied, and decide whether to source the same product (or promote the supplier listing).
• E-commerce agencies & analysts — run competitor pricing audits for clients: map a rival's entire assortment, spot new product launches with scheduled runs, and quantify pricing strategy with hard numbers.

Sample output

One flat item per store product (real data, easy to load into any spreadsheet or database):

{
  "title": "Death Wish Coffee Dark Roast",
  "handle": "dark-roast-coffee",
  "url": "https://www.deathwishcoffee.com/products/dark-roast-coffee",
  "price": 16.99,
  "currency": "USD",
  "vendor": "Death Wish Coffee",
  "productType": "Coffee",
  "imageUrl": "https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/1121/8938/products/dwc-darkroast.jpg",
  "createdAt": "2019-04-11T14:41:33-04:00",
  "publishedAt": "2019-04-15T10:00:00-04:00",
  "variantsCount": 4,
  "bestsellerRank": 2,
  "isBestsellerTop10": true,
  "store": "https://www.deathwishcoffee.com"
}

With Match products on AliExpress enabled, each item also gets matchStatus (matched / no_results / blocked_needs_proxy / skipped), matchQuery, and for each of the top 3 supplier candidates: ali1Title, ali1Price, ali1Currency, ali1Url, ali1PriceDiff, ali1MarkupPct (same for ali2* and ali3*). aliNPriceDiff is storePrice − aliPrice (positive = the store charges more); aliNMarkupPct is the store's markup over the AliExpress price in %.

Input: analyze a Shopify store in one line

The minimum input is just the store URL — any page of the store works:

{ "storeUrl": "https://www.deathwishcoffee.com" }

Field	Type	Default	Description
storeUrl	string	— (required)	URL of the public Shopify store to analyze.
matchAliexpress	boolean	false	Search AliExpress for each product and add top-3 supplier candidates with price gap and markup %.
maxProducts	integer	0	Limit catalog size. 0 = whole catalog.
maxMatches	integer	20	Only the first N products are searched on AliExpress.
proxyConfiguration	object	no proxy	Proxy for all requests. Apify RESIDENTIAL proxy strongly recommended when matching AliExpress — datacenter IPs get blocked.

Pricing: how much does it cost to spy on a Shopify store?

Event	Price	Charged when
Store analyzed	$0.008	Once per successfully scraped catalog.
Product scraped	$0.001	Per product delivered to the dataset.
Product matched	$0.005	Only per product with at least one successful AliExpress match.

1,000 results (catalog products) ≈ $1.01. A 300-product store without matching costs about $0.31; add ~$0.10 to also match the first 20 products on AliExpress. Failed runs, errors, and blocked matches are never charged.

FAQ

How do I find the AliExpress supplier of a Shopify store?

Enter the store URL, enable Match products on AliExpress, and use Apify RESIDENTIAL proxy. For each product you get the top 3 candidate AliExpress listings with their prices and URLs — the likely suppliers a dropshipping store sources from.

How do I check the price markup of a dropshipping store?

Every matched product includes aliNPriceDiff (store price minus AliExpress price) and aliNMarkupPct (the markup percentage). Sort the dataset by markup to instantly see where a store makes its margin.

How can I see the best-selling products of any Shopify store?

The Actor reads the store's public /collections/all page sorted by best-selling and adds bestsellerRank (top 50) plus an isBestsellerTop10 flag to each product. Some themes hide this collection — then the field is null.

Is scraping a public Shopify store legal?

The Actor only reads publicly available data (no login, no personal data), which US courts have repeatedly found lawful to access (e.g. hiQ v. LinkedIn). You are responsible for complying with the target site's terms and your local laws.

Why are all my AliExpress matches "blocked_needs_proxy"?

You ran without a residential proxy — AliExpress blocks datacenter IPs, including local runs. Enable Apify Proxy with the RESIDENTIAL group in the input and rerun. Blocked matches are never charged.

Does this work on WooCommerce, BigCommerce, or other non-Shopify stores?

No — it supports Shopify storefronts only and fails with a clear message otherwise. Check the URL in a browser first; if the store runs on another platform, this Actor cannot read it.

Limitations (honest ones)

• Shopify stores only. Password-protected or non-Shopify stores fail with a clear message.
• The catalog comes from Shopify's public /products.json; a few stores disable it — the Actor then falls back to the product sitemap (capped at 250 products per run in that mode).
• AliExpress matching needs a residential proxy. On datacenter IPs (including local runs) AliExpress usually blocks and items are marked blocked_needs_proxy — that is expected, not a bug.
• Matching is text-search-based: the top-3 candidates are likely supplier listings, not guaranteed identical products. Always eyeball the candidate URLs before business decisions.
• AliExpress prices are usually in USD; the store price is in the store's currency. Markup % is only meaningful when the currencies match.
• Best-seller rank covers the top 50 of /collections/all sorted by best-selling; some themes hide this collection.

🤖 For AI Agents & MCP

This Actor is public on the Apify platform, which means AI agents can call it directly via the Apify MCP server or the Apify API. An agent can request a store analysis ("spy on this Shopify store and tell me its best sellers and margins"), wait for the run, and read the structured dataset — no custom integration needed. The flat one-item-per-product output is designed to be trivially consumable by LLMs and downstream tools.

More actors by srd836

• Google Sheets Import & Export — sync scraped data to and from Google Sheets.
• YouTube Transcript Scraper — extract transcripts from YouTube videos.
• Naukri Jobs Scraper — scrape job listings from Naukri.com.

Support

Found a bug or need a field that isn't there? Open an issue in the Issues tab — every issue is read and answered, usually within a few days.

---

This Shopify store spy tool helps you find the AliExpress supplier from a Shopify store, works as a dropshipping price markup checker, and doubles as a Shopify competitor analysis and product research API. Use it to scrape any Shopify store's product catalog and prices, discover a dropshipping store's best-selling products, compare Shopify prices with AliExpress supplier prices, and monitor competitor stores on a schedule — all pay-per-result, no monthly subscription. Unofficial — not affiliated with or endorsed by Shopify or AliExpress.