You can’t log into a competitor’s Shopify admin, so the admin’s own product export is off the table. But a Shopify storefront publishes its product list at a public address that anyone browsing the store can reach — and that public list is exactly what CatalogCSV reads. If you can browse the store, you can usually export it. No account, no API key, nothing installed on their store, and the file is built entirely in your browser.

That makes it a quick way to answer the questions you normally piece together by clicking through product pages one at a time: what does this store sell, at what prices, from which brands, and what did they add recently?

What you can see in the sheet

The Variant rows format gives you one row per variant, 26 columns in total. The ones that matter most for competitor research:

  • vendor, product_type and tags — how the store organises its range, and which brands it carries.
  • option1–option3 and variant_title — the sizes, colours or materials each product comes in.
  • price and compare_at_price — the current price, and the crossed-out “was” price when something is on sale.
  • sku and grams — the store’s own SKUs (where it fills them in) and the weight it lists.
  • available — true or false, whether the storefront currently lets you buy that variant.
  • product_url, image_src, images_all and image_count — links back to each product and its photos.
  • created_at, published_at and updated_at — the dates the store’s product data carries.

If you want the product copy too, switch on the description and choose HTML or plain text; it is added as an extra column.

How many products does the store have?

Search for this and you mostly find instructions for the store owner’s admin, which doesn’t help when the store isn’t yours. CatalogCSV pages through the whole public catalog, even on the free tier, so when the export finishes the popup tells you how many products it found — for example “downloaded 100 of 640 products (free limit)” — while the file itself is trimmed to the first 100. That number counts what the store shows publicly; drafts and hidden products aren’t part of the public list.

In the sheet, a product and a row are not the same thing. Every variant gets its own row, so:

  • Products: count the unique values in the handle column (handle is column A, so in Google Sheets =COUNTUNIQUE(A:A)-1 does it; in Excel, use Remove Duplicates on a copy of that column).
  • Variants: count the rows, minus the header.

Which products are newest?

Sort the sheet by created_at or published_at, newest first. The products at the top are the ones the store added or published most recently — a fast way to see what a competitor has been launching, without scrolling a “new arrivals” collection that may be sorted by hand.

Two caveats: a store can republish an old product, which moves its published_at forward, and the dates only tell you when a product entered the catalog, not how well it sells.

What it can’t show

CatalogCSV is a product exporter, not a spy tool. Be clear about what a public catalog does not contain:

  • No sales, revenue or traffic. Nothing in the public product list says how many units sold or how many people visit.
  • No apps or theme. It doesn’t detect what the store is built with.
  • No inventory quantities. You get available true/false, not how many units are left.
  • No tracking over time. Each export is a snapshot of the moment you click. To see changes, export again later and compare the two files yourself.
  • Not every store can be read. A store running a bot check can’t be exported, and a store behind a password page needs the password entered first, in the same tab.

If what you need is best-seller signals, installed apps, traffic or automatic store tracking, dedicated competitor-research extensions such as Koala Inspector are built for that; their own Chrome Web Store listing describes detecting best-selling products, uncovering apps and themes, traffic stats, and monitoring up to 50 stores. CatalogCSV does the narrower job: a clean, complete spreadsheet of what the store shows publicly.

Free vs Pro

The first 100 products of every export are free, in every format, with every column and option. There is no account or sign-up. For a small competitor, that may be the whole store. For a larger one, a Pro license ($9/month or $79/year) removes the limit, with one key for up to three browsers or computers.

Because the free limit applies per export, you can run it on several competitors in a row and get the first 100 products of each.