Top 13 Tools to Research eMarketplace Competition

Many brands we’ve talked to have said that they pay little attention to the competition.

Do they know who their principal competitors are? Sure, most of them do. But do they know what keywords those competitors rank for on their Amazon listings? Do they know what ads their competitors are running on Google? Do they know what consumers say about their products in reviews? Usually not.

Most say that they don’t have the time to collect this information. We’ve even heard the rationale that “our competitors’ tactics don’t matter to us.” Worst of all is when we hear “we don’t really have any direct competitors, our product or brand is too unique.”

Even if it’s a different product or a different sales model, any product that can be bought in lieu of your own is competition. A sale is a binary thing. Consumers will either buy from you or they won’t. In most cases, when consumers don’t buy from you, they end up buying from someone else.

To succeed in e-commerce, you have to stay one step ahead of your competition to secure that sale before a consumer favors another brand.

To stay ahead, you need regular competitive analysis. This type of research is most useful when updated annually or even more frequently. Not only will you score those sales that would have otherwise gone to someone else, but you also gain key operational benefits, like:

• Identifying new products to develop and work into your catalog
• Avoiding slow-moving products based on the competitor products perpetually in clearance
• Identifying and analyzing successful promotions
• Developing new pricing strategies
• Gaining clearer insights into SEO priorities

To perform ongoing competitor analysis and gain these benefits, you need the tools to make the process efficient. Manually collecting the data you need would take months. Instead, you can dive into this list of the top 13 tools to research eMarketplace competition to learn what solution to use in what step of the process.

Top 13 Tools to Identify Your Competitors

Some tools required to research your competitors are SaaS that you’ll need to sign up for, and others are free tools you use for other purposes every day. Learn to wield these free tools first to identify your competitors.

Can you list all the brands selling online that are similar to yours? Probably not. That includes brands that sell similar products as well as brands with a sales or marketing model you like or want to imitate.

There are some surprising tools to help you easily identify both.

Stretch your imagination just a little farther, and you could even benefit from identifying other competing brands that:

• Have a similar business premise
• Market to a similar demographic
• Are new to your market
• Have a long-term standing in your market
• And, of course, sell similar products

What’s the number one tool to pick up on these? A simple search engine.

Google

You don’t need to reinvent the wheel to perform competitor analysis. Start by typing in search strings around the products you sell, then go through the Google results. Your most successful competition will have organic search results that point to their eMarketplace listings or their e-commerce websites (or even their blog content).

The companies that list ads for those same search strings will also be potential competitors.

Save all these brand names along with the keyword you searched for and the URL that Google returned. Once you get into the next step, you’ll whittle this list down significantly.

The eMarketplace Platform Itself

Whatever eMarketplace you plan to sell on, that should be your second stop in identifying your competitors. Whether it’s Etsy, Walmart.com, or BestBuy, search for the brands that you identified first in Google. Any of those brands that are selling on that platform are your competition.

Even if you’re not planning on selling on Amazon or eBay, these two enormous marketplaces still serve as a valuable research tool. Their algorithms are designed to point consumers to whatever items they’re most likely to buy and are highly sophisticated, so whatever brands they point to are doing something right.

It’s helpful to find brands on Amazon or eBay who serve the same niche, so you can pick up on some of the most competitive marketing trends, too. Every month, more than 197 million consumers visit Amazon, meaning the platform attracts some of the most ingenious marketing by brands with the know-how to stand out.

Competitor-Specific Research

Once you’ve clearly identified your competitors, it’s time to learn everything you can about their strengths and weaknesses, so you can identify your own path to a competitive position in your market.

IP Owner Search

Even if your priority is to get your piece of the pie in eMarketplaces, a little research into competitors’ e-commerce storefronts (websites commonly hosted by Shopify or Magento) will go a long way.

To do this, once you’ve identified your principal competitors, now you can look up their e-commerce websites by simply Googling them.

Once you have their storefront URLs, paste each into Who.Is. You’ll learn what e-commerce platform the site is hosted on, get IP owner information, and can check out dozens of other statistics.

Dissect Competitors’ Websites

Now that you have competitor websites pulled up, you can dig a little deeper into their design for more vital analysis. Again, though your goal is to strengthen your position on eMarketplaces, this research into the competition’s e-commerce tactics will help you make decisions in things like promotions or multichannel sales tactics.

When looking at competitors’ websites, be sure to study:

• The site design
• Product prices (also compared with what’s listed on eMarketplaces)
• The full catalog of products they sell
• The content they provide for free
• The lead magnets they offer
• The product data they include on their listings (descriptions, images, etc.)
• The general layout of their product pages (reviews, additional content, etc.)

As you go through this analysis, it will quickly become clear what these brands do better than you. You’ll also identify areas where you do (or could do) something better than they do. This is what gets the wheels turning, so you can prioritize your sales, SEO, and content strategies.

This research also gives you insights into what products to develop and what products to steer clear of. Any competitor product perpetually on discount could indicate that it doesn’t sell well. On the other hand, if a competitor’s catalog includes products you haven’t developed yet that would go well with your most successful products, that could be a big win.

We have an easy way to discover rivals’ bestselling products, too. This will work for any competitor who sells on a Shopify-powered online store. Just add “/collections/all?sort_by=best-selling” to the main URL, then press enter.

Competitor SEO

Even if you build the perfect product listing on Amazon and have a truly superior product, a product listing that can’t be found won’t generate sales.

Most people first think of an e-commerce store’s “findability” as the main benefit of SEO. However, SEO is also the key to how products are found on eMarketplaces.

It’s important to note that a consumer’s search intent for marketplaces is different than the search intent on Google. This means that the keywords you optimize for will be different. The SEO you optimize for on search engines focuses on answering questions, whereas marketplace SEO hinges on the consumer’s intention to buy.

For example, if you optimize a blog on your e-commerce website for the search string “how to kill creeping Charlie,” you could rank among the most helpful articles that give users a step-by-step to rid their yard of the weed. Within your blog, you could make a plug for the product you sell that helps kill weeds faster.

In contrast, on Amazon, you would want to optimize your product listing for that weed killer for terms like “weed killer” or “creeping Charlie solution.” The exact terms you optimize for will depend on your competitor SEO research.

It’s no big secret that SEO is complex. Neither Google nor Amazon (nor anyone else) publishes their search algorithms, so the best experts out there have been left to research and make educated guesses about what’s most important. The rest of us then trust those experts and do the best we can.

Competitor SEO analysis gives us the added benefit of actually seeing what’s been successful for another brand in our niche or market.

To figure out what keywords the competition is using, use Moz.com or a similar SEO research tool. We stick with Moz because we know it well. On their Free SEO Tools page, you have access to tools where you can instantly see what SEO terms a brand uses on their e-commerce site, plus the backlinks pointing to their marketplace listings and much more.

SEO Structure

It’s not just the keyword terms that form an SEO strategy, you also want to study how listings and pages are structured. Specifically, you want to know how competitors use:

• Page titles
• H1 tags
• Internal links
• Content

Sounds complicated, right?

Fortunately, there are other tools that can help you with this deeper SEO analysis. One we’re fond of is Internet Marketing Ninjas.

Use their “Side-by-Side SEO Comparison Tool” to compare your product listing with a rival’s listing. This tool will tell you which ranks better and why. On the results page, you’ll see comparison tables that explain how your page differs from your rival’s, and they even provide you with high-level tips to improve your ranking.

Social Media Research

Billions of people use social media every day, so it’s no wonder that social networks have found ways to engage users in new ways. One of the most recent has been with social selling.

Brands have had a presence on social media for years by way of “pages” and user engagement. It’s a space where, at this point, a brand that isn’t on social media truly raises a red flag for consumers considering a purchase.

Obviously, your most successful competitors are already engaging consumers and running promotional campaigns on social platforms. You want to dig into what they’re doing, so you can prioritize your own social strategy.

Once again, this isn’t specific to the eMarketplace you’re considering selling on, however, it is part of the bigger picture you need to get ahead of the competition across channels.

Hootsuite Streams is a particularly handy tool to keep track of content posted by your competitors. There’s a free version of the platform, too!

Advanced SEO and Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

When a competitor fails, you learn something. You also learn something when a competitor succeeds. We’ve covered SEO research already, but once you have that foundation you can go a step further to identify the failures and successes of your competition for more insights into your sales strategy.

Specifically, seeing how certain SEO activity and pay-per-click campaigns are run will give you better information to build your own. For example, you can monitor competitor backlinks to see how heavily they rely on this strategy. With Monitor Backlinks, this doesn’t even have to be a time-sucking part of your competitor analysis.

Another example is found in monitoring page traffic. SimilarWeb is one of the best tools out there for this. You can see where most of your competitors’ traffic comes from, and the tool even lists out similar pages that users visit for the same terms.

PPC campaigns are another key data point in your advanced SEO analysis. Using a tool like iSpionage, you get an inside look into competitors’ PPC keywords and monthly ad budgets. This gives you an excellent baseline to consider when building your own strategy.

There are, of course, tools that do all the above and more. At this point, we’ve crossed the threshold into paid software solutions, so it will be up to your team where you want to invest. SimilarWeb (mentioned above), for instance, is a robust tool that can perform in about half of the areas of analysis we’ve identified in this article.

Another equally robust software is Semrush. It’s jam-packed with tools to research keywords, enhance ad campaigns, and monitor business growth—all against an established list of competitors.

Why Competitive Analysis Matters More in e-commerce

We’ve covered how to perform competitor analysis, but you might still think, “Alright, what does this really matter if I don’t have the time for it, anyway?”

All your efforts building your brand in eMarketplaces will be for naught, however, if you don’t go into it with eyes wide open. That requires an in-depth understanding of what your competition is doing.

In e-commerce, you also have two huge advantages when doing this kind of research:

1. The data is already available in a digital and high-organized format
2. You have all these tools (and more) to speed up the whole process

Ultimately, you want this competitive analysis so you can see how to stand out. You want to study what others are doing, so you can do it differently (and better). That’s how you’ll capture the imagination of consumers and get that sale before the next brand does.

Competitor analysis on eMarketplaces will also help you:

• Make smarter marketing decisions
• Get ahead of industry trends
• Create meaningful benchmarks based on the competition
• Improve your value proposition
• Improve your pricing strategy
• Find gaps in what’s out there that your brand can fill

Competitor analysis is essential for any brand just entering into eMarketplaces, and it’s also a powerful way to stay ahead of market movement in the future. A regular update to this analysis will help you keep an eye on how your brand stacks up, so you can continue to win at e-commerce long-term.