“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the results of a hundred battles.”
This quote from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War fits so perfectly in the modern-day sales and marketing on e-commerce platforms like Amazon. After all, it