A ShopHunter alternative that will not guess

If you are looking for an alternative to ShopHunter, you are almost certainly looking for one number: what a Shopify store earns. This page is about how StoreLens gets to that number differently, and it opens with the part most comparison pages bury — StoreLens does not produce that number yet.

The short version

ShopHunter will give you an estimated revenue figure for any store today. StoreLens will not. What StoreLens is doing instead is recording what stores actually have in stock, hour after hour, so that the figure it eventually publishes is derived from observed inventory movement rather than inferred from traffic. If you need an answer this afternoon, ShopHunter has one. If you have been burned by an answer that turned out to be invented, keep reading.

What StoreLens does today

What StoreLens does today, and what it does not do yet. This table is generated from the same ledger the codebase tracks its own progress in.
CapabilityStatusDetail
See which Shopify theme a storefront is running.Available nowFree, no account, and the answer says when it was read rather than pretending a cached result is a fresh one.
See a store's published catalog — its products, variants and prices.Available nowRead from the same document the poll already fetches, so it costs no extra request. A price carries the currency the storefront declared, or honestly none.
We are collecting an append-only inventory history for every tracked store, and nothing reads it back yet.Being built — not readable yetThe collector is running and the time-series is growing right now. Nothing reads it back yet — that is what the estimate is waiting on, and it is why the clock had to start before the feature did.
We will show an estimated monthly revenue figure for a store, with a confidence band once it is built.Not built yetNot built. Inventory history cannot be backfilled, so the honest answer until there is enough of it is that we are still gathering data — not a number with no evidence behind it.
We will show a store's best sellers ranked by estimated velocity once it is built.Not built yetDownstream of the estimate: ranking products by how fast they sell needs the diff engine that has not been built.

That table is generated from the same ledger this project tracks its own progress in, and a test fails the build if this page describes anything on it as available before the ledger says it is. It is the only way we found to make a marketing page structurally incapable of getting ahead of the software.

What ShopHunter says about itself

What ShopHunter says about itself, and when we read it

A Shopify sales tracker and product research tool, sold on estimated revenue for any store. ShopHunter

Where the two actually differ

Where the estimate comes from

ShopHunter says it estimates a store's daily takings from traffic patterns, ad counts and conversion behaviour. Those are reasonable proxies and they have the enormous advantage of working immediately on a store nobody has been watching. They are also, by construction, a model of a store rather than a measurement of one: two stores with identical traffic and identical ad spend can convert very differently, and nothing in that method can tell you which one you are looking at.

StoreLens is built on the other trade. It reads a store's published catalog repeatedly and records what changed, which measures something real — but it only works on stores it has been watching, and it is worth nothing on day one. That is why the collection started long before this page existed.

What each will admit it does not know

As of the date on the facts above, ShopHunter's public site states no accuracy figure and no confidence range. StoreLens will publish a confidence band with every estimate and will refuse to publish a figure at all below the point where there is enough history to support one. Until then this page says so rather than filling the space.

Price

StoreLens's tools are free and need no account. We are not quoting a price for ShopHunter, because it does not publish one on its public site — see the dated facts above. Numbers circulating on review and coupon sites are not their pricing page, and repeating one as if it were is exactly the kind of thing this page exists not to do.

Who should not use StoreLens yet

If your work depends on a revenue figure today, StoreLens is not the tool — and you should treat any tool's figure as an estimate with a wide range around it, ours included when it arrives. If you are picking a tool to live with, the question worth asking is what happens when its estimate is wrong, and whether it tells you how confident it is at all.

What you can use today, free

Questions

Is StoreLens a drop-in replacement for ShopHunter?

Not today, and saying otherwise would waste your time. ShopHunter's headline feature is an estimated revenue figure for any store, and StoreLens does not produce one yet — the inventory history it will be computed from is being collected now. What StoreLens does today is free: the theme a storefront runs, and its published catalog.

Why not just show an estimate now, like everyone else?

Because a number nobody can stand behind is worse than no number. Store-level sales estimation from inventory tracked over time needs time — history cannot be reconstructed after the fact, and below the point where there is enough of it the honest answer is that we are still gathering data. Every incumbent in this category has an estimate today; the reviews are about how often it is wrong.

What is StoreLens actually doing while it waits?

Tracking inventory. Every store in the queue has its published catalog read on a cadence, and each reading is appended to a time-series that is never rewritten. Units that disappear from stock between two readings are what a sales estimate is eventually made of. That is the slow part, and it is running.

What does StoreLens cost?

The tools on this site are free and need no account. Nothing is behind a paywall today because the one field that will be paid — the revenue estimate — does not exist yet.

How do I know your facts about ShopHunter are current?

Every fact on this page carries the date we read it and a link to the page we read it from. If a fact here ages past six months our build fails until somebody re-reads it, which is a deliberately annoying rule: a stale price on a comparison page is the cheapest possible way to lose a reader's trust.