Understanding your competitors is an essential part of any business strategy. For the eCommerce market with such a huge demand and many online merchants, its quite vital that you conduct a competitive analysis as a part of your eCommerce development plan. This would give you an insight into what your competitors are offering and how apart from giving you valuable information on making your customer engagement and satisfaction better. Let’s take a look at the basic steps to be followed while doing a competitive analysis as a part of your eCommerce development strategy.
Key Steps for Competitive analysis
By understanding your competitors and analyzing their behavior, you can stay one step ahead in the race by anticipating their behavior and actions. This is all the more important when you have competitors in the same eCommerce segment that you are currently in so that you can determine and monitor their actions and refine your eCommerce development strategy to stay ahead in the race.
Finding your competitors: The first step in your competitive analysis should be to find your competitors from various sources. It could be a much more deep diving exercise from a Google search but does add rich value when you make it a comprehensive effort. You can use online tools like SEO, keyword research tools across the web, social media, advertising tools, customer support threads, business listings, online communities, and world wide web content to find your competitors. Once you have completed all your search options, you will get a real list of your competitors across the online marketing space. The next step is categorizing them into different segments, based on how near or actual is the competition.
Categorizing your competitors: Once you have researched your competitors, you would need to assign them to the below categories.
- Target Competitors: These are competitors that are selling the same product like yours, either the same brand or with a different name. For this segment of competitors, you would need to monitor their eCommerce development strategy aggressively so that you can keep a tab on what’s going on in the ring.
- Nearby Competitors: These are businesses that are selling products or offering services that are related to your business. For example, if you are selling computers, they could be selling network devices. This segment of competitors is not your actual competitors, and analysis would help you when you identify their marketing strategies and see how best you can adapt to the similar market that both of you are a part of.
Once you have identified and categorized your competitors, you would then begin the actual competitive analysis that we shall deep dive into the following articles.
How can Exinent help?
If you are interested to start selling online during COVID 19, we at Exinent are here to help. We have been into eCommerce development and support services for the past decade and have hundreds of delightful clients who have taken advantage of our custom eCommerce website development service. We focus on creating online success stories with a robust, secure, scalable, and customized online shopping platform that would help you get customers across various online platforms to your store. Feel free to Contact Us; now is the time for your business to get online and noticed!
