Competitor analysis

How to find your competitors?

Your competitors can be found as the top 10 ranking ecommerce sites on the major search engines and directories such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL and Ask. To do a competitor analysis, you need to locate your major competitors, companies in your line of business that are most visible to your potential buyers. They are the regular advertisers in your industry magazines and search engines.

How to spy on your competitors?

Another approach is to differentiate your offerings so that you target your own special niche; so as to not be in direct competition with them. Study their strengths and weaknesses and see how you can tailor your offerings to beat theirs. A great competitor analysis tool is the free Alexa Toolbar. After you've gotten a list of your most important competitors, you should visit them all to find out how professional their site is, what their strong products are; their promotions, their prices and their customer service (and return policy).When you browse a competitor it will tell you how busy they are by their traffic ranking; who their competitors are, by related sites and who is linking to them. By using this tool, you can narrow down your competitor list to the most important ones.

Competitor Price Watch:

Since every competitor is competitive on a certain types of products, you may want to bookmark each of the competitor's promotion and product pricing pages to stay on top of them. Ideally you should have up to 3 links next to each of your product prices to show the current price of your competitors and each of the 3 competitor product pages can be opened by just a click. Price monitoring is probably the most important competitor analysis for ecommerce retailers. In such an event you can review it and update your price immediately, as necessary. If you are bookmarking hundreds or thousands of pages, then a monitoring software such as Compressweb Web Monitor is essential, and a big time saver. Look for this competitor "bookmarking" feature in your ecommerce solution because it is such an important tool in today's competitive marketplace. In addition, you should obtain a monitoring software to spy on these pages; so that you'll know when a competitor's price changes.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO Watch)

Another important factor in competitor analysis is watching your competitor's search engine ranking. For the competitors that rank high on the top 10 of the major search engines; study their SEO structure. Especially when you are starting out, having other sites with related industry content linked to your site can be a great way to improve your own current ranking. Visit these sites and ask them to link to your site as well. We will soon have a separate website, to address this topic in greater detail.. This is call "Link Popularity"; and with the Alexa Toolbar, you can find out who is linking to your competitors.