You know the Shopify store directories: 13 million stores across 400 platforms, a weekly refresh, plans from $75 to $950 a month, built for research and list building. Alert covers one platform, Shopify, and answers a narrower question: which merchants have a reason to buy your app this week, and who is the person to write to. Different jobs, so the choice is usually clear once you name yours.
A searchable database of Shopify stores, and hundreds of other platforms besides, with dozens of filters, product catalogs, traffic and revenue estimates, and a change log of app installs. CSV export and API access on the mid-tier plans and up.
Alert crawls Shopify storefronts itself and turns what changes into dated events: a competitor uninstalled, a one-star review, a Plus upgrade, a retention hire, a new ad. Each event arrives with the merchant's stack and a named contact.
If your workflow starts with a large export into a spreadsheet or your own tooling, a directory is built for that. If it starts with the ten merchants who changed something this week, and ends with an email that names the change, Alert is.
Directory figures are the leading vendor's own published numbers, quoted as is. Alert's are the ones on our pricing page: verified app stacks and confirmed installs, never a raw scan count.
| Shopify store directories | Alert | |
|---|---|---|
| Built for | Ecommerce research and list building across 400+ platforms. | Selling a Shopify app: finding the merchants in market right now and the person to contact. |
| Coverage | 13.7M active stores on 409 platforms, 8,100+ tracked apps, 1.8B products (the leading directory's published figures). | Shopify only. 500,000+ live stores with a verified app stack, 4,000+ apps detected live on storefronts, against a 21,000-app catalog. |
| How the stack is known | Database updated weekly. | Alert's own storefront crawl, re-run on a rolling cadence. An app that appears or disappears between crawls becomes a dated install or uninstall event, in days. |
| Buying signals | Historic change log of app installs and uninstalls; store age, traffic and revenue estimates. | Five live feeds: competitor reviews scored and summarized, app installs and uninstalls, Shopify Plus upgrades, role-level hiring, competitor ad launches. |
| Contacts | Generic store addresses (info@, support@). Personal contact data through an optional third-party vendor integration. | Named decision-makers with graded emails. 800,000+ merchant contacts on file; a reachable email on 8 in 10 resolved review leads. |
| Alerts | Email workflows on the entry plan; all automations on the mid-tier plans and up. | Every signal delivered as it lands, with the merchant, stack and contact attached. |
| Working the lead | CSV export, API access and CRM sync from the mid-tier plan. | Built-in pipeline and notes, AI-drafted outreach per signal, one-click handoff into Claude or ChatGPT. No CSV export, by design. |
| Pricing | $75 to $950 per month on the leading directory. CSV export starts on its $250 plan. | $199 per month flat, unlimited seats, 14-day free trial, no credits. |
Any exported list is a snapshot of the day it was built, and merchants change apps constantly. Alert is built around the differences between its own crawls rather than the snapshot, so the change itself is what you get.
Any list, including one you build in Alert, is right on the day it is built. What holds its value is the event: this store dropped that app on this date. Alert leads with the event and treats the list as the thing you derive from it.
Detection is not a resold dataset. Alert reads the theme, scripts, web pixels and app handles each storefront loads and resolves them against its catalog, then re-reads the store on a rolling cadence.
When the stack changes, that change is the alert: dated, per store, with the merchant and contact attached. State tells you what a store runs; the move tells you it is open to change.
The uninstall is the alert. It is dated from Alert's own crawls, carries the store's current stack, and lands with the person to write to. There is no list to export and re-check first.
Illustrative record. Fields shown are the ones Alert exposes on an App Moves alert.
Both tools are good at their job. The mistake is buying one for the other's.
Directory details are taken from the leading ecommerce store directory's public pricing and product pages in September 2026 and may change; check the vendor's site for current terms. Alert is not affiliated with or endorsed by any directory vendor.
Yes. Teams that need multi-platform sizing or product-level data use a directory for research and Alert for the daily list of Shopify merchants that changed something. Alert's contact layer is included, so the signal comes with the person.
No. Alert is Shopify only, on purpose. Owning the storefront crawl for one platform is what makes app-level detection and dated install events possible.
No, and that is a deliberate choice rather than a gap. Alert is built for working the signal in place: pipeline, notes and AI-drafted outreach live next to the alert, and any lead can be handed to Claude or ChatGPT in one click to write it into the tools they are connected to.
Alert re-crawls Shopify storefronts on a rolling cadence, so a stack change becomes a dated install or uninstall event within days. Where a per-app figure would be misleading because of a recent detector rollout, Alert withholds it rather than publish a number it cannot stand behind.
14 days free, then $199/mo, unlimited seats, cancel any time. No demo call, no sales rep. The product makes its own case in the first session.