How to Keep an Eye on Your Ecommerce Competitors
In the fiercely competitive world of ecommerce, staying ahead of the game requires you keeping a keen eye on your competitors. Understanding what your rivals are doing, how they're doing it, and analyzing their strategies is essential for maintaining a competitive edge no matter what products you’re selling.
When it comes to selling online, you need to remain on the ball. Recognizing trends, highlighting the right products, and finding new ways of making yourself stand out are all important, but it’s essential that you don’t get too caught up in your own strategy and overlook what your competitors are doing.
As much as it’s essential to develop a strategy that works for your business, understanding your competitors gives you a competitive advantage. By analyzing their strengths and weaknesses, you can identify opportunities to differentiate yourself and get one step ahead.
But how? Here are 4 ways of keeping your eye on the competition.
1. Keep track of their pricing strategies
The way you price your items could be the difference between securing a sale or sending them to your competitors, who might offer better value for money or more enticing discounts and promotions. Making everything as cheap as possible isn’t always the best strategy, but you do need to stay competitive in order to drive conversions and revenue — this is why it’s so important to monitor your competitors’ prices and adapt your pricing strategy accordingly.
Of course, monitoring each competitor’s website one-by-one is a mammoth task, but web scraping tools can help you collect pricing data from multiple sites without such hassle. A tool such as ScrapingBee, for example, will enable you to extract the data you need and download it for your own analysis. Using this data, you can then determine whether your products are priced competitively and make adjustments if required.
2. Monitor customer feedback and reviews
What are customers saying about your competitors? Do they like what they’re offering? Are there common gripes and pain points? Monitoring customer feedback and reviews for similar businesses can help you understand customer sentiment around your competitors. This is valuable information that can help you identify opportunities to improve your own products, address customer concerns, and fill gaps in the market.
To do this, start analyzing public review platforms, product reviews, social media mentions, and industry-specific forums. Customers are rarely afraid to share their honest thoughts — particularly if they’ve had a negative experience — so use this to your advantage by taking on board their feedback and applying it to your own business.
3. Keep an eye on their social media presence
It’s a good idea to follow your competitor's social media accounts, or at least keep an eye on them regularly. Social media is a big asset for ecommerce businesses. Creating a social media buzz around one of your star products could cause demand to skyrocket, while platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter also provide a way to build your brand profile and create a sense of community.
To perform competitor social media analysis, monitor their social media activities to gain insights into their social content strategy. This can provide valuable information about their audience preferences, product launches, and promotional tactics. Then, you can fine-tune your own social plan to engage with your target audience effectively and identify opportunities to stand out.
4. Analyze their website traffic and rankings
SEO is a big part of how well your ecommerce store performs, and similar businesses are competing against each other for the best spot among search engine results pages (SERPs). If you’re targeting specific keywords, for example, take a look at whether your competitors are ranking for the same keywords or something different — you might find that they’re ranking for niche or long-tail keywords you hadn’t even considered.
You can use a tool such as Ahrefs to perform regular SEO competitor analysis. You can identify competitors by analyzing which sites are ranking for similar keywords, then perform actions such as determining which keywords are driving their traffic and assessing how many backlinks your competitors have in comparison to yours. You can also identify your competitors’ most popular content and uncover any gaps in your own content.
Ecommerce is an ever-changing landscape, but monitoring your competitors will keep you in the loop and help you uncover new ways of improving your business. Remember to keep an eye on your competitors’ pricing strategies, monitor customer feedback, track their social media activity, and assess their SEO performance.
When it comes to selling online, you need to remain on the ball. Recognizing trends, highlighting the right products, and finding new ways of making yourself stand out are all important, but it’s essential that you don’t get too caught up in your own strategy and overlook what your competitors are doing.
As much as it’s essential to develop a strategy that works for your business, understanding your competitors gives you a competitive advantage. By analyzing their strengths and weaknesses, you can identify opportunities to differentiate yourself and get one step ahead.
But how? Here are 4 ways of keeping your eye on the competition.
1. Keep track of their pricing strategies
The way you price your items could be the difference between securing a sale or sending them to your competitors, who might offer better value for money or more enticing discounts and promotions. Making everything as cheap as possible isn’t always the best strategy, but you do need to stay competitive in order to drive conversions and revenue — this is why it’s so important to monitor your competitors’ prices and adapt your pricing strategy accordingly.
Of course, monitoring each competitor’s website one-by-one is a mammoth task, but web scraping tools can help you collect pricing data from multiple sites without such hassle. A tool such as ScrapingBee, for example, will enable you to extract the data you need and download it for your own analysis. Using this data, you can then determine whether your products are priced competitively and make adjustments if required.
2. Monitor customer feedback and reviews
What are customers saying about your competitors? Do they like what they’re offering? Are there common gripes and pain points? Monitoring customer feedback and reviews for similar businesses can help you understand customer sentiment around your competitors. This is valuable information that can help you identify opportunities to improve your own products, address customer concerns, and fill gaps in the market.
To do this, start analyzing public review platforms, product reviews, social media mentions, and industry-specific forums. Customers are rarely afraid to share their honest thoughts — particularly if they’ve had a negative experience — so use this to your advantage by taking on board their feedback and applying it to your own business.
3. Keep an eye on their social media presence
It’s a good idea to follow your competitor's social media accounts, or at least keep an eye on them regularly. Social media is a big asset for ecommerce businesses. Creating a social media buzz around one of your star products could cause demand to skyrocket, while platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter also provide a way to build your brand profile and create a sense of community.
To perform competitor social media analysis, monitor their social media activities to gain insights into their social content strategy. This can provide valuable information about their audience preferences, product launches, and promotional tactics. Then, you can fine-tune your own social plan to engage with your target audience effectively and identify opportunities to stand out.
4. Analyze their website traffic and rankings
SEO is a big part of how well your ecommerce store performs, and similar businesses are competing against each other for the best spot among search engine results pages (SERPs). If you’re targeting specific keywords, for example, take a look at whether your competitors are ranking for the same keywords or something different — you might find that they’re ranking for niche or long-tail keywords you hadn’t even considered.
You can use a tool such as Ahrefs to perform regular SEO competitor analysis. You can identify competitors by analyzing which sites are ranking for similar keywords, then perform actions such as determining which keywords are driving their traffic and assessing how many backlinks your competitors have in comparison to yours. You can also identify your competitors’ most popular content and uncover any gaps in your own content.
Ecommerce is an ever-changing landscape, but monitoring your competitors will keep you in the loop and help you uncover new ways of improving your business. Remember to keep an eye on your competitors’ pricing strategies, monitor customer feedback, track their social media activity, and assess their SEO performance.
