Start Dominating Your Market
Fuel your brand with invaluable data for predictive analytics and actionable insights, empowering your team to make data-driven decisions.
2 August 2024
Are you ready to unlock the secrets of conquering the e-commerce market in today's cutthroat business world? How do some small businesses gain a competitive edge while others barely make a mark?
The answer to these questions is to keep a watchful eye on your business competitors and their strategies for making your e-commerce store stand out.
That’s where doing a mandatory business practice—e-commerce competitive analysis—comes in handy.
A competitive analysis is a powerful tool that helps you identify your rivals, assess their strengths and weaknesses, and plan a winning strategy to outperform them.
In this beginner guide, we will discuss the key steps for how to do a competitive analysis. So, follow our steps and gain a strategic advantage over your competitors!
A competitive analysis is a strategic process of researching and identifying your competitors in a specific niche. The analysis helps business owners evaluate internal and external factors, such as their competitors' strengths and weaknesses in a category that provides similar services or products.
Conducting periodic e-commerce competitive analysis is crucial to comprehending market trends and promptly addressing emerging challenges.
The analysis aims to uncover and leverage what your competitors are lacking in order to give you the upper hand.
Merchants can perform two types of competitive analysis:
1) holistic competitive analysis, which digs deep into every business aspect, and
2) targeted competitive analysis, which evaluates certain aspects of an operating business, such as their marketing campaign or website features.
A competitor analysis aims to equip you with insights to inform your product development and marketing choices.
To understand those “hidden-in-plain-sight” knowledge nuggets, follow the step-by-step e-commerce competitive analysis guide below.
The first step involves defining your own business, evaluating your market position, and setting your goals before performing the e-commerce market competitive analysis.
It is the process of understanding the peculiarities of your business model, your customers’ needs, and how you are going to solve them. After learning these basics, you can define your brand.
The second step involves identifying your market competitors. These could be direct, indirect, or potential competitors. The direct competitors are those who offer the same services or products as yours. Indirect competitors are those who offer products or services similar to yours but not identical. Possible competitors may enter the market in the future.
Therefore, find out:
You can find out who your e-commerce competitors are.
Now that you know your e-commerce rivals, it’s time to investigate their websites. Analyzing their websites to:
● Examine the user experience, focusing on how easy it is to navigate the site. Is the site visually appealing, and is the checkout process smooth?
● Check their content and messaging tone with their customers.
● Look at their offerings and promotions.
This is how you can gain insights into what’s working and what's not in the e-commerce arena.
Products are the heart of an e-commerce business. Analyzing competitors’ product offerings is like investigating the merchandise on display, which helps you understand their strengths and weaknesses.
Start by:
● Scrutinizing their product range
● They offer a variety of products.
● Inspect product quality.
● Compare their products to yours and see how you can beat them.
SWOT is a useful e-commerce competitive analysis framework that helps you understand your competitors’ marketing positioning. It is a fact-based assessment of the competitor’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
SWOT analysis offers a holistic approach to revealing and categorize fundamental information about your competitors.
You can also conduct competitor analysis by reviewing social media feedback and performance to improve your product development and brand positioning.
Conduct a beginner's competitive analysis for:
Twitter:
LinkedIn:
Instagram:
After collecting all the necessary data about your competitors, compile it into a single framework. There are different types of e-commerce competitive analysis frameworks or templates that categorize and segment the data you have collected regarding your competitors’ business operations.
Do check our advanced tools and join our beta waitlist
Here are the popular competitive analysis templates that you can download online:
An e-commerce competitive analysis is a powerful approach that not only helps you learn about your competitors and their strategies but also identifies areas where your business can excel.
Here, we have outlined a comprehensive guide to e-commerce competitive analysis, which includes the following steps:
Follow these guidelines to outperform your competitors!
Fuel your brand with invaluable data for predictive analytics and actionable insights, empowering your team to make data-driven decisions.
