How to Tell What Ecommerce Platform a Site Is Using

You can identify what eCommerce platform a site uses in under two minutes. All you need is a free browser tool, a quick source code check, or a detection site.

This is useful when analyzing a competitor’s store, planning a migration, or just curious about a site you like. Most guides point you to BuiltWith and stop there. However, detection tools have real blind spots, and some stores actively hide their platforms.

This post covers five methods, ranging from the fastest to the most reliable, including what to do when the obvious tools come up empty.

The Fastest Way: Use a Browser Extension

The quickest way to detect an eCommerce platform is a browser extension. Install it once, and from then on, you get instant results on every site you visit. No copying URLs into a separate tool. No opening new tabs.

Wappalyzer

Wappalyzer is available for Chrome and Firefox. Once installed, it puts a small icon in your browser toolbar. Visit any online store and click the icon. You’ll see the platform, CMS, analytics tools, payment processors, and more, all pulled from the page in real time.

It goes well beyond the eCommerce layer. You’ll often see the WordPress version, which plugins are running, and what CDN is in use. For a developer doing a pre-migration audit, that’s genuinely useful context.

One thing to know: Wappalyzer can miss stores with aggressive caching or headless setups. If the icon shows nothing or gives an unexpected result, move to the manual method below.

BuiltWith Extension

BuiltWith also has a browser extension, though most people use the main site. The extension works the same way: visit a page, click, and get a technology breakdown.

The BuiltWith web app gives you more detail than the extension, including historical data. If you want to know whether a store recently moved from Magento to Shopify, BuiltWith’s technology history tab shows you that. Worth checking when you’re doing serious competitor research.

How to Detect an Ecommerce Platform from the Source Code

This is the method that actually tells you what you’re looking at. It takes about 30 seconds once you know what to look for. No external tool required.

Right-click anywhere on the page and select View Page Source (or press Ctrl+U on Windows, Cmd+Option+U on Mac). A new tab opens showing the raw HTML. Then press Ctrl+F to open the search bar and type one of the strings from the table below.

Platform-by-Platform Source Code Reference

For WooCommerce stores, the /wp-content/plugins/woocommerce/ Path is the most reliable signal. Finding it is near-certain confirmation. The generator tag alone is not enough on its own, since some themes and cache plugins strip it out.

Here’s a practical tip: When we run pre-migration audits on WooCommerce stores at DevDiggers, source code is always the first thing we check. The generator tag disappears in certain configurations. The /wp-content/ folder path rarely does. If you want to go deeper into detecting WordPress specifically, this guide on how to tell if a site runs WordPress covers the full set of signals.

Here’s something worth knowing: WordPress powers around 41.9% of all websites. WooCommerce is the most widely used eCommerce platform in the world. It held about 36% of detected eCommerce sites in 2025, according to the HTTP Archive Web Almanac. If you’re not sure where to start, WooCommerce is statistically your best first guess.

Using the Browser Network Tab for Headless Stores

Some stores use a headless setup. The frontend is custom-built, so the HTML gives away almost nothing. The source code search strings above won’t work.

Here’s the fix. Open your browser’s developer tools with F12, then click the Network tab. Reload the page. Now filter by Fetch/XHR. Browse the store: add a product to the cart, navigate to a product page, and interact with the search bar. Watch the network requests as they fire.

If you see requests going to a myshopify.com/api/ endpoint, the backend is Shopify regardless of how the frontend looks. For WooCommerce, look for calls to /wp-json/wc/ that’s the WooCommerce REST API. For BigCommerce, watch for requests to api.bigcommerce.com.

This matters more now than it did three years ago. A growing number of enterprise brands run a custom React or Next.js frontend over a standard eCommerce backend. The visual clues are gone. The API calls are not.

Check the URL Structure

URL patterns are a quick visual check that needs no tools at all. They’re useful as a first pass, but treat them as a hint rather than a final answer. Most platforms let store owners customise URLs, so the absence of a pattern doesn’t rule anything out.

Here’s what to look for on product and collection pages:

• Shopify: /products/product-name and /collections/collection-name. These are the defaults. The word collection in the URL is a strong Shopify signal.
• WooCommerce: /shop/, /product/product-name/, and ?add-to-cart= in the cart URL, these are common. Also, look for /checkout/ rather than a branded checkout subdomain.
• BigCommerce: /products/product-name/ similar to Shopify, but network requests to cdn-bc.com in the source confirm it.
• Magento: Older Magento installs often use URL keys like /catalog/product/view/id/.
• Wix: Wix URLs often contain .wixsite.com on free plans, or load assets from wixstatic.com even on custom domains.

The footer is also worth checking. Many stores still carry a “Powered by Shopify” or “Powered by WooCommerce” line at the bottom of the page, especially if the theme is lightly modified. It takes five seconds and sometimes saves you the rest of the work.

Use BuiltWith for a Full Technology Report

When you need more than just the platform name, BuiltWith gives you the full picture. Paste a domain into the search bar and you get a full report. It covers the eCommerce platform, analytics setup, email tools, live chat software, CDN, payment processors, and more.

That context is often more useful than knowing the platform alone. Pitching a migration to a potential client? Knowing they’re on WooCommerce 5.x with WP Engine hosting and Klaviyo for email tells you far more than just the platform name.

One limitation to know: BuiltWith can lag on stores that recently migrated or use aggressive server-side caching. If a store moved from Magento to Shopify three months ago, BuiltWith might still show Magento. Always cross-reference with source code or the Network tab when accuracy matters.

W3Techs is another solid option for usage stats and broad platform data. It’s better suited for market research than for checking a specific store.

Thinking about WooCommerce for your own store? Our WooCommerce development services page is a good place to start. It covers what a WooCommerce build actually involves and where we can help.

What to Do When Detection Tools Fail

Some stores are genuinely hard to detect. Heavily customised builds, headless frontends, or stores that strip generator tags and customise URL structures will trip up most tools. Here’s what to try before giving up.

• Check the admin login URL: Visit yourdomain.com/wp-admin. If you land on a WordPress login page, it’s WordPress. Try yourdomain.com/admin for Shopify. BigCommerce uses yourdomain.com/manage. These aren’t always accessible from the outside, but they’re worth trying.
• Look at the favicon: Some platforms embed their logo directly in the default favicon, though this is increasingly rare as brands customise their favicons.
• Try Netcraft: Netcraft analyses hosting and server information. It won’t always tell you the eCommerce platform, but it tells you the web server software, SSL provider, and hosting infrastructure. That often narrows things down, since certain platforms run almost exclusively on specific hosting stacks.
• Accept the limit: A well-built headless store with a custom frontend may genuinely resist detection. That’s not a failure of your method; it’s a signal that the store has been built with real engineering investment. Worth noting when you’re doing competitive analysis, because it changes what you can and can’t learn from the outside.

Most standard stores, though, give themselves away in the first 30 seconds. The source code method, combined with Wappalyzer, catches the vast majority.

Wrapping Up

You can identify most eCommerce platforms in under two minutes using the methods above. For the fastest result, run Wappalyzer first. If you need confirmation or more details, open the page source and search for the platform-specific strings in the table.

For headless stores, the Network tab is your only reliable option. And when everything else is inconclusive, the admin login URL check is worth a quick try.

If what you find on a competitor’s store makes you think about building or improving your own WooCommerce store, our WooCommerce development services in India cover everything from fresh builds to complex migrations.

For a broader context on WordPress for eCommerce, that post covers whether WooCommerce is the right foundation for your store before you commit to anything.

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