Introducing the Shopify Niche Index: Weekly Rankings of Stores, Apps and Best Sellers

Today we are opening up a slice of the data behind Koala Inspector as a free public resource: the Shopify Niche Index. It ranks the biggest Shopify stores in 21 niches, the apps those stores run and the products they sell most, and it rebuilds itself every Monday.

Most store research starts with a niche question. Who are the biggest stores selling what I sell? What apps do they all run? What is actually selling in my category this month? Answering those used to mean opening dozens of stores one by one. Koala already studies hundreds of thousands of Shopify stores, so we turned the answers into lists anyone can read.

Updated October 12, 2026. Part of the Shopify Niche Index, refreshed every Monday from Koala's own store data.

What is in the index

Every niche gets a store ranking, and the larger niches also get app and best-seller lists. All of them refresh weekly:

• Top stores. The busiest stores in the niche by estimated monthly visits, with where they are based and how big their catalogs are. Start with pet stores, jewelry stores or the 100 biggest Shopify stores overall.
• Apps. The 100 most used apps in the niche, plus the apps that are far more common there than anywhere else on Shopify. See the lists for clothing stores and jewelry stores.
• Best sellers. What the niche's biggest stores sell most, the product pages drawing the most visits, what those products cost and which of them are most advertised. Start with this week's best sellers across every niche.

From the second week on, every list shows what is new and what moved, so the index becomes a weekly record of which stores and products are gaining ground.

The first finding: every niche has a signature app

Alongside the lists we are publishing a live data study, the signature app of every Shopify niche. It finds, for 80+ niches, the app most over-represented compared with Shopify as a whole. This week's strongest signatures:

• Games stores are 139x as likely as the average Shopify store to run Board Game Atlas Listings (5.2% of them, against 0% of all stores).
• Cannabis Products stores are 136x as likely as the average Shopify store to run AgeChecker.Net ‑ Age Verifier (2.7% of them, against 0% of all stores).
• Tobacco Products stores are 128x as likely as the average Shopify store to run AgeChecker.Net ‑ Age Verifier (2.5% of them, against 0% of all stores).
• Music & Sound Recordings stores are 108x as likely as the average Shopify store to run Single: musicians & creators (13% of them, against 0.1% of all stores).
• Lighting stores are 58x as likely as the average Shopify store to run Sign Customiser ‑ SF (2% of them, against 0% of all stores).
• Digital Goods & Currency stores are 47x as likely as the average Shopify store to run Digital Downloads ‑ Fileflare (3.6% of them, against 0.1% of all stores).
• Business Services stores are 40x as likely as the average Shopify store to run Gang Sheeter (3.9% of them, against 0.1% of all stores).
• Vehicle Parts & Accessories stores are 37x as likely as the average Shopify store to run Year Make Model ‑ EasySearch (3.5% of them, against 0.1% of all stores).

The pattern is practical. Most signature apps solve the one problem a niche cannot sell without, like an age check for drinks or a year, make and model search for car parts.

How we build it

Go deeper on any store

The index shows the leaders. Koala Inspector shows you everything about any store you open: its apps and theme, its full catalog with likely best sellers, and, with tokens, its traffic sources, its ads and what it changes over time.