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How to find Shopify stores to sell your app to

To find Shopify stores to sell your app to, look for merchants who already pay for a competitor app, or whose storefront shows they lack the category your app fills, then narrow by size, country and niche. Your App Store listing stays the main channel: outbound only works when you can say why this store, and why now.

Jean-Romain Krupa
By Jean-Romain Krupa, founder of StoreRadar. Last updated .

Step by step

  1. 1.

    Get the App Store listing right first

    Merchants look for apps by searching the Shopify App Store. A clear listing, good screenshots and recent reviews do more than any list of leads, and every cold email you send will link back to it.

  2. 2.

    Read your competitors' App Store reviews

    Each review shows the store's name, its country and how long it has used the app. These are merchants who already pay for the category. Low ratings and complaints about a missing feature tell you who is ready to switch, and why.

  3. 3.

    Check a store's app stack before you write

    For each candidate, confirm which apps the store runs today by reading its page source. If it already uses your app, skip it. If it uses a competitor, you know your angle.

    The method is in how to check which Shopify apps a store uses.

  4. 4.

    Find stores that lack your category

    A store with no reviews app, no upsell, or no shipping-bar app is a prospect for that category. You find them by checking stacks one by one, or by filtering a database for stores without any app of that type.

  5. 5.

    Filter a store database when you need a list

    Store databases let you filter Shopify stores by installed app, theme, country and size. Technology-list vendors such as BuiltWith, Wappalyzer and Store Leads offer versions of this, and so does StoreRadar. Export the list, then check the stores you write to first.

How big the pool is

As of October 2, 2026, StoreRadar had detected 1,811 apps on 516,120 Shopify stores, counting only detections backed by an app extension file on Shopify's CDN. The most widely detected was Judge.me Product Reviews, on 187,049 stores. If you sell a reviews app, that is the size of the pool already paying attention to reviews, before you count the stores with no reviews app at all.

Detections count stores where the app left a trace on the storefront at the last crawl. They are not installs, and they say nothing about which plan the merchant pays for.

Signals that a store is ready to buy

Limits of every method

  • Detection is not usage. An app on the storefront tells you nothing about the plan, the spend or the satisfaction.
  • Admin-only apps are invisible. If your competitor runs only in the admin, no outside tool can find its users.
  • Lists go stale. A database result is as old as the store's last crawl. Check the store before you write.
  • Spam burns the list. Follow the anti-spam law of the store's country, and keep every email specific to that store.

Do it with StoreRadar

FAQ

How many Shopify stores use a given app?

Only the app's developer knows its real install count. A database can tell you how many stores show the app on their storefront. For example, StoreRadar detected Judge.me Product Reviews on 187,049 stores as of October 2, 2026.

Can I target stores that just uninstalled a competitor?

Yes, if you can see the removal. Shopify does not publish uninstalls, so you compare a store's apps over time. Our guide on finding stores that uninstalled a competitor app shows how, and why most raw removal signals are noise.

Is there a free way to find stores for my app?

Yes. Competitors' App Store reviews name the merchants, and a page source check tells you which apps a store runs. It is slow, but it costs nothing and gives you the best leads: stores you have actually looked at.

What does store data cost?

It ranges from free tiers with small caps to monthly subscriptions and one-time downloads. StoreRadar's pricing page lists its free tier, the one-time CSV and the annual plan.

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