How to Find Shopify Stores and WordPress Sites for Outreach

If your business sells to a platform — a Shopify app, a WordPress plugin, a theme, or development and marketing services for either — then your ideal prospect list is simply "stores or sites on that platform." The good news is that Shopify and WordPress are two of the most detectable platforms on the web, so building a qualified, platform-specific list is very achievable. This guide covers where to find Shopify stores and WordPress sites, how to verify and qualify them, and how to pitch without becoming the spam everyone deletes.

It is the platform-specific companion to how to find websites using a specific technology and how to build a B2B lead list from a website's tech stack.

Why platform-targeted outreach works

For a platform business, the platform is the whole qualification. A Shopify app maker does not care how large or beautiful a store is if it runs on BigCommerce — it simply cannot install the app. By starting from "is this on my platform?", you guarantee that every prospect can actually buy and use what you sell. That single filter does more for conversion than almost any firmographic, because it eliminates the largest source of wasted outreach: people who could never say yes. Layer a niche or size filter on top and you have a list where relevance is built in.

It helps to confirm you can actually detect these platforms reliably first — see how to tell if a website is built with Shopify and how to tell if a website is built with WordPress for the underlying signals.

Part 1: Finding Shopify stores

There are several complementary sources for Shopify stores, and the best lists combine a few:

• Technology indexes. Tools that maintain a searchable index of detected platforms let you filter directly to Shopify and export. This is the fastest route to volume.
• App-store and theme reviews. Public reviews on the Shopify App Store and theme marketplaces are written by real stores — a rich, pre-qualified source of merchants who actively install apps and themes.
• Niche marketplaces and directories. Many verticals have directories of stores; cross-referencing them with platform detection isolates the Shopify ones.
• Social platforms and ad libraries. Stores that advertise are stores with budget; public ad libraries and shoppable social profiles surface active merchants you can then verify as Shopify.
• Search footprints. Shopify stores share recognisable markers (asset domains and paths), so search operators can surface them at small scale for free.

Once you have candidate domains from any of these, the next step is verification.

Part 2: Finding WordPress sites

WordPress powers a huge share of the web, so the challenge is not finding WordPress sites but finding the right ones. Useful sources include:

• Niche directories and association rosters, cross-referenced with WordPress detection to keep only the WordPress members.
• Plugin and theme showcases. Many commercial plugins and themes publish "sites using us" galleries — instant lists of WordPress sites that already pay for add-ons.
• Hosting customer lists and case studies, which often name the sites a managed WordPress host serves.
• Keyword-based search plus detection: search for the niche, then detect the stack and keep the WordPress results.

Because WordPress is so common, always pair the platform signal with a second qualifier — a niche, a plugin, a size proxy — or the list will be too broad to act on.

Detect and verify at scale

Whatever your sources, run platform detection across the combined candidate list and keep only genuine matches. This step prevents the most damaging outreach mistake: pitching the wrong platform. It also de-duplicates and cleans the list. For a handful of prospects you can verify by hand; for hundreds or thousands, use a tool that analyses sites and exposes the platform in a filterable, exportable form so verification is a filter rather than a chore.

Qualify deeper than "it's on the platform"

Being on the platform gets a prospect onto the list; deeper signals decide who to contact first:

• Plan or tier. A Shopify Plus store or a managed-WordPress enterprise site signals budget; a free-tier or basic setup signals the opposite.
• Installed apps or plugins. What a store has already adopted tells you what it values and where the gaps are — the absence of a tool in your category is often the strongest buying signal.
• Site age and activity. A brand-new store has different needs and budget from an established one; signs of recent updates suggest an active owner.
• Popularity signals. Public traffic-rank estimates and social following give a rough sense of scale to prioritise by.

Each of these turns a flat list into a ranked one, so reps spend their time on the accounts most likely to convert.

Personalise the pitch by platform

Platform context is the easiest, most honest personalisation there is. "I saw you run [theme] on Shopify and noticed you don't yet have [category of tool]" is specific, true and immediately relevant. Tailor the value to what the platform and the installed stack imply: a Plus store cares about different things from a side-hustle store, and a WordPress site running a page builder has different needs from a headless one. Segment your messaging by these distinctions rather than blasting one template, and the response rate follows.

Quality over quantity: how big should the list be?

It is tempting to chase the biggest possible list, but reply rates reward focus, not volume. A tightly qualified list of a few hundred genuinely-fit stores, worked with personalised messages, will almost always out-perform a blast to tens of thousands of loosely-matched domains — and it protects your sending reputation, which mass outreach quietly destroys. Do the arithmetic before you start. If a focused campaign to 300 well-matched prospects books meetings at a few percent, that is a healthy pipeline from a list you can build and personalise in a day. A generic blast at a fraction of that rate burns goodwill, trips spam filters, and damages your domain reputation for months — all for a similar number of meetings. Size the list to how many prospects your team can genuinely research, personalise and follow up with, not to how many domains you can technically collect. The platform and niche filters exist precisely so you can afford to be selective, and that selectivity is the entire advantage of targeting by technology in the first place.

Warm the outreach before you send

Cold does not have to mean abrupt. Because your list is platform-qualified, you have natural ways to warm a prospect before the direct pitch. Engage genuinely with the store's social posts, leave an honest review of an app you both use, or reference something specific about their setup that proves you actually looked rather than mail-merged a template. For agencies and app makers, publishing useful content for the platform — a teardown, a how-to, a free mini-audit — means prospects recognise your name before your email ever lands, which lifts reply rates more than any subject-line trick. Warming takes time, so reserve it for your highest-value accounts and let the broader list run on relevance alone. The point is that a platform-targeted list does not just tell you who to contact; it tells you enough about each prospect to earn that crucial first reply, which is the hardest part of any cold outreach.

Compliance and etiquette

Relevance is half of effective outreach; the other half is respecting the recipient and the law. Follow GDPR (EU/UK), CAN-SPAM (US), CASL (Canada) and the equivalent rules for your audience: identify yourself honestly, state your purpose, offer a genuine and easy opt-out, and use personal data lawfully. Beyond the legal minimum, keep volume sane and messages relevant — platform-targeted outreach earns its keep precisely because it is not mass spam. The list gives you permission to be specific; use it.

Common mistakes

• Pitching the wrong platform because the list was never verified.
• Stopping at "it's on the platform" instead of qualifying by tier, apps and activity.
• Sending one generic template that ignores the very platform signal that qualified the prospect.
• Treating a stale list as current — sites migrate, so re-verify priority accounts before sending.

The workflow

1. Pick the platform that defines your market (Shopify, WordPress, or both).
2. Source candidates from indexes, reviews, directories, showcases and footprints.
3. Detect and verify the platform across the list.
4. Qualify by tier, installed apps or plugins, age and popularity.
5. Personalise by platform and comply with the rules for your audience.

Go deeper

• The general method: how to find websites using a specific technology.
• The full pipeline: how to build a B2B lead list from a website's tech stack.
• Verify the platform: Shopify and WordPress detection.

Build platform-specific lists in minutes: StackOptic analyses sites and lets you filter by platform, apps and audit scores, then export qualified prospects — start free.