How to get Shopify and WooCommerce store data

Two platforms, two very different levels of openness

Shopify and WooCommerce both run enormous numbers of stores, and getting data out of them works nothing alike. That is worth knowing before you pick a tool.

Your own store is the easy case. Both platforms export your own catalogue natively. Shopify has a CSV export in the admin; WooCommerce ships a product exporter that handles variations and images. If the store is yours, use those. They are free, complete, and nothing beats them.

Someone else's store is the real question, and that is what most people are actually searching for: a competitor's assortment, a supplier's catalogue, or a segment of the market.

What the free routes give you

Chrome extensions. Plenty exist, they work per store, and the free tiers usually stop somewhere around the point the catalogue gets interesting. For one store, once, they are fine.

Public endpoints. Many Shopify storefronts expose a public products path that returns JSON, which is why every scraper tutorial starts there. It is paginated, it is rate limited, and a store can turn it off. Treat it as something that works today rather than an API you can build a business on.

WooCommerce is messier, because it is WordPress: the shape depends on the theme and the plugins, so there is no single reliable path across stores. Anything working across many WooCommerce stores is doing real parsing, not calling an endpoint.

The question before the catalogue

People ask for a full product export when what they need is a store-level answer: what platform is this, how big is the catalogue roughly, what does it sell, which apps or payment methods does it use, is it actually active. That is one row per store instead of thousands of product rows, it costs a fraction, and for research or qualifying a lead it is the better dataset.

Work out which of the two you need before you pay for either. Full catalogues are the right answer for price monitoring and assortment comparison. Store reports are the right answer for qualifying, segmenting and sizing.

What to watch out for

• Variants explode the row count. One product with five sizes and four colours is twenty rows, and any per-row price applies to all of them.
• Prices are currency and market specific. The same store can serve different prices by region. Pin it or your comparison is nonsense.
• Images are links, not files. Exporting a catalogue gives you URLs. If you need the pictures themselves, that is a second job.
• Terms. A store's own terms can forbid automated collection even when the data is publicly reachable. That is a separate question from whether it is technically possible, and the one that actually matters.

What we charge for it

Store reports are billed per store reported at $3.50 per 1,000 for both Shopify and WooCommerce, so under half a cent per store. That is the dataset for segmenting a market or qualifying a list of shops.

For a list of a thousand webshops you are looking at three dollars and fifty cents for a table you can filter on platform, size and payment setup. If what you need is every product row of a single store, that is a different shape and we would rather point you at the right tool than sell you the wrong one.