PPSpy in Algeria: what a store spy tool can and cannot tell you
PPSpy reads public Shopify stores and estimates how much each one sells. It costs 39 to 299 US dollars a month, and the stores it tracks almost never deliver to an Algerian door.
DZBuild publishes this article. We sell an Algerian store platform, so we are one of the options near the end. Every PPSpy, DSers and Shopify figure below was read from that company's own page on 7 September 2026, and the links are in the last section.
What PPSpy is and what it reads
PPSpy is a website with a browser extension. You paste in a store address and it reads what that store already publishes in the open.
It reads Shopify stores. Not WooCommerce, not a store built on an Algerian platform, not an Instagram shop.
For one store it will show you the products, the prices, the theme, the apps installed, and an estimate of sales. Its home page, read on 7 September 2026, claims "1M+ Active Shopify Store" and "200M+ Shopify Product", and says more than 130,000 merchants use it.
The tool is real and it does what it says. The question worth asking is which stores it reads.
Where its sales numbers come from
PPSpy does not see anyone's bank account. It never claims to.
Its own home page says the tool uses a "proprietary AI powered algorithm" that "predicts order data". The verb on their page is predicts.
Beyond that sentence they do not publish the method. So there is nothing you can check the estimate against, and no way to know how far off it lands on any one store.
Read a revenue figure there as a guess in a confident font. It tells you a product is moving somewhere. It is not a receipt, and nobody in Algeria has verified it against a real store.
What it costs and how you would pay from Algeria
These prices were read from PPSpy's own pricing page on 7 September 2026.
| Plan | Per month | Per year | Roughly per month in dinars |
|---|---|---|---|
| Standard | 39 US dollars | 328 US dollars | about 5,200 DZD |
| Pro | 99 US dollars | 832 US dollars | about 13,200 DZD |
| Business | 299 US dollars | 2,512 US dollars | about 39,800 DZD |
The dinar column uses 1 US dollar = 133.20 DZD, the rate published by open.er-api.com on 7 September 2026. Dollars usually cost an Algerian buyer more than the published rate, so treat that column as a floor.
You can register with an email and try the tool without a card. Their home page says so plainly.
Their subscription and refund page, read the same day, adds three things you want to know before you register. Fees are charged in US dollars. Monthly and yearly fees are not refunded, even if you cancel and never open the account again. And if you did give a card, the free trial becomes a charge unless you cancel it first.
Paying at all needs a card that works outside Algeria. CIB and EDAHABIA are domestic cards, so most merchants here stop at this step.
DSers, the other tool that shows up in the same searches, is priced the same way. Free Basic plan, then 19.90, 49.90 and 499.90 US dollars a month, with a 14 day trial, read from dsers.com/pricing on 7 September 2026.
Why it shows you almost no Algerian stores
The first reason is simple. PPSpy reads Shopify, so anything an Algerian merchant sells on another platform is invisible to it.
The second reason is the one that matters. Shopify's own payment product is not offered here. Its help page listing the supported countries, read on 7 September 2026, does not include Algeria.
That leaves a Shopify checkout with no easy way to collect money from a buyer here. Most buyers here expect to pay cash to the delivery man instead.
We did not count how many Algerian stores run on Shopify, and we will not print a number we cannot stand behind. The payment page is the part you can open and check for yourself.
So the stores PPSpy ranks for you are selling somewhere else, to buyers who pay before the parcel moves. That single difference changes what their numbers mean for you.
What it cannot see about a cash on delivery buyer
Here an order is a promise, not a sale. The sale happens at the door, days later, when someone counts out the cash.
A lot fits in that gap. The confirmation call you have to make. The buyer who never answers. The parcel refused on the doorstep. The return trip you pay for anyway.
No spy tool sees any of it. On a prepaid store abroad the gap is thin, so ignoring it costs that merchant little. Here the gap is most of the business.
A product can look excellent in PPSpy and still lose you money, for one plain reason. Too many people say yes on the phone and no at the door.
The full list of what a store dashboard can measure on delivered orders is in our analytics documentation. You do not need an account to read it.
What the free research method already covers
Before paying 5,200 DZD a month, use the free tools that look at Algerian buyers instead of American ones.
Meta's Ad Library shows which ads are running here and how long each has been running. Google Trends shows whether interest is climbing or already gone. Ouedkniss and Facebook Marketplace show what is being sold locally today, and at what price.
We wrote that method out step by step in picking products from data, so this article does not repeat it. If you want categories rather than a method, they are in what sells online in Algeria.
None of that costs a dollar, and all of it points at the market you actually deliver to. If you also want the dollar side of the Shopify question, we priced it in what Shopify really costs in Algeria.
