Hey guys,

Last month I realized anyone could pretty much find out who the biggest Shopify stores are since they're all hosted under the same IP: 23.227.38.32

Knowing this, I scraped the Top 100 Shopify Stores by Alexa Rank, using myips.ms - so these are the most visited e-commerce stores using Shopify in the whole world:

Full list of the top 100 Shopify stores (Image)

(P.S: I transformed the Alexa rank into Estimated Monthly Traffic for easier understanding)

Now, as for my findings:

1. Clothing is king, and the whole Fashion niche rules over everything.

Full break-down of Niches (Image)

Of the top 100 Shopify Stores, 29 had Clothing as their main niche.

Add Accessories, Footwear, Underwear plus Swimwear stores - which amount to 21 stores in total - and you have exactly 50% of the top 100 stores belonging somewhere and somewhat in the Fashion niche.

Taking a closer look, the biggest store currently on Shopify is Fashion Nova, which is a fashion company (well, duh) with over 21 million visits per month. Their traffic numbers are actually 3 times as large as their 2nd competitor (which is a makeup store).

Now, this really is The Mountain vs Oberyn levels of competition.

Fashion Nova can essentially A/B test their landing pages and user experience until their conversion rates just blow away every competitor.

And even then, this as a whole will benefit the entire Fashion niche - as they can simply steal learn from Fashion Nova UX choices and improve their own conversion rates for free.

No other niche has this much free information to be studied and replicated online.

Main takeaway: If you want to start a new e-commerce store or expand yours, a local needleworker can end up being more helpful than mindlessly browsing Ali-express.

2. You don't need to have Walmart prices to sell like Walmart.

Full breakdown of the Best-sold Product prices (Image)

Yes, some 29% of the Best-Sold Products on the list are under 25$, but 50% of the top stores have their Best-Sold product at a price point above 50$.

Were you expecting this? I really wasn't.

This means big stores aren't obliged to do drop-shipping prices, even though some of these stores are (clearly) sourcing products for cheap in Asia.

Branding up and niching down seems to be the absolute key here.

And see it for yourself - go to any store from the list, and check if you can't identify their customer persona straight away.

All these stores have made the effort to laser-target their niche because that means they'll be the only ones able to satisfy it.

Finally, having a larger margin per product is also one of the very few ways these stores get to increase their sales - because larger product margins will mean a larger advertising budget, which in the end will mean a larger number of customers reached.

Remember that almost all of these stores survive and grow strictly through Facebook/Instagram ads - 93% of these 100 stores are using Facebook ads (trust me, I checked them one-by-one).

Main takeaway: Always focus on selling the benefit and not only product features, so you can brand yourself and distance your product from the common Youtube drop shipper.

3. Mobile Site Speed isn't a concern when you get a lot of traffic.

Mobile Site Speed breakdown (Image)

Some of these stores are taking longer to load on mobile than Usain Bolt took to run 100 meters on the Olympics.

It's this bad.

And because of this, it would seem that Site Speed doesn't affect nearly as much the sales or traffic numbers as one would predict.

However, this a misleading behavior that you shouldn't replicate.

Yes, these stores still have their traffic and large sales numbers for sure - but Amazon found in an early e-commerce study that for every 100ms (meaning 1/10 of a second) of site delay, they lost 1% of sales. (Source)

Meaning many stores in this list could, in theory, almost double their sales numbers, by just working to decrease their site speed to regular values - and all this without ever having to increase their traffic numbers.

This is free money they're leaving on the table every month.

Main takeaway: Focus on having your e-commerce site speed low (especially mobile site speed), because unless you already have traffic in the hundreds of thousands and/or an established brand, your sales will tank (or never even takeoff).

And that's it for today.

Now, you can check the full interactive database of my data here ⬅️ but it's okay if you don't because I'll keep posting more data-based insights right here.

Thanks!