Staying Cost Competitive in e-Commerce: 5 Strategies for Analyzing Competitive Products

1. Staying Cost Competitive in e-Commerce: 5 Strategies for Analyzing Competitive Products Scraped web data is of great importance to data analysts, online media, e-commerce, research firms, and government. The amount of data available on the real estate portals, classifieds, social networks, and blogs, etc. is so huge that it is almost impossible to contain it in a structured format manually unless you’re using an automated tool or software. Many tools don’t provide the functionality to save data online whereas others come with restrictions. Therefore, retailers cannot just extract any data from their competitor sites and use it without scrubbing it. There needs to be a strategy for utilizing insightful data. If you are new to this field, here are some strategies that may provide you with a brief insight on web scraping. Step 1: Identify your Potential Competitors Analyze your target product to identify your current and future competitors. For instance, if you’re planning to sell a cosmetic product, you must know how many brands and unbranded players are available in the market, and what products are preferred by the customers. This is the first step of competitive price analysis. Step 2: Know the Market Share of Top 10 Rivals You cannot determine your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses unless you know their value in the market. Conduct a thorough research by dividing their resources into different categories—product type, location, price, target audience, etc. This will help you with SWOT—which is the fourth step. Step 3: Analyze your Competitor’s Website, especially their Content, SEO and Social Media Strategy Both content and search engine optimization plays a huge role in ranking your site on the first page of search engine results and displaying ads on relevant platforms. Tapping the content and media platforms of your rivals help you strengthen your marketing strategy. Step 4: SWOT For the preliminary search, you can use web scrapers to extract the data of your competitors. Using the extracted data, you can make comparisons and work out the SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) for individual rivals. This step will help you formulate an effective pricing and marketing strategy. Step 5: Plan, Execute and Follow-Up

2. Plan your price bracket, launch your marketing campaigns and execute your strategies. Follow up to get the latest updates from time-to-time. Also, keep an eye on the changing shopping trends to avoid losing on the client database. Competitive analysis in e-Commerce helps retailers realize their current position in the market and plan the future course. There are very few industries that have 3 to 4 major players. The e-commerce markets may have up to 50+ different brands. Hence, it is extremely important for new vendors to understand the importance of competitive monitoring.