Ultimate Guide To Competitor Analysis for E-Commerce in 2024

Competitor analysis is the studying of competitors to get a better understanding of one’s own standing in the market. The issue in the sphere of e-commerce; however, is that this process might be a bit intimidating due to the sheer amount of data available, unfamiliarity with the tools and technologies, or the lack of general know-how. This article aims to act as an in-depth guide that will address those issues.

What is competitor analysis? 

Competitor analysis is about identifying the competitors in your industry, examining their various marketing strategies (e.g. social media content, personalized ads, dynamic pricing), market position, offerings, and market share, among other factors.

The information gained is then used as a reference point for your position relative to your competitors. A common outcome of competitive analysis, for example, is understanding the price that your competitors are charging for the same product that you both produce.

Why is competitor analysis important now? 

Conducting a competitive analysis is important because it provides you with four key insights:

Learning your weaknesses and strengths

Arguably, a useful approach to understanding the strengths and weaknesses of your business is by having a reference point. By learning more about your competitors in the industry, you can better assess where you stand, what areas you need to improve on, or which operational spheres have reached their maximum potential.

Recommendation: Leverage consumers’ spending habits to Don’t just focus on what you are doing right. Figure out where your business is coming up short compared to your competitors.

Understanding your market 

When you study your competitors, you could also stumble upon the newcomers in the market, whose entries had previously gone unnoticed by you. The more you know about competitors, the easier it will be to compete against them.

Recommendation: Leverage e-commerce data to see what consumers’ demands are, and whether or not they are currently being met. By taking insightful action on the data, you will be able to plug the gap that increases your market share.

Spotting trends 

Periodic studying of the market will provide you with the underlying trends in your market. If you operate a coffee shop and see all your competitors offering paper straws, instead of plastic, it might be advisable to follow along to not lose customers.

Recommendation: Leverage consumer review data as a tool to identify consumer ratings and reviews of products, services, vendors, packaging, and delivery, as well as interests and buying habits. These factors provide insight into the general direction in which the market is moving.

Setting benchmarks 

Your analysis should cover both small and large companies. This way, the competitive analysis will show you how far you have separated yourself from the smaller competitors, but also how far you still are from the titans of your industry. This will potentially spur you on to keep going.

Recommendation: Leverage brand datasets to learn more about competitors’ business information, such as funding, the number of employees, unique selling point (USP), targeting strategies, ads, campaigns, and expenditure.

How to do a competitor analysis? 

There are five general steps that will help you conduct an in-house competitor analysis:

1. Create a list of your competitors. Imagining where you customers would turn to, if they didn’t buy from your company, will fire up your imagination. 
2. Gather as much information about your competitors as possible. Areas of interest might include your competitors’ background histories, locations, size, etc.
3. Identify how their target audience is different or similar to yours. To achieve this, read their mission statements, the type of message they are trying to get across, their interactions on social media, etc.
4. Identifying the four P’s:

• Product: What are they selling? 
• Price: What is their pricing model? Is it one-time purchases or subscriptions? How much are they charging? 
• Promotion: How are they advertising their products? On what mediums? 
• Place: Where do they sell their products? Is it online? Or at brick-and-mortar locations? 

5. Finally, compare and contrast your findings on each index, via visualizing it, with those of your own to see where you stand in relation to others. 

What tools do you need to do a competitor analysis? 

When it comes to the right tools for sourcing data from the Internet, e-commerce web scraping is one of the most efficient tools at businesses’ disposal for gathering as much accurate data as possible, quickly, and in a usable format. Web scrapers can extract real-time data from competitors’ websites including product images and prices, consumer comments on products, and inventory availability.

For more on e-commerce and web scraping

If you are interested in learning more about web scraping, read:

• Social Media Scraping: Tools, How-to & Case Studies
• How to Scrape Instagram and 6 Best Instagram Scrapers
• Top 18 Web Scraping Applications & Use Cases

And if you believe your e-commerce enterprise will benefit from marketing tools, we have a data-driven list of vendors prepared.

And we will help you through the process: