The effectiveness of an e-commerce business strategy determines whether a store will enjoy lasting success or wind up a failure. Discovering practical solutions that have previously been vetted by your market competitors is crucial. It can save you large amounts of time and spare the expense of manually reviewing a wide range of solutions in the market. The most successful sellers are privy to this fact and have invested time and effort to find the best tools to flourish.
Even if you have decided to add a free Chrome extension to your workflow, the question remains: which commerce inspector tool is the best, and can help meet your e-commerce needs?
In this article, we will review Commerce Inspector, now known as Shine Commerce, one of the leading inspector tools available, and determine whether it is the best fit for most e-commerce sellers in the market.
What is Commerce Inspector?
Available for download from the Google Chrome store as a free Chrome extension, Commerce Inspector does exactly as its name promises. It is an inspector tool that sellers can use to obtain and analyze data and intelligence about commerce competitors online. Commerce Inspector touts itself as a solution that provides users with “must-have competitive insights”. This suggests that it provides users with the data necessary to succeed. Long gone are the days when sellers must hypothesize about what their competitors are doing to stay relevant. Tools like Commerce Inspector unravel key information with just the click of a few buttons.
Commerce Inspector’s Features
Understand which products are newly listed, and which are popular with customers
Looking into possible new items to list in your Shopify e-commerce store? Get insights on which products have been newly listed and which are currently popular among customers. Using Commerce Inspector, find out which are top-selling items from rival retailers and what items have been recently included. Then, you can update your product list and offer customers a vibrant variety of goods to purchase.
Commerce Inspector reveals hidden data
Commerce Inspector distinguishes itself from other commerce inspectors and monitoring platforms. Its ability to reveal usually hidden information for popular buys in the market makes it a compelling download. If you’re looking for a tool that can provide you with the current top products, Commerce Inspector is a great tool as it will show you how your competitors have been performing and the goods sold in the past week. When evaluating your competitive market, identifying where visitors are originating from with Commerce Inspector is also valuable. Visitor analytics on digital marketing performance is thus also provided by Commerce Inspector.
Provide powerful competitor data on sales performance
The free version of Commerce Inspector provides insights into goods sold every month and money earned by your chosen competitor. You can use this feature from Commerce Inspector across any number of stores. However, you need to opt for the paid version to access deeper insights, such as revenue (at a product level and at a shop level). The paid version is also necessary for finding out the best-selling products from previous weeks.
Find out the Shopify apps which your competitors use
With the amount of Shopify apps that are constantly being introduced to the market, it is inevitable that you’ll miss out on some of the hottest launches. If you are not aware of the best Shopify apps available, it will affect how you manage your commerce store.
Need a great way to stay in the know of what Shopify apps are popular and trending among your competitors? Use a business intelligence tool like Commerce Inspector, or other free Chrome extensions, to get the information you need. Commerce Inspector will comb through your rivals’ sites and assess what Shopify apps they use. You’ll then get the data you need and can decide which Shopify apps you want to try out and include in your operational flow. Using Commerce Inspector, you’ll stay ahead of the competition by using the apps other people already have their hands on. This way, you won’t lag and miss out on growth opportunities.
Determine where traffic is coming from
An essential part of every e-commerce store’s digital marketing analytics is to understand traffic. Every seller should know where traffic is coming from and how many visitors are coming through. With this in mind, Commerce Inspector comes with features that will display the number of visits that an e-commerce store has, where traffic originates (whether it’s from search engines like Google, social media or influence referrals, or social media such as organic posts), and which social channels the store has a presence within. All this data obtained through Commerce Inspector is vital. This is particularly the case for having a holistic understanding of how to optimize your e-commerce store performance.
Detect online ad campaigns on Facebook
To promote their ranges of online products, e-commerce store owners would typically run ad campaigns on social channels like Facebook . These sites attract millions of visitors a day. With Commerce Inspector, you can easily detect the ad campaigns that a competitor store is currently running on Facebook. Commerce Inspector gives you a glimpse into the types of campaigns you could look into running for your own business.
Commerce Inspector – Pros and Cons
Commerce Inspector – Pros
1. Foolproof E-commerce Tracker
Commerce Inspector’s biggest advantage is how it is easy and seamless it is for e-commerce sellers – even those who are new to the game. It is easy and pleasant to navigate, with features conveniently collapsed into a left sidebar. Moreover, Commerce Inspector automatically generates insights when you open a Shopify store, making it convenient and intuitive to use.
2. Free version
Commerce Inspector comes with a free version. This makes it viable even for e-commerce sellers with a tight, low, or even no budget. Using the free version allows you a glimpse into your competitors’ stores, although unlocking more does come at a hefty cost. More of this will be discussed in the Cons section.
3. In-depth insights on all products
Commerce Inspector shows you all the insights you need on a full suite of products in-store. To find out what the best-sellers are or what products have been newly added, you can just use the tool. Having these insights via Commerce Inspector will put you in good stead as you’ll be able to revise or validate your own product range. Depending on what’s popular with customers, you could choose to feature some products more prominently or add new products entirely. The bottom line is that competitive data points give you the tools necessary to win and grow your store revenue. This is ultimately the goal of almost every e-commerce store on the web.
4. Discover more about your competitive niche
Especially for e-commerce sellers who have found themselves in a competitive yet narrow niche, you’ll need a powerful tool. This tool should ideally provide competitive intelligence for you to succeed. Knowing more in-depth information about your competitive niche through Commerce Inspector is beneficial. You’ll gain a more holistic understanding of what you can do to accelerate the fulfilment of your selling goals. For example, if your niche is in skin care, you can detect insights with Commerce Inspector to find out information like traffic and revenue data. This will then enable you to act however you wish, with visibility that was not previously afforded to you.
