Using Competitive Analysis to Your Advantage in E-commerce
When you’re starting up your business, why reinvent the wheel? Doesn’t it make more sense find one that’s already rolling and attach it to your vehicle?
This is what using competitive analysis to your advantage in ecommerce is all about. Whatever your goal, whether it’s how to sell ebooks on your own website, market fishing lures or start an adventure travel service, looking over your rivals’ shoulders will afford useful insights.
- Gain a Clearer Picture of the Market
According to ecommerce platform provider Shopify, conducting a solid competitive analysis will give you insights into industry pricing, the quality of the merchandise you’re up against and the nature of the services your adversaries provide.
Starting off with this knowledge in hand enables you to construct your model to exploit areas in which they are deficient while avoiding competing head to head with them in areas where they have considerable strength.
- Glean Insights into Their Tactics
If you offer a discount, will they offer a bigger one? If you start ranking well for certain keywords, has their history shown they will try to bury your efforts with a massive campaign around the same ones? What have they done in the past in this regard? What type of competitor are they? Do they fight dirty? If so, how has that worked out for them?
Getting inside their heads will enable you to startup without ruffling too many feathers—until you’re big enough to roast the entire bird.
- Learn From Their Mistakes
Are they betting big in an area and completely missing the boat in another one? In what areas have they experienced major fails, and what can you learn from their involvements in this regard? Keying in to this can save time and capital you might have otherwise wasted going down a road they’ve already traveled to no avail.
With that said, investigate the situation to find out why it didn’t work out for them. Perhaps there is something you could do differently to capture an area they abandoned because of a failure.
- Mount a Better SEO Campaign
If you track their keywords to observe how they put them into play, you can potentially develop a better strategy and blow them out of the water.
Conversely, if you see they’re overlooking certain areas, you can move in and exploit them. Just be careful to keep the advice from number three above in mind. Don’t repeat their mistakes.
- Plan Expansions and Diversifications
They may well have blazed a trail to scale you can follow. How did they become the success they are today? What lessons can you learn from the efforts they put forth?
When it comes to diversifying and expanding, why spend a lot of time and money on trial and error? Find the best operator in your area, look at what they did, put your own spin on it and roll it out. You can be confident it has the potential to succeed, because you’ve already seen it do so elsewhere.
- Spot Emerging Trends
If you’re considering how to sell books on your own website and you see a particular genre gathering momentum for your competition, why not take advantage of it?
Players who have been around longer have probably already figured out what sells best during certain times of the year. By observing when they ramp up, you can anticipate a trend coming and get in on it too.
Using competitive analysis to your advantage in these six areas will save you a lot of time, capital and costly errors. Why bang you head against a wall trying to beat the established players? For further guidance on this subject, read this article: how to do a competitive analysis.
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