If you are not the only manufacturer of the products you offer on your site, you are in a competition. Competing in e-commerce starts with defining competition. Defining the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors selling similar products and taking precautions against them is one of the most important points of a profitable and sustainable e-commerce business.
In order to analyze the competition in e-commerce, you must first be able to identify who the competitors are. You already know some of them, but you can actually find all your important competitors easily with a little research instead of settling with the companies in your mind.
To do this, we will start by making a list of competitors and then evaluate your competitors individually according to 11 different criteria to ensure that you have a very important competitor analysis table for your business.
Here is a list of these methods:
Your already known competitors
Organically top sites for searches on your targeted keywords
Sites that run search engine ads on the same keywords
Sites that include references to suppliers that provide products related to you
Sites in this area that share on social networks such as Twitter and Facebook
E-commerce sites that advertise in publications followed by your target audience
By following these items only, you now have a list where you can analyze their status. Now it's time to visit all of your competitors' sites one by one to assess what advantages and disadvantages are based on some criteria.
Here, you have to give an objective point of view on how your competitors are in different situations affecting the customers' purchasing decision. Here are 10 different factors that closely concern the purchasing process:
1- Visuality
2- Content
3- Product variety / quality
4- Price - payment options
5- Customer service
6- Shipping options
7- Social media marketing
8- Email marketing
9- Search engine optimization
10- Ads
Some of these factors can only be evaluated by visiting competitors' sites, but you may need to spend some time for others. For example, to measure success in email marketing, you will need to subscribe to all your competitors' mailing lists and track their submissions. In order to measure their success in customer service, you may need to shop from your competitors and then measure the quality of the service they offer.
Give all your opponents a score based on these 10 criteria, then calculate their total score. The highest score among them means you are the most serious competitors.
Here is a competition analysis method that you can do on your own in the simplest way. If you have different methods to measure the competition, you can share it in the comments section below.
