By Carson Cobb. Last updated November 2026.
Public signals that help you estimate a store's revenue
Shopify doesn't publish what a store sells, so every outside estimate starts with the formula above. These public signals help you pick sensible inputs and check whether the answer is in the right range.
- Product count. How many products a store sells, and at what prices, tells you a lot about its average order value and how big the business is.
- Review volume and growth. Only some buyers leave a review, so reviews undercount orders. How fast the count grows over a few months is more useful than the total.
- Traffic estimates. Third party traffic tools estimate monthly visits. They're a starting point for the visitors input, and they're least reliable for smaller stores.
- Ad activity. Public ad libraries, like Meta's Ad Library and Google's Ads Transparency Center, show whether a store is running ads and how many. A brand running lots of ads for months is usually selling enough to pay for them.
Why any outside estimate is rough
Each input is a guess. Traffic tools can be off by a wide margin, and conversion rate changes with the product, the price, the season and where the traffic comes from. A small error in each number multiplies in the result, so use the estimate as a range and compare it with the signals above.
How to check your own real numbers in Shopify
For your own store, skip the estimate. In your Shopify admin, open Analytics. You'll see total sales, sessions, conversion rate and average order value, and you can compare any period with the one before it.
If your conversion rate is lower than you'd like, that's the work I do. My conversion optimization page covers how, and the results page shows what it has done for other brands.