Focusing on the needs of your target customers is the same thing when growing an e-commerce business, but that doesn’t mean you can afford to ignore your competitors.
After all, if a dozen other e-commerce businesses are serving the same needs, how are you going to stand out from the crowd? That’s a tall order, especially in a dynamic digital age where customer preferences change at the click of a mouse.
But there is a solution to this conundrum. It’s called an ecommerce competitor analysis, and it could give you the insight you need to differentiate your brand.
This guide will explore everything you need to know about competitor analysis: what it is, how to implement it effectively, and the online tools you can use to give your ecommerce brand a leg up on the competition.
Here’s what we’ll cover:
What is eCommerce Competitor Analysis?
Competitor analysis for e-commerce is the process of collecting and analyzing data about your competitors to gain valuable insights that will help your business gain a competitive advantage in the marketplace.
Essentially, the goal of eCommerce competitor analysis is to develop a deeper understanding of your competitors’ strengths, weaknesses, and strategies. Done well, competitor analysis can give you the insights you need to implement strategies that will put your brand in an ideal position to increase its market share.
How to Conduct Ecommerce Competitor Analysis
Like any other strategy, conducting competition research requires a systematic approach for stronger impact. Here are the steps to follow when conducting e-commerce research on your competitors:
Step 1: Identify your competitors
First, you need to determine which brands you are competing against. After all, you can’t track and measure your progress if you don’t have a list of competitors to measure against.
To be clear, your competitors are those companies that target the same audience as yours and operate in the same market space.
How do you find these competitors? The obvious answer is to use Google and search for keywords related to your offerings and industry. But there is a faster and more efficient way.
Using market intelligence tools like Crunchbase, Owler, and ZoomInfo, you can create a comprehensive list of competitors and gather relevant data about them within an hour.
With Crunchbase, for example, you can search for companies with the tool’s advanced search feature, refine your search using the tool’s filters, and get refined search results based on what you’re looking for.
As you collect your data, be sure to create a spreadsheet listing each competitor, along with their product offerings, best features, strengths and weaknesses, and marketing approaches.
Step 2: Conduct Competitor Keyword Analysis
Ranking high in search engine results pages (SERPs) matters. According to Backlinko research, a No. 1 ranked website is 10 times more likely to be clicked from a page ranked No. 10.
This shows that an effective search engine optimization (SEO) strategy is key to ensuring your website gets more traffic than your competitors.
And when it comes to implementing an effective SEO strategy for your eCommerce website, doing keyword research it comes with the territory.
By identifying the keywords your competitors are targeting, you can discover opportunities to increase your e-commerce site’s visibility in the SERPs. Additionally, these keyword lists can help you discover content gaps, which provide opportunities to address unmet needs of your target audience.
To identify competitor keywords, you can use keyword research tools like WordStream, SpyFu, or Google’s Keyword Planner.
SpyFu, for example, not only lets you search for competitors, but also find every keyword they rank for.
Even better, you can use the keyword research tool to find the specific pieces of content and backlinks that outrank yours.
When gathering information about the SEO keywords you want to target, include key factors such as search volume, keyword difficulty, cost per click (CPC), and relevance. Having this information in a structured document will serve as your road map for how to optimize your content and outperform your competitors in the SERPs.
Step 3: Research your competitors’ websites and social media pages
A critical part of your competitive analysis is looking at how your competitors communicate and present themselves to your shared target market. After all, you can’t build the knowledge necessary to differentiate your brand without knowing the lay of the land, so to speak.
In fact, 85 percent of businesses they consider performing competitor analysis to be a critical factor in distinguishing their brand. So where are the best places to see what your competitors are doing?
Here are two places to start:
- Websites: Determine how to make your ecommerce website stand out checking your competitors’ products, price points, unique selling propositions (USPs), customer reviews and overall user experience.
- Social media profiles: Analyze your competition’s presence on different platforms, engagement metrics, content strategy and audience engagement.
Step 4: Read customer reviews
Customer reviews offer a goldmine of information about your competitors’ products, services, strengths and weaknesses. After all, what better way to find out how to market your brand than to hear directly from the people you’re marketing to?
Researching the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors’ strategies can tell you a lot about how to differentiate your brand. Additionally, knowing what customers love about your competitors’ products or services can help you generate ideas for how you can please them too.
On the other hand, discovering the cons highlighted in customer reviews also lets you know what to avoid. For example, to learn how to do product research through customer reviews, pay attention to features that receive positive feedback and those that customers feel are lacking.
When researching customer reviews, you track performance indicators that you believe would be valuable benchmarks for your own business strategy.
Here are some key indicators to consider:
- Product quality
- Features and functionality
- Value for money
- Customer service
- Shipping and delivery
- Brand reputation
Clearly, there is a lot of data you can gather from each of your competitors. So how do you stop yourself from spending hours manually searching for every customer review?
The solution: Use a reputation management tool.
ReviewTrackers, for example, lets you create an online reputation report for each competitor. These smart reports can provide you with key competitor data such as review highlights, average scores and more.
Advanced Ecommerce Competitor Analysis Techniques
For your competitor research to produce the results you want, you’ll eventually need to go beyond the basics. Let’s explore some advanced tactics to help you get the most out of your competitor analysis strategy.
1. Monitor market trends
It’s not enough to just keep an eye on your competitors. You should also supplement your market research by keeping up with industry trends and technological innovations within your niche. After all, these aspects also shape how customers perceive your brand and your competition.
Ask yourself, are your competitors adapting to these trends and new technologies? To find out, you can use social listening tools like Brandwatch to monitor social media conversations around your brand, industry and competitors.
By staying up-to-date, you’ll help position your e-commerce brand as a leader in your market.
2. Evaluate your performance
You won’t know how your e-commerce brand stacks up against the competition if you don’t set benchmarks to serve as a basis for comparison.
Before doing competitor research, review your business goals and establish key performance indicators (KPIs) such as web traffic, conversion rates, and social media engagement.
With these benchmarks clearly defined, it will be much easier for you to identify areas where you can excel and outperform your competitors.
3. Create a competitive analysis report
Your competitor research efforts won’t yield results if you don’t create a competitor analysis report that summarizes your key findings.
Aggregate your data in a way that helps inform your business strategy. Here are some aspects to note:
- Strong points
- Weaknesses
- Areas for improvement
- Threats
By organizing your data in a way that describes your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, it will be much easier to translate your findings into actionable items that you can apply to e-commerce development strategy.
You know everything about your competition… now combine it with powerful hosting
At the end of the day, the goal of eCommerce competitor analysis is not to make comparisons. is to outperform the competition and position your e-commerce brand as the top choice in the market.
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