Go to any Shopify store. Right-click, View Source. You'll find <script> tags from every app they've installed, tracking pixels from every ad platform they use, and a JavaScript object called Shopify.theme that tells you their theme. Store owners don't realize this is public. But it is.
I built a scraper that does this at scale. Puppeteer with stealth plugins, 1,000+ app signatures, 40+ pixel patterns, pointed at 250,133 Shopify stores. I wanted to build StoreInspect, a Shopify intelligence tool, and I needed to know what the ecosystem looked like first.
The short version: most stores are empty.
How the detection works
The scraper loads each store's homepage and checks four things:
- Script URLs. Most apps inject a
<script src="cdn.klaviyo.com/...">or similar. Match the domain, you've got the app. - JavaScript globals. Klaviyo sets
window.klaviyo. Gorgias setswindow.GorgiasChat. These work even when the script URL is obfuscated. - DOM elements. Chat bubbles, review widgets, popup forms. CSS selectors identify the app.
- Theme App Extension blocks. Shopify injects HTML comments like
<!-- BEGIN app block: shopify://apps/klaviyo/blocks/... -->into the page. These map directly to installed apps and are almost impossible to hide.
This only catches client-side stuff. Backend apps (inventory, fulfillment, accounting) don't show up. Every number below is a floor.
Half the stores run zero or one app
Out of 250,133 stores:
|
Apps Installed |
Stores |
% |
|---|---|---|
|
0 apps |
37,885 |
15.1% |
|
1 app |
92,764 |
37.1% |
|
2 apps |
58,028 |
23.2% |
|
3-5 apps |
56,012 |
22.4% |
|
6-10 apps |
5,413 |
2.2% |
|
11+ apps |
32 |
0.0% |
That single app on 37% of stores? Almost always Shop Pay, Shopify's own checkout. Strip it out and more than half the ecosystem runs bare Shopify.
Average: 1.8 apps per store.
Traffic changes things. A store with 1M+ monthly visitors runs 5.8 apps on average. Under 50K visitors? 1.5.
|
Traffic Tier |
Stores |
Avg Apps |
Avg Pixels |
|---|---|---|---|
|
Under 50K/mo |
211,854 |
1.5 |
4.0 |
|
50K-200K |
36,500 |
3.1 |
7.9 |
|
200K-1M |
1,735 |
4.7 |
8.6 |
|
1M-5M |
38 |
5.8 |
8.7 |
|
5M-20M |
7 |
7.0 |
11.3 |
The top apps
|
App |
Category |
Stores |
Adoption |
|---|---|---|---|
|
Shop Pay |
Payment |
178,028 |
71.2% |
|
Klaviyo |
|
55,072 |
22.0% |
|
Mailchimp |
|
36,768 |
14.7% |
|
Judge.me |
Reviews |
30,113 |
12.0% |
|
Privy |
Popup |
11,269 |
4.5% |
|
Smile.io |
Loyalty |
11,166 |
4.5% |
|
Loox |
Reviews |
9,724 |
3.9% |
|
Yotpo |
Reviews |
9,370 |
3.7% |
|
Omnisend |
|
8,442 |
3.4% |
|
Gorgias |
Support |
5,358 |
2.1% |
Klaviyo at 22% is 50% ahead of Mailchimp at 14.7%. That race is over. Judge.me owns reviews at 12%, triple Loox and Yotpo. Gorgias, the app ecommerce Twitter treats as table stakes? 2.1%. That's 5,358 stores out of 250,000.
After the top 4, every app is below 5% adoption. If your Shopify app has 5,000 installs, you're in the top 15 of the entire ecosystem.
A third of stores skip Google Analytics
|
Pixel |
Stores |
Adoption |
|---|---|---|
|
Shopify Web Pixel |
247,710 |
99.0% |
|
Google Analytics 4 |
170,188 |
68.0% |
|
Meta Pixel |
114,061 |
45.6% |
|
Google Ads |
85,387 |
34.1% |
|
Klaviyo (pixel) |
49,529 |
19.8% |
|
TikTok Pixel |
24,369 |
9.7% |
|
Hotjar |
10,783 |
4.3% |
Average: 4.6 pixels per store, 2.5x the app count. Pixels are one script tag and no configuration, so that tracks.
GA4 at 68% means 80,000 stores have no Google Analytics. Over half skip Meta Pixel. TikTok Pixel, for all the hype, is under 10%.
One in four stores runs a deprecated theme
|
Theme |
Type |
Stores |
Share |
|---|---|---|---|
|
Dawn |
Free |
31,981 |
12.8% |
|
Debut |
Free (deprecated) |
28,251 |
11.3% |
|
Prestige |
Paid |
8,760 |
3.5% |
|
Impulse |
Paid |
8,731 |
3.5% |
|
Minimal |
Free (deprecated) |
6,880 |
2.8% |
|
Brooklyn |
Free (deprecated) |
5,987 |
2.4% |
Dawn is #1 at 12.8%. Right behind it is Debut at 11.3%, which Shopify deprecated in 2021. Add up all the deprecated themes and you get 58,430 stores, 23.4% of the dataset. These stores are missing years of performance work and the entire Online Store 2.0 feature set.
19% of stores run custom themes ($5,000-50,000+ from an agency). In the 1M+ traffic tier, that number is 80%+.
59% have no email. 78% have no reviews.
From our 250K-store breakdown:
- 59% have no email marketing app. No Klaviyo, no Mailchimp, nothing.
- 78% have no reviews app. No Judge.me, no Yotpo, no Loox.
- 107 stores out of 120,000 run a full CRO stack (email + reviews + support + upsell + analytics). That's 0.09%.
If you're selling to Shopify merchants, you don't need to beat a competitor. For most stores, you're the first tool in the category they've ever tried. It's not Klaviyo vs. Mailchimp. It's Klaviyo vs. nothing.
What I took away from this
Shopify has millions of stores. The app store has thousands of apps. The marketing says merchants build sophisticated stacks.
The data doesn't back that up. Most stores run zero or one app. Most have no email, no reviews, no support. A quarter sit on deprecated themes. The typical Shopify store is stock Shopify with Google Analytics and maybe a Klaviyo pixel.
That's fine. Shopify works out of the box. But for anyone selling apps, services, or agency work into this ecosystem: the market isn't saturated. It's barely started.
Full dataset at storeinspect.com/report/state-of-shopify, updated daily.
I'm Anders, founder of StoreInspect. The detection engine behind this analysis is also a free Chrome extension if you want to try it on individual stores.