Which numbers actually decide a product here
Four numbers decide whether a product is worth keeping, and no external tool can produce any of them for you. They come from your own orders.
Delivered revenue. Money from orders that reached the buyer, not orders that were placed. A DZBuild dashboard counts revenue this way, on the day the parcel was delivered.
Profit against your real cost. You type a cost price on the product, and profit is measured against it rather than against a guess.
Returned count per product. The inventory page keeps a running sold total and a running returned total for each product. That second column is the one that separates a product with a problem from a product nobody wants.
Where and when the orders come from. Top wilayas, orders by hour and top products, plus a source icon on every single order. That icon is worked out from the ad link the buyer clicked, and from the app or site the visit came from. You see which ad platform produced the order, and which wilaya sends parcels back.
Three limits belong in this same paragraph, not in a footnote. Revenue counts delivered orders only, so a busy Tuesday looks flat until the parcels land. There is no CSV or Excel export of orders or of the charts in the dashboard. The Google Sheets sync is the way around that, and it needs a paid plan.
How to test one product with real orders
This is the test that produces the numbers above. It takes about two weeks and one product.
- Pick one product. One, not a catalogue.
- Write down the cost price and the delivery cost before you start.
- Publish a single page for that product, with the order form on the page.
- Point one ad at that page and nothing else.
- Confirm every order by phone and send the confirmed ones to your courier.
- Stop at 20 deliveries and read three numbers: delivered, returned, and profit after delivery cost.
If returns are high and deliveries are high, the product sells. Something at the door is wrong: the price, the photo, or the promise in the ad. If both are low, the demand is not there and no tool would have told you.
Twenty deliveries is a small sample and one bad wilaya can distort it. Run the same test on a second product before you conclude anything about the first.
A new DZBuild store gets 3 days of Pro with no card asked at signup. That is enough to publish the page and take the first orders. After the 3 days you pick a paid plan, and a store with no plan stops selling. Put in your own cost price and your own wilaya prices. The numbers you read at the end are then yours, not an estimate of someone else's.
Questions people ask about product research tools
Is PPSpy free? There is a free trial you can start with an email and no card. The paid plans start at 39 US dollars a month, read from their page on 7 September 2026.
How much does PPSpy cost per month? 39, 99 or 299 US dollars a month, or 328, 832 and 2,512 US dollars a year. At the 7 September 2026 rate of 133.20 DZD to the dollar, the monthly plans are roughly 5,200, 13,200 and 39,800 DZD.
Is PPSpy accurate? Nobody outside the company can say. Their page describes an algorithm that predicts order data and does not publish the method, so the figures cannot be checked against anything.
Can I pay for PPSpy from Algeria? Only with a card that works outside the country. The fees are charged in US dollars, and the company's refund page says they are not refunded after you are charged.
Can I use it to find Shopify stores selling in Algeria? Very few exist to find. Shopify's payment product is not available in Algeria, so a Shopify checkout cannot easily collect money from a buyer here.
Is DSers the same kind of tool? No. DSers moves AliExpress products into a Shopify store and handles the ordering. PPSpy looks at other people's stores. Both bill in US dollars.
What should an Algerian merchant use instead? The free method first: Ad Library, Google Trends, Ouedkniss and Marketplace. Then your own delivered orders, which is the only data that describes your buyers.
How this was checked
Every figure in this article was read on 7 September 2026 from the page named beside it.
| What | Where | What the page said |
|---|---|---|
| PPSpy plan prices | ppspy.com pricing page | Standard 39 US dollars a month or 328 a year, Pro 99 or 832, Business 299 or 2,512, with a 30% yearly discount |
| PPSpy trial and refunds | ppspy.com subscription and refund policy | Fees in US dollars, monthly or 12 month terms, fees not refundable, trial converts to a charge unless cancelled, one trial per member |
| What PPSpy tracks | ppspy.com home page | Shopify only, "1M+ Active Shopify Store", "200M+ Shopify Product", more than 130,000 merchants, sales predicted by their own algorithm |
| Trial without a card | ppspy.com home page | Free trial offered with the note that no credit card is required |
| DSers prices | dsers.com/pricing | Free Basic plan, then 19.90, 49.90 and 499.90 US dollars a month, 14 day trial on paid plans |
| Shopify payments in Algeria | help.shopify.com supported countries page | Algeria is not on the list of supported countries |
| Dollar to dinar rate | open.er-api.com | 1 US dollar = 133.203966 DZD, updated 7 September 2026 |
The DZBuild features named here were read from our own product documentation and the live dashboard on the same date. We did not count Algerian stores on Shopify. We did not test PPSpy's estimates against a real store, and we publish no return rate for any product. Where a number is missing above, it is missing because we could not verify it.