Undercart Research · 2026

The State of Shopify
Tech Stacks 2026

We looked at every app, pixel, and payment tool running on 1,041 established Shopify storefronts. The typical brand runs 9 apps — but the software a store adds as it scales tells you more about its revenue than almost anything on the page.

Sample: 1,041 enriched storefrontsData pulled July 2, 2026By Undercart
1,041
Storefronts analyzed
Enriched, live Shopify stores
10.1
Apps on the average store
Median 9 · up to 38
92%
Email stores on Klaviyo
Of stores running a dedicated email platform
82.5%
Run ads + analytics
The near-universal growth baseline
The headline finding

The bigger the brand, the bigger the stack.

Tech-stack size scales cleanly with estimated revenue. Shopify stores estimated under $100K/year run an average of 2.1 apps; stores estimated at $10M+/year run an average of 10.8 — more than five times as many.

The gradient is monotonic across every band we measured: more revenue, more software, with no plateau in sight. A brand's app count is one of the cleanest revenue tells in the storefront.

Average apps installed, by estimated annual revenue
  • < $100K2.0
  • $100K – $1M5.4
  • $1M – $10M7.3
  • $10M+10.8

n = <$100K 22 · $100K–$1M 12 · $1M–$10M 131 · $10M+ 872

Most-used apps

Google and Meta own the pipes. Klaviyo owns the inbox.

Google Analytics leads every install, on 80.2% of stores, followed by Google Ads (74.3%) and the Meta Pixel (70.9%). Advertising and measurement are effectively table stakes.

The first non-Google, non-Meta tool on the list is Klaviyo, running on 58.4% of all stores — and on 92% of stores that run any dedicated email platform. No other category has a leader that dominant.

PayPal (56.2%) is the most common payment method after Shopify's own checkout, and Microsoft Clarity (41.5%) has quietly become the second-most-common analytics tool.

Top apps — share of 1,041 storefronts
  • Google Analytics80.2%
  • Google Ads74.3%
  • Meta Pixel70.9%
  • Google Tag Manager61.4%
  • Klaviyo58.4%
  • PayPal56.2%
  • Microsoft Clarity41.5%
  • Microsoft Ads34.3%
  • Judge.me31.8%
  • TikTok Pixel20.6%
  • Yotpo18%
  • Pinterest Tag15.9%
  • Hotjar14.7%
  • Gorgias13.4%
  • Attentive13%
  • Klarna6%
Category leaders

A handful of apps have their categories on lock.

In four of the highest-value categories, a single app captures somewhere between a third and nearly all of every store that runs one. These are the defaults merchants reach for first.

92.4%
Klaviyo
of stores running email marketing software (608 of 658)
75%
Attentive
of stores running SMS marketing software (135 of 180)
49.8%
Gorgias
of stores running customer support software (139 of 279)
47.5%
Judge.me
of stores running product reviews software (331 of 697)
What separates the scale-ups

Acquisition tools are universal. Retention tools are what big brands add.

Comparing $10M+/year stores against $1M–$10M/year stores, advertising (90% vs 85%) and product reviews (69% vs 71%) are adopted early and almost equally. They don't separate the winners.

The retention and lifecycle stack does. $10M+ stores are 3.2× more likely to run SMS marketing (19.6% vs 6.1%), 3.4× more likely to run a loyalty program (18.0% vs 5.3%), and 2.6× more likely to run a dedicated helpdesk (30.1% vs 11.5%) than mid-market stores.

The pattern is consistent: brands buy acquisition software to get off the ground, then layer on retention software to grow past the mid-market.

Category adoption by revenue band
$10M+/yr stores$1M–$10M/yr stores
  • SMS marketing
    19.6%
    6.1%
  • Loyalty & rewards
    18%
    5.3%
  • Customer support
    30.1%
    11.5%
  • Email marketing
    67.1%
    45%
  • Subscriptions
    9.2%
    6.9%
  • Product reviews
    68.6%
    71%
  • Advertising
    89.8%
    84.7%
Enterprise tells

Some apps almost never appear below $10M.