Commerce Inspector – Cons
1. A limited set of features on the free version
While Commerce Inspector can be installed completely free of charge, the set of features it comes with is ultimately limited. In comparison, many other free Chrome extensions like Koala Inspector offer more for free. They tend to have a more comprehensive set of features available even on free versions. If you’re on a tight budget, this might be a deal breaker for you.
2. Costly to unlock more features
You need to subscribe to one of Commerce Inspector’s paid plans to enjoy all it has to offer. Its paid plans do not come cheap. You’ll find yourself paying $29 for unlimited data in 3 stores, $59 for unlimited data in 10 stores, and $149 for unlimited data in 30 stores. This is ultimately a relatively more costly option than most other inspector tools available. Considering that most e-commerce sellers will likely need to use this inspector tool for more than just 3 stores, the starting $29 plan is unlikely to be sufficient, meaning you’ll find yourself spending a substantial amount of money. This is something all e-commerce sellers who are considering Commerce Inspector need to take into consideration.
3. Tied to each store you are subscribed to for 30 days
If you want to unsubscribe from a specific store and subscribe to a different store instead with the 3 slots you have on the entry-level paid plan, you need to wait for 30 days from your first subscription to do so. This makes the plan rather restrictive, and if you want to switch between stores to track, you will have to upgrade, which again incurs more costs for your business.
Free VS Paid Plan – Which is a better choice?
When it comes to using Commerce Inspector, there are mainly two types of plans you could opt for. These are namely the free and paid options, and your choice could depend on several factors, which include the budget you have set aside to grow your e-commerce business.
Commerce Inspector Free Plan Benefits
The first is of course the free plan, which comes in the form of a free Chrome extension. There are many reasons why you would opt to stay on the free plan, avoiding extra costs for more features. If you’re just starting out on your e-commerce journey, you may not be entirely sure that you want to invest in the paid plan just yet. The free plan would then give you the flexibility to try out other tools as well. You can decide if Commerce Inspector will be your chosen free Chrome extension. A free plan also comes with fewer stakes and risks involved. You will not be financially implicated if the tool turns out to be a bad fit for your business.
The free Chrome extension version contains numerous useful functions which you do not need to pay for. It allows for tracking of competitors’ Shopify apps which are used, any recent product launches (which you can filter by day and tag), and best-selling products of all time.
Commerce Inspector Paid Plan Benefits
On the other hand, there are situations wherein paying for more premium plans may make more sense. For more advanced e-commerce sellers, you might consider upgrading to the paid plan. This is especially so if you want to have access to deeper insights, so you can grow at a faster pace. The paid plan brings you all the features of the free plan, with more included in the package. There are also additional insights you get as a paid user which you cannot access on the free Chrome extension. These include the ability to track revenue (shop level and product level), best sellers from the week prior, the ability to search apps and products across shops, generate trending and best-selling shop lists, and detect ads.
Want to try out the additional features provided on the paid plan? Look out for limited-time discounts and free trials for Commerce Inspector. You’ll get to assess appropriately whether this is really the right choice for you. This is important when there are other e-commerce inspectors and free Chrome extensions to choose from in the market.
What are the Commerce Inspector Alternatives?
What if you try out Commerce Inspector and decide it’s not for you? This could be because of the user interface or experience, or perhaps you just want a better alternative. The good news is that there are many free Chrome extensions in the market. Some even come with the full range of benefits which you can only access on Commerce Inspector’s paid version. These features include detecting ads, Shopify ads, and themes. This means you would not need to pay more to get the full set of features and can instead invest your resources in what matters most. You can divert your budget to growing your business, running more ads, and funding your growth.
The best Commerce Inspector alternative is Koala Inspector. It comes packed with features including a Shopify ads detector, Shopify themes detector, ad campaigns detector, and more. In short, you’d be getting all the features you would need to pay for on Commerce Inspector, all for free with this alternative tool.
Like Commerce Inspector, Koala Inspector empowers e-commerce sellers like you with insights. These insights are usually hidden from public view. They provide you with access to competitor data, so you can thrive in your niche of choice. It also comes with a paid plan, which then unlocks the Export CSV function. Using this function, you can neatly generate, save, import, and export product lists to your store. Even without this nifty feature, the free plan for Koala Inspector is likely to satisfy your many diverse e-commerce needs. It is well worth the download, given that it is a free Chrome extension you don’t have to fork out a single cent for (if you’re not keen to upgrade to the paid plan).
Conclusion
With many inspector tools available to detect necessary insights on competitor Shopify stores, making the right choice is essential. To drive e-commerce growth, Commerce Inspector is one of the leading picks available. It provides most features necessary for e-commerce sellers to find out how they can improve their business. However, to use the full suite of features, users need to subscribe monthly. Subscription costs start at upwards of $29 per payment.
If you are looking to build your e-commerce empire with a free tool that doesn’t compromise on functionality and offers the capabilities to detect ad campaigns, Shopify apps, and themes seamlessly, you may consider other options available in the market. While there are thousands of choices to choose from, it can be difficult to ascertain which is most appropriate. That’s where Koala Inspector shines. Even with just a free plan, you can harness the full potential of the tool. Leverage the opportunity to level up your e-commerce game with affordable paid plans. Koala Inspector brings sustainable and high returns for your Shopify store that will undoubtedly expedite your journey to profitability.
