USE CASE:

Reading platform detection for ecommerce brands

Here is how platform detection for ecommerce brands actually gets done, what it costs each way, and where each way stops working. Mamba Labs writes Apify actors for work like this, and Ecommerce Platform Profiler is the one that reads ecommerce brands.

Where this starts

Ecommerce brands frustrate platform detection, for a reason specific to them. Ecommerce brands live and die on platform choice, and the platform is visible in the page source, which shapes platform detection. What catches people out on ecommerce brands, platform detection included: a headless build hides the platform completely, and headless correlates with the biggest merchants. If you would rather try it than read about it, Ecommerce Platform Profiler does platform detection for ecommerce brands today.

Doing it end to end

  1. Start with one of ecommerce brands you already know, so a wrong platform detection answer is obvious rather than plausible.
  2. Run Ecommerce Platform Profiler across your list of ecommerce brands, which carries 2 ready made setups for platform detection.
  3. Read ten rows of platform detection on ecommerce brands by hand before you trust the rest of the list.

Traditional Search Tools

  • Wappalyzer, for ecommerce brands. Free as an extension, cheap as an API, and it will still miss the headless ones.
  • Wappalyzer. A browser extension that answers this instantly and free for occasional use. It has an API and a list price when you want it in bulk.
  • BuiltWith. Deeper history and lists of sites by technology, which is the reverse lookup and often the more useful direction. Priced as a data product.
  • Store directories. The app stores of the major platforms publish merchant lists. A ready made list of confirmed users, for free.
  • View source. Open the site, view source, search for the platform's signature. Thirty seconds if you know the signatures, and they are all documented publicly.

Preconfigured tasks

A task is one of these actors with the inputs already filled in for a specific version of this job. Open one, swap in your own list, and run it without setting anything up from scratch.