OpenData / Methodology
How every store is verified — and the audit numbers.
Anyone can claim a big store database. This page shows how OpenData's records are actually produced — where candidate stores come from, how each one is verified, what a record keeps as proof — and publishes the measured quality figures from our latest warehouse audit, dated 15 November 2026.
23,984,359 domains scanned · 1,504,744 verified stores · quality audit 15 November 2026How stores are found and verified
Signal-first discovery
Candidates come from public signals that a store exists — certificate-transparency logs, Common Crawl captures, DNS fingerprints and public storefront directories. We start from evidence a store is there, never from bought or brokered lists, and never from another vendor's database.
Live-visit verification
Each candidate storefront is fetched and read directly. A store counts as verified only when the visit — or an archived public capture of the same storefront — exposes at least one ecommerce technology. One visit per store in the current re-verification pass: alive or dead, HTTP status, final URL, platform, and the contact details the store itself publishes.
Fingerprint detection
A library of 5,966 detection rules reads the signals the page actually exposes — platform, storefront technologies, apps and payment gateways: 1,807 technologies and 202 apps detected so far. If a signal is not visible, we record nothing; we never guess an app or a gateway into a record.
Provenance & monthly refresh
Every record keeps its source URL and the date it was last observed, so any row can be audited back to the public page it came from. The published snapshot is refreshed monthly, and verification results merge into the database only after they pass the gate — a record is never downgraded by a later, weaker observation.
What we cannot see: apps that run only inside a store's admin, checkout-only extensions and email tools leave no storefront trace. No outside tool can see them, and we never guess. We describe data as last-verified on its observation date, never as live.
Quality audit — 15 November 2026
Measured directly from the production warehouse on the audit date; the counting rules are the same ones the site's published totals use. Figures that cannot be measured are not estimated — they are left out.
Re-verification pass (still running)
A full re-verification pass is re-visiting the verified index store by store. As of this audit, 129,178 stores have completed the re-verification and had their results merged back into the warehouse (counted from the merge provenance records). Results merge only after the verification gate confirms them, and a weaker later observation never downgrades an existing record. The pass is still running; its raw screening tallies are kept by the screening pipeline itself and are not published until the pass completes.
How fresh is the verified index?
Last-observed dates of the 1,504,744 verified stores — the most recent storefront scan recorded on each store’s master record — by days before the audit date:
| Last observed | Verified stores | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Within 30 days | 1,504,588 | 99.99% |
| 31–90 days ago | 0 | 0.0% |
| 91–180 days ago | 0 | 0.0% |
| More than 180 days ago | 0 | 0.0% |
| No scan date on the master record | 156 | 0.01% |
Contact coverage
| Public contact found | Verified stores | Share of verified |
|---|---|---|
| Business email | 205,297 | 9.8% |
| Phone number | 111,859 | 5.8% |
| Social profile | 92,494 | 6.1% |
| At least one contact of any kind | 272,395 | 13.1% |
| Platform/technology record, no contacts | 1,232,349 | 86.9% |
Contact coverage is deliberately honest: most verified stores publish no business email at all, and we record a blank rather than inventing one. Stores with platform evidence but no public contact are sold separately, clearly labelled as technology-only records.
Coverage by platform
| Platform | Verified stores | With public email | Email share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Squarespace | 393,273 | 59,632 | 15.2% |
| WooCommerce | 374,284 | 48,041 | 12.8% |
| Wix | 345,756 | 10,986 | 3.2% |
| Shopify | 269,688 | 71,250 | 26.4% |
| BigCommerce | 3,307 | 707 | 21.4% |
| EasyStore | 1,186 | 204 | 17.2% |
| Other platforms | 117,250 | 14,477 | 12.3% |
Contact quality & compliance
Only what stores publish themselves
Every email, phone number and social profile in the database was published by the store itself, on its own public pages, as its way to be contacted. Each address's mail-server (MX) record is checked before the address is kept, and addresses that are clearly not the store's own — vendor demo and sample addresses — are filtered out during verification, and counted, never silently merged.
No bought or leaked data
We scan public pages ourselves and keep the source and observation date for every record. We do not purchase, copy or ingest third-party store databases, broker lists or leaked data — in any tier, at any price.
Removal honoured, permanently
Any business can have its record removed via the data removal page — removal is completed within 48 hours, and removed domains go on a permanent suppression list so they are never re-added.
Nothing behind a wall
Nothing behind a login, paywall or access control is ever collected, and no consumer or shopper data of any kind is recorded — only public business facts about stores.
Verify it yourself
Do not take this page's word for any of it. The free store checker looks up any store in the index — free accounts get 30 full-record unlocks a month, each showing the record, its source URL and its last-observed date. For deliverability testing, our public sample repository includes sample-100-unmasked.csv — 100 full records with unmasked business emails, published so anyone can test the addresses themselves before buying anything.