Across our sample, 83.8% of enriched stores estimate at $10M+/year, so any single app's baseline odds of belonging to a large brand are about 84.1%. These tools blow past that baseline — when you see them, you're almost certainly looking at a scaled brand:

Klarnapayments
100%
Bazaarvoicereviews
100%
Zendesksupport
100%
Nostopersonalization
100%
Consentmoprivacy
100%
Trustpilotreviews
98.3%
Tapcartmobile app
98%
LoyaltyLionloyalty
98.4%
Global-ecross-border
96.8%
AttentiveSMS
97%

% = share of each app's users that estimate at $10M+/year. Apps shown have ≥30 users in the sample.

How the stack fits together

Every serious stack starts with the same two categories.

82.5% of storefronts run both an analytics tool and an advertising pixel — 859 of 1,041 stores. It is the single most common pairing in ecommerce, and the foundation nearly every larger stack is built on.

Add product reviews and you have the most common full stack outright: Ads + Analytics + Reviews. Email and payments come next as stores mature.

Most common category combinations
  • Ads + Analytics + Reviews49
  • Ads + Analytics48
  • Ads + Analytics + Email + Reviews18
  • Ads + Analytics + Email + Payments + Reviews15
  • Ads + Analytics + Email + Payments14
Adoption by category

Where the software actually goes.

Share of 1,041 storefronts running ≥1 app in each category
  • Analytics88.8%
  • Advertising & pixels87%
  • Product reviews67%
  • Email marketing63.2%
  • Payments & BNPL59.7%
  • Conversion & merchandising39%
  • Customer support26.8%
  • Operations & consent23.2%
  • SMS marketing17.3%
  • Loyalty & rewards15.9%
  • Shipping & returns13.4%
  • Subscriptions8.9%
Shopify plan

When you can see the plan, it's almost always Plus.

A store's Shopify plan is only detectable from the public storefront for about 11% of our sample (115 of 1,041stores expose the checkout-extensibility markers that reveal it).

Among those, 95.7% are on Shopify Plus. The markers that leak a plan are the same enterprise features that Plus unlocks — so a detectable plan is itself a strong signal a store is large.

95.7%
of detectable plans are Shopify Plus
110 Plus · 3 Advanced · 2 Basic, of 115 stores with a readable plan
Methodology

How we built this.

The sample

1,041 live Shopify storefronts that Undercart had fully enriched as of July 2, 2026, with crawls spanning June 25 – July 2, 2026. We excluded domains flagged as likely non-stores and any soft-deleted records. 872 of the 1,041 stores carry a revenue estimate, which is what the revenue-band cuts are computed on.

How tech is detected

Undercart fetches each store's live HTML (including Google Tag Manager container scripts) and matches it against a library of ~300 app, pixel, theme, and payment signatures. Each detected app is filed into a category. A store "runs" an app if that signature is active on its storefront.

How revenue is estimated

Revenue is a composite estimate combining catalog size and pricing, review velocity, advertising presence, social reach, and the detected tech stack, confidence-weighted and benchmarked against a truth set of stores with known revenue. Bands are annual: under $100K, $100K–$1M, $1M–$10M, and $10M+.

Scope & limitations

This is not a random sample of all Shopify stores. Undercart enriches established, discoverable brands, so the set skews large: 83.8% estimate at $10M+/year. Read every figure as describing notable, established Shopify storefronts, not the long tail of new or dormant shops. The sub-$1M bands are small (34 stores), so cross-band comparisons lean on the well-populated $1M–$10M and $10M+ cohorts.

About the data

This report is a slice of what Undercart tracks on every Shopify store.

Undercart maintains a live index of Shopify merchants — revenue estimates, full tech stacks, ad signals, social reach, and contact data, re-crawled nightly. The numbers in this report come straight out of that index. If you want this depth on a specific store, a competitor set, or the whole market, that's the product.

Cite as: Undercart, “The State of Shopify Tech Stacks 2026,” July 2, 2026. undercart.co/reports/shopify-tech-stacks-2026