Shopify’s Admin API can pull product data too, but it needs an app, OAuth approval from the store owner, and an access token - overkill for a one-off export, and not something you can do on a store you don’t manage.

This tool sidesteps all of that by reading /products.json, the same public, unauthenticated feed themes use to render a store’s pages. There’s no key to request, no app to register in the Partner Dashboard, and no permission screen for a store owner to approve.

The trade-off is that you only get what’s public: live products and their storefront-visible fields, not draft products or exact inventory counts. For most export and migration jobs, that’s exactly what’s needed.

It’s worth knowing the trade-off runs both ways: an API key with the right scopes could also read draft products and exact inventory levels, neither of which the public feed exposes. For a published, live catalog, though, the public feed already has everything most exports and migrations actually need, with none of the setup an API key requires.