E-commerce detection
How DomainCare passively detects Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, and other store platforms — and custom-built shops — on add and on demand.
E-commerce detection
DomainCare runs a passive e-commerce fingerprint when you add a domain (and on demand via the Re-detect button on the per-domain page — one button refreshes both the CMS and e-commerce fingerprints). The result surfaces as a badge above the status hero: the platform name when we recognize it, or "Online store" when the site behaves like a shop on a custom or unrecognized stack. E-commerce detection is metadata, not a recurring check — it doesn't run on a schedule and doesn't fire alerts.
Why this exists
Knowing a domain sells is context that changes how you read everything else DomainCare tells you: an SSL warning or a blacklist hit costs a store money in a way it doesn't cost a blog. It also makes inherited infrastructure visible — operators often don't know what platform the previous contractor built on.
What we look for
Three tiers, in order. The same single homepage request that powers CMS detection feeds the first two.
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Platform fingerprints — headers and HTML signatures for Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento / Adobe Commerce, BigCommerce, PrestaShop, OpenCart, Ecwid, and Shopware. First match wins.
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Store behavior signals (for custom-built shops) — scored, never single-signal:
- Strong:
Productstructured data with offers (JSON-LD or microdata),og:type=product/ price meta tags, add-to-cart buttons. - Supporting: cart/checkout links in navigation, payment SDK scripts (Stripe, PayPal, Klarna, Adyen, and others), cart cookies, visible price density.
- Detection requires two strong signals, or one strong plus a supporting one. A blog with a Stripe donate button will not read as a store.
- Strong:
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Sitemap structure — product-named child sitemaps (
sitemap_products_*also identifies Shopify,product-sitemap.xmlWooCommerce) and clusters of commerce-path URLs (/product/,/shop/,/store/,/collections/) in the sitemap. Blog-style/category/archives deliberately don't count. A large cluster (20+) is treated as decisive; smaller clusters count as supporting evidence. At most one child sitemap is fetched, and the sitemap URL already discovered by the sitemap check is reused when available.
If nothing clears the bar, the badge stays hidden — absence of the badge means "no reliable store signal", not "definitely not a store".
Re-detecting
The Re-detect button re-runs both fingerprints and updates both badges. Use it after a platform migration. If the site answers but no signal clears the bar anymore, the badges clear; if the site is unreachable (network error, site down), the last-known badges are kept rather than wiped.
Privacy
Detection is passive — DomainCare only reads what your site already returns publicly: the homepage, robots.txt, and the sitemap. No login, no exploitation, no parameter probing, no crawling beyond a single sitemap file.