Will I lose anything if I drop Apollo?

Depends how you use it. If you only use Apollo for the data, you lose nothing we don't replace, with tighter targeting and verified emails on top. If you also use Apollo's built-in sequencer for sends, you'd swap it for Instantly, Smartlead, or HeyReach. The B2B SaaS half of the database only matters if you also sell outside ecom.

Does Ecom Leads have a sequencer?

No. We ship the list. Outreach runs in your tool of choice.

Is the data more limited than Apollo's?

260M is impressive on paper. In practice, most of those contacts don't have a verified email, don't match what you sell, or have no reason to buy this month. The count that matters is meetings booked, not contacts indexed. We send ~1M ecom-only stores, picked for ICP fit and a buying signal that just fired, with verified contacts. Fewer leads, more meetings.

Can I try before paying?

Yes. The free tier ships 25 hand-picked ecommerce leads every Sunday. No card.

Apollo vs Ecom Leads

Apollo wasn't built for ecommerce. Ecom Leads is.

By Robin Faraj — Co-founder, 11x — we run our own ecom outbound on this exact data and land 30–40% interested reply rates.

Last updated · May 2026

If you've been paying Apollo's per-seat fee to chase ecommerce decision-makers and watching credits burn on contacts that bounce, you're not imagining it. Apollo is a brilliant B2B SaaS database. It wasn't built for ecom. Here's the gap, in plain numbers, and how we close it.

TL;DR

Apollo's database is built around LinkedIn-tagged B2B companies. Ecommerce brands, especially DTC under 50 employees, show up patchy or not at all.

We monitor about a million ecommerce stores daily for buying signals: Shopify Plus upgrade, Klaviyo install, stockout, product launch, or any signal you ask us to add. Every Sunday you get a ready-to-send list of the brands that just gave one.

Each lead ships with verified decision-maker contacts (email, LinkedIn, phone), deBounce-checked under 2% bounce. Real people, not info@.

Our own outbound on this data lands 30–40% interested reply rates. $99/month, flat. One subscription replaces Apollo's per-seat fee and the Storeleads + VA stack you'd add on top.

What Apollo is great at

Apollo is the default for B2B SaaS prospecting. 260M+ contacts, deep LinkedIn enrichment, a sequencer that runs campaigns in the same window where you built the list. If you sell to a head of engineering at a Series B SaaS, Apollo is hard to beat.

Pricing starts at $59/user/month and reaches $99/user on the Professional plan (Cognism's Apollo breakdown). Credit allowances scale per tier.

Where it falls short for ecom

Three structural gaps. Apollo isn't bad at these. It just wasn't built for them.

The data is shaped for B2B, not DTC.
Apollo's strength is people in roles tagged on LinkedIn at companies enriched from tech-employee data. Most ecommerce brands have under 50 employees and don't show up that way. The founder running a $5M Shopify brand may have a one-line LinkedIn that doesn't match the storefront name, or the company isn't in Apollo's enriched set at all. The hit rate is poor where it matters most.
No store-level signal.
Apollo tells you a person exists. It doesn't tell you their store just upgraded to Shopify Plus last week, installed Klaviyo three days ago, or has 461 variants out of stock. Those are the signals that mean a brand is ready to spend, and Apollo wasn't built to surface them.
The pricing scales with your team, not your sends.
$99/user is fine for one seat. With three people doing outbound that's $297/month for the same database, and you still need a tool that knows ecom on top. The math gets worse before it gets better.

See a Sunday drop before you read the rest.

25 free ecom leads, signal-matched, in your inbox this week.

Get 25 free leads

The math: what the stack costs vs us

A small ecom-focused agency typically runs:

Apollo Professional$99/user/month (one seat for the database + sequencer)
Storeleads Pro$250/month (the tier with exports and useful filters)
ClayOptional, $149/month+ for enrichment workflows
VA hours$400–800/month to stitch the tools together (3–4h/week)

Realistic floor: $750+/month before you send a single email. North of $900 with Clay.

Ecom Leads is $99/month, flat. The list arrives ready to send. No VA, no stitching, no per-seat scaling when your team grows.

Tool pricing sourced from each vendor's public pricing pages (Apollo, Storeleads, Clay).

Side by side

Apollo

Ecom Leads

Database focus
Generalist B2B, 260M+ contacts
Ecommerce-only, ~1M stores
Per-store enrichment
Limited
Platform, traffic, app stack, revenue tier
Buying signals
Job changes, funding events
Shopify Plus upgrades, app installs, stockouts, product launches, plus any signal you ask us to watch
Pricing
$59–$99 per user / month
$99 / month, flat
Cadence
Credit pools, you build the list
One weekly drop, ready to send
Email verification
Built-in, varies on ecom
deBounce-verified, under 2% bounce

When to keep Apollo (and add us)

Apollo isn't useless for ecom. Cases where it stays:

You sell to both ecom and non-ecom. Apollo covers non-ecom. We cover ecom.
You want the sequencer in the same tool as the list. Apollo runs the campaigns, we feed the leads.
You already have Apollo and want the ecom data layer added without ripping anything out.

If you only sell to ecommerce, you don't need both. A weekly drop of signal-matched brands with verified contacts is what you'd use Apollo for anyway, without the per-seat fee or the hit-or-miss ecom contact quality.

Questions

Depends how you use it. If you only use Apollo for the data, you lose nothing we don't replace, with tighter targeting and verified emails on top. If you also use Apollo's built-in sequencer for sends, you'd swap it for Instantly, Smartlead, or HeyReach. The B2B SaaS half of the database only matters if you also sell outside ecom.

Try a Sunday drop on us. 25 free leads.

No card. One email a week. See the data before you pay anything.