When you think of competitive intelligence, you may think it’s a modern practice. But did you know it’s almost as old as ancient times? Early civilizations were leveraging competitive intelligence, in some form, long before us to make strategic decisions. They would seek information about their rivals’ trade practices, army strength, and politics. Of course, they did not get insights into their rivals and their people through a dashboard on a computer screen. Snooping on rivals involved many serious challenges and consequences.
Now, thousands of years later, some things have still not changed, like keeping an eye on your opponent to stay ahead. Thankfully, we live in the age of technology, and things are much easier. Today, businesses have access to evolving technologies. They can monitor competition and learn how they operate, plus gain insights into customer behavior and the market.
When we talk about ecommerce, competitor monitoring is absolutely vital as it’s one of the most dynamic markets. In this blog, we will discuss what competitive intelligence in ecommerce is, its benefits, and the right way to use it.
What is competitive intelligence in ecommerce?
Competitive intelligence refers to collecting information about direct and indirect competitors to learn about their strategies to guide your own. In ecommerce, this generally means that brands and retailers know about their competitors’ strategies by closely monitoring product gaps and assortments, pricing, customers, and more. This helps them bridge the gaps in the market, set competitive pricing, and maximize brand presence.
While it may sound simple, tracking competitors in ecommerce is quite challenging. This is because the volume of rivals in a growing market like ecommerce is huge. Subsequently, gathering a large amount of data and analyzing it becomes difficult. That’s where ecommerce competitive intelligence proves helpful. It can track unlimited competitors and their data to give comprehensive and precise insights to drive more sales.
6 ways to use competitive intelligence in ecommerce
Every business has the same end goal, which is to maximize its profits. Now, there is no single strategy or formula to follow, especially when you are in a saturated market like ecommerce. This causes businesses to lose focus on what’s most important. Competitive intelligence can provide you with that clarity in different areas.
Let’s see in which ways competitive intelligence can contribute to achieving ecommerce sales growth.
1. Benchmark against the correct competitors
Every business knows who its competitors are when it launches, but over time, competition changes. A dynamic market like ecommerce sees new entrants in every segment daily. When the changes occur so frequently, it becomes difficult to keep track of the right competitors.
Competitive intelligence solves this problem. It works by continuously monitoring the market based on the products that you offer. Depending on the industry segment, products, target audience, and more such factors, it finds the closest matches. This is the best approach to identifying and staying informed about new entrants and future competitors in real-time.
In short, with competitive benchmarking, you’ll achieve:
- Information on new or future entrants
- Details about what they offer
- Comprehensive insights into their strategies
2. Zero in on the right areas to focus
From deciding which products to sell to which channels to sell on, businesses must make big decisions every day. But when you’re dealing with multiple aspects of handling a business, it is important that you prioritize.
Competitive intelligence gives you insights into where you stand against your competitors in terms of products, pricing, messaging, and so much more. Using this information, you can find areas where your business is critically lagging and work towards managing that first. In short, competitive insights shift your focus to the right places, which actually have the potential to increase your sales and profits.
Use competitive intelligence to learn:
- Where to prioritize efforts
- How to better allocate resources
- How to optimize business processes
3. Understand your ecommerce market better
Brands need to understand competitor strategies to devise their own in order to respond to market trends. For example, offering better deals or discounts compared to your competitors during the holiday season can attract more customers.
Additionally, ecommerce competitive intelligence can open up new opportunities for your business to reach the untapped market. The way your competition operates its business also tells you what shoppers are looking for. For example, many alcoholic beverage brands have recognized the shift in the market by learning about their rivals and have launched non-alcoholic drinks to tap into a broader market.
Get overall market insights like:
- Gaps in the market to find opportunities
- Emerging market trends and possible disruptions
- Best strategic positioning for your segment
4. Win the price war every time
A fast-moving market can be dangerous if businesses don’t have the means to respond to the changes quickly. Today, automation has made every process so easy that a competitive pricing strategy can be changed every day. And this is what the majority of your competitors are doing. They change their product prices daily, sometimes multiple times a day. Price changes occur based on various factors – customer behavior, product demand, and stock levels.
Competitor price intelligence ensures that you have a comprehensive view of these price changes. This can help you in both ways – in making real-time adjustments to your product pricing and leveraging historical data to learn competitor pricing strategies.
With competitor price intelligence, you can:
- Automate price changes based on competitor pricing
- Identify the best pricing strategy for you
- Monitor deals, discounts, and promotions
5. Find the right sales channels for your products
Where to sell your products is another question that ecommerce competitive intelligence can answer. Limiting your products to one or two marketplaces doesn’t cut it anymore. Today, even smaller brands are expanding their reach on multiple sales channels to maximize their sales potential.
Competitive intelligence analyzes which sales channels your competitors are on. It drills down into their presence, different strategies they use, and the kind of customers they cater to. Having this detailed information can help you choose the right marketplaces or make strategic shifts to increase your reach, visibility, and sales.
It will help you identify:
- The sales channels your competitors use
- Which marketplaces do customers prefer
- New marketplaces for your segment
6. Know what your customers want
As important as it is to know about competitors, it is equally essential that brands understand their customers’ needs. What your customers want and how well you can respond to their needs make all the difference. And this is not limited to the products you offer, but also expands to the messaging and overall shopping experience.
Competitive intelligence can gather customer reviews and feedback on competitors’ products and the entire purchase cycle. This gives you an opportunity to optimize your products, messaging, and customer experience to shape better relationships and build loyalty.
Use competitive intelligence to understand:
- Specific needs of your customers
- Product price ranges that attract shoppers
- What drives customer satisfaction and loyalty
Wrapping up
Competitive intelligence offers historical and present data to learn from past ecommerce market trends and respond to existing trends. Knowing why competitors launch certain products, how they price them, how they manage their stocks, and when they offer discounts and deals–all these insights are crucial to guiding big decisions.
Obviously, all of this is not as simple as it sounds. Like every other business process, it involves a lot of boring stuff – setting up a process, designing and implementing workflows, and optimizing them. At Mobius, we take care of the complex and boring stuff so you can concentrate on more important things. Talk to us about your competitive intelligence needs, and we will help you tackle them.
Read AI-generated summary
- In this blog, we will discuss what competitive intelligence in ecommerce is, its benefits, and the right way to use it.
- This is because the volume of rivals in a growing market like ecommerce is huge.
- Now, there is no single strategy or formula to follow, especially when you are in a saturated market like ecommerce.
- This is the best approach to identifying and staying informed about new entrants and future competitors in real-time.
- In short, competitive insights shift your focus to the right places, which actually have the potential to increase your sales and profits.
