Analysing the competition is essential for the optimisation of sales in eCommerce businesses since it allows them to anticipate changes in the market. When you know the strategies that the competition is using, it’s much easier to maintain competitive prices. To achieve this, the first step is to enable an automated system for monitoring the competition. You need a tool with the capacity for self-learning, with which you can continuously analyse the prices and stock of competing businesses. Once this tool is in place, we’ll explain the most important indicators to keep in mind when it comes to analysing the competition.
- Analyse their prices and promotions
- Monitor their product and service catalogues
- Check the user experience on other eCommerce websites
Analyse their prices and promotions
Knowing the prices of your competitors will allow you to create a framework to move within, a reference point for setting and modifying the prices of your products and services. You should collect information about their prices at a set period of time as well as about their evolution over a longer period, based on your objectives. This is how you can anticipate the moves the competition will make, using predictive analysis.
Likewise, in terms of pricing, you should monitor the seasonal promotions and campaigns launched by the competition. This includes everything from general or segmented discounts to changes in sales conditions, delivery times, shipping costs, or returns. These are factors that can attract a greater number of potential customers.
Monitor their product and service catalogues
Simultaneously, we recommend that you search your competition’s catalogue of products to find their star products and determine which items might be missing from your own catalogue. Monitoring the prices of the competition will allow you to get information about their product categorisation and individual data about SKUs, EANs, descriptions, specifications, and other interesting data included in their eCommerce store. This is a series of KPIs that monitoring software obtains automatically.
In some sectors, it’s more important to know who has the industrial property rights for the products that you sell, or similar products, so that you can see what your competitors have patented and what they’re investing in.
Check the user experience on other eCommerce websites
On the other hand, to keep your website constantly updated and offer a better user experience, you can analyse the eCommerce website design of your direct competition: what the purchase process is like, what calls to action they use to attract customers, how they’ve integrated their corporate image, etc. These are aspects that should be taken into account both in the online as well as in the responsive version of the store.
You can also carry out a more superficial periodic analysis of the other elements that contribute to the success of eCommerce businesses:
- Activity on social networks
- Content creation
- SEO positioning
- Campaigns using Google Ads and social media
The ultimate goal is to find out how to compete with other businesses in the same sector on equal terms to achieve a gradual increase in sales and generate increased trust in your users. Given its importance, companies can count on help from experts in eCommerce and pricing to provide them with personalised advice and customised consultancy.
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