I Spent a Month Building a Free Shopify Sourcing Tool — Here's What It Does

If you've ever spent an evening bouncing between a Shopify store, a spreadsheet, and five AliExpress tabs trying to figure out whether a product is actually worth selling, you already know the problem I set out to fix.

I'm a Shopify theme developer. Over the years I've sat inside dozens of ecommerce teams, and the same workflow kept showing up: someone finds a product doing well on a competitor's store, opens a new tab, searches AliExpress by hand, guesses at a margin, copies data into a spreadsheet, and repeats that ten more times before lunch. It's slow, it's manual, and it's the kind of busywork that eats the hours you should be spending on strategy.

So I spent the last month building Shopify Product Research — a free Chrome extension that turns that entire workflow into a few clicks.

What it actually does

The extension sits in your browser and reads the same public data your browser already loads when you visit a Shopify storefront. No API keys, no Shopify admin login, no account to create. Install it once, and it works on any of the 5.6M+ Shopify stores out there.

Here's the short version of what's inside:

• Compare prices across millions of Shopify stores. Search any product and instantly see what every Shopify store selling it is charging — with green/grey/amber badges showing whether you're cheaper, about the same, or pricier than the market.
• Source products from AliExpress in one click. Found a product that's clearly selling well? Switch to the Source It tab and see matching AliExpress wholesale listings, with supplier cost and your estimated profit margin calculated automatically.
• Side-by-side comparisons. Select up to 3 products and compare price, store, and details head to head, without fifteen open tabs.
• Bulk image export. Pull every product image from a collection in one shot, full resolution, named by product handle — a lifesaver for catalogue migrations or design audits.
• CSV and JSON exports. Export a single product, a whole collection, or an entire store catalogue — titles, SKUs, variant pricing, vendor, tags, metafields — straight into a spreadsheet-ready file.
• Competitor catalogue auditing. Browse any Shopify storefront and see its collection structure, product count, and variant depth without needing API credentials.
• SEO tag inspector. Check the live title tag, meta description, and social tags on any product or collection page, with flags for anything missing or out of spec.
• One-click SEO/GEO/AEO audit. Runs a full audit pre-loaded with the current page URL — no copy-pasting required.

Why I built it this way

Three things mattered to me while building this:

1. No friction. The moment a tool asks for an API key or a login, most people close the tab. This extension reads Shopify's public storefront data directly, so it works the instant you install it — on any public Shopify store, with no setup.

2. No cost. Every feature is free. No trial, no premium tier, no credit card. The AliExpress sourcing links use affiliate tracking, which is what keeps the tool free to run — but the tool itself never asks you to pay for anything.

3. No data leaves your browser. Nothing is collected, stored, or sent to a server. Everything runs locally, page by page, as you browse.

Who this is actually for

• Dropshippers and product researchers who want to know what's selling and where to source it, without fifteen tabs open.
• Ecommerce store owners doing competitive pricing checks before they launch or reprice a product.
• Agencies and freelancers doing catalogue migrations or store audits for clients, who need clean CSV/JSON exports fast.
• SEO and CRO folks who want a fast read on a store's on-page SEO without a full crawl tool.

Try it

It's live on the Chrome Web Store right now, completely free:

👉 Install Shopify Product Research

I'm actively shipping updates — the last few weeks alone added AliExpress sourcing with margin calculations, smarter search matching, and a saved-listings tab. If you install it and hit something that could be better, I want to hear about it.

If you're past the research stage and want a hand turning that data into a store that actually converts, that's my Shopify store development and CRO work.

Built by the team behind Collective Theme, where we also build free Shopify audit and SEO tools.