If you run an e-commerce store —whatever vertical you are working in— you will probably have realized that making competitor analysis turns out to be crucial to improve your online competitiveness and set competitive prices that match in your market and bring more traffic to your website. Monitoring tools are valuable assets that surely will boost your online business.
Most of the sectors that operate through digital environments, work under high competitiveness, and rivalry between stores under the same vertical is very harsh. That happens because internet users tend to make their purchasing decisions based basically on the price, hardly considering other aspects of the store, such as users reviews for instance.
The wide variety of digital stores where to buy products online, makes it indispensable for them to stand out and offer competitive prices. One of the most common methodologies is the benchmarking, that means, making a competitor analysis to improve the performance of your website.
Get to know the strategy of your competition
Carrying out benchmarking techniques will allow you to obtain interesting data that will help your business to improve its competitiveness. But how can you do this?
One of the best solutions to make a retail industry analysis is through competition monitoring tools. First of all, you need to make sure you know who your direct rivals are; that means, who are those who sell the same products for a similar price and to the same audience as you do.
Once you have got them identified, the monitoring tool will start making a competitor price watch by tracking their prices, which will allow you to have a much broader understanding of their evolution throughout the year. This will help you detect if there exists any change trend or pattern in your vertical.
This turns out to be a great asset because when you can foresee price changes, you can administer your e-commerce stock better and optimize your purchase to the distributor. Besides, you can anticipate and put more competitive prices applying promotions, discounts, gifts, etc.
And it does not apply only when there are price changes. By analyzing competitors, you will be able to set better prices for your e-commerce because you will have a much more global point of view of the vertical’s situation. Many digital stores set their prices basing their decisions on competition, and this lets them adapt faster according to the real market status.
It is also useful to realize if your purchasing costs are higher than other competitors’. If they can set lower prices than you, it is probably because their acquisition costs are also lower.
Monitoring your rivals is useful when trying to improve your positioning in websites like Amazon or Google Shopping. It is vital to keep prices that not only adjust to the market situation but also that make it stand out from your rivals and help you position correctly in this type of marketplaces.
These monitoring tools will allow you to project your store among high pricing competition that exists within your rivals. If you understand better your sector’s behaviour, you can recognize possible weaknesses in your store, take more efficient decisions and boost your products due to well-designed corporate strategies.
Then, thanks to monitoring tools you can:
Make a retail industry analysis to identify who is your real competition, compare prices and evaluate your vertical’s status.- Benchmark your competitors to evaluate possible weaknesses and adapt your prices to the market’s situation.
- Improve your decision-making capacities to maximize conversions.
