How does spy tools like Ali-hunter and ppspy get data from Shopify stores, normally in order to get this data you’ll need to use a webhook, but this only applies to your store and stores that installed your application.
How does spy tools like Ali-hunter and ppspy get data from Shopify stores, normally in order to get this data you’ll need to use a webhook, but this only applies to your store and stores that installed your application.
2
Answers
They are called web scraper or crawlers. They go to your product page (going through all the links in your ecommerce) and understand the content of the page. They extract the product name and the product price. They will do that every X hours or X days and collect the information, so they don’t need any webhook.
In theory you could make your page complicated enough to not make it easy to crawl, for example you could show the price with Javascript (the crawlers typically have javascript not enabled). But that would make your website less accessible, especially to Google, which is in fact another crawler.
PPSPY does the following.
It reads your Shopify sitemap to find the products in the store.
…/sitemap_products_1.xml
As fallback, it parses the URL:
…/collections/all?sort_by=best-selling – and tries
to find the products there.
Next, it uses the JSON URL from Shopify. There again it tries to find
all products. An example URL:
…/products.json?page=1&limit=250 – most store owners don’t even know this exists.
After that, it calls the JSON URL for each product. You can get this
URL in your online store by simply opening a product page and writing
".json" after it in the URL. Example URL:
…/products/your-productname.json.
In this JSON there is a field "updated_at". This field is updated every time a change is made. Also, when an order take place (the stock is changed).
And with this, it is possible to track the sales (approximately).