Ammar Mohamed on Store Leads and Building Better Ecommerce Lead Lists
Michael talks about Store Leads all the time, so he brought on Ammar Mohamed to go deeper. Ammar handles sales, marketing and support at Store Leads, a database of ecommerce stores. He explains how the product grew mostly through word of mouth, shares the list-building reports he used as a Shopify Plus sales rep, and previews the integrations coming next.
Watch the episode
Topics covered
- What Store Leads is and who uses it
- Ammar's role and how he found the tool at Google
- Why Store Leads spreads by word of mouth
- Retention and month-to-month pricing
- Buying-signal reports from his time selling Shopify Plus
- Relevance over heavy personalization
- Upcoming Zapier, CRM and personal data integrations
Key takeaways
- Store Leads crawls the internet daily for ecommerce stores and publishes its findings every Sunday. At recording it had almost 11 million leads.
- Its data includes product counts, product types, estimated monthly sales and installed apps, so you can build very specific lists.
- Stores that recently re-platformed are a strong signal. They need a new tech stack, and their SEO often takes a hit.
- New stores with a large social following are often established brands going direct to consumer for the first time.
- Upgrades to Shopify Plus, new enterprise tools, and newly installed TikTok, Facebook, Google or LinkedIn pixels all show intent.
- Be relevant at scale by referencing recent events instead of over-personalizing every email.
- Store Leads lists generic contact emails, not personal data. Pair it with a personal data vendor like Apollo for decision makers.
Show notes
🛒 The Yellow Pages of ecommerce
Ammar describes Store Leads as a crawler that looks for every ecommerce store it can find around the world, sorts them into a database and publishes the results every Sunday. It tracks how many products a store has, what it sells, roughly how much it makes per month and which apps it has installed. Customers include agencies and tech companies that serve ecommerce stores, as well as analysts and investors who keep an eye on stores and platforms like Shopify, Magento and WooCommerce.
“store leads is like the Yellow Pages of e-commerce websites it's like the Zoom info of e-commerce”
Ammar Mohamed, 0:25
🗣️ Growth by word of mouth
Ammar first found Store Leads late one night at the Google office, and downloaded a roughly seven gigabyte CSV of leads. He says most growth has come from word of mouth, and the company is only now getting into paid marketing. Users love it and recommend it to friends, but they often don't want competitors to find out. So referrals tend to come with a "don't tell anybody" nudge.
Michael says about six people at his company log in every day. Ammar says retention depends on company size. Bigger agencies and tech companies tend to stay on, while small one or two person agencies sign up on and off. There's no long-term commitment, and he thinks the price relative to the value is another reason people refer it.
“there's something secretive and low-key and underground about store leads that I think a lot of people love”
Ammar Mohamed, 3:34
📈 The Shopify Plus playbook
At Shopify, Ammar's job was to upgrade merchants to Shopify Plus. He'd watch for accounts that had just hit a million dollars in sales that year and call to tell them they qualified. People were excited, because qualifying came with status, a bit like being offered an American Express black card. When that pool dried up, he looked for accounts that might soon hit a million: big or fast-growing social followings, a great sales day or hour, or press features.
🔍 Reports worth building
Ammar shares the reports he thinks every sales and marketing person going after ecommerce should know about:
- Recently re-platformed stores. Someone leaving Magento for Shopify may be tired of upkeep and custom code. Someone going the other way may want more flexibility. Either way they need a new tech stack, and SEO often suffers. You can set this up as an automatic weekly report and filter it, for example by category or social following.
- Recently created stores with a big social following. Many new stores are hobbyists without budget. But a subset are established brands, like a wholesale clothing brand going direct to consumer for the first time, bringing their fans, staff and inventory.
- Recent Shopify Plus upgrades. A sign the store is growing and doing well.
- New technology installs. Expensive tools like Salesforce Commerce Cloud, or new TikTok, Facebook, Google or LinkedIn pixels and Google Tag Manager, show intent to invest in marketing.
He uses the LinkedIn pixel as an example. If a store just installed it, you can pitch help with a channel that has a steep learning curve and tricky conversion tracking. His broader point is to be relevant at scale by referencing recent events, rather than spending time over-personalizing every email.
🔌 What's coming next
Ammar is most excited about a Zapier integration. For example, a Slack channel could ping you when a store installs a competitor's app, or a "hot leads" channel could alert you when a store in your territory tips over an estimated $100,000 a month in sales. Tech companies could get alerts when existing customers upgrade to a plan that unlocks one of their features.
Store Leads already integrates with HubSpot and Salesforce, and Ammar says Close and Pipedrive have been requested. Longer term, he wants Store Leads to cover all ecommerce data, including product data.
He also explains that Store Leads only collects generic emails and phone numbers, such as info@ or support@ addresses from a site's footer or contact page, and strips out personal emails. Those work for small companies but not for a brand like Nike. So Store Leads is integrating with personal data vendors. Apollo was already integrated, so you can set rules like "find the CEO, then the VP of marketing, then a sales manager", with more vendors planned.
“any email address is better than none”
Ammar Mohamed, 16:07
About Ammar Mohamed
Ammar Mohamed works at Store Leads, a lean company that has been around since 2019. He handles what he calls any customer or revenue activity: sales, one-to-one demos, marketing, paid ads, webinars, partnerships, trade shows and all of the support.
Before joining full time, Ammar was a Store Leads user. He found it while working as a sales rep at Google. Earlier he worked at Shopify, selling Shopify Plus, which is where he learned to build the kind of lead reports he describes in this episode. He also runs a YouTube channel with list-building ideas.
Episode links
Want cold email that books meetings without the guesswork?
Michael’s team at DFY Meetings has worked with 500+ companies and booked 5k+ calls.
Book a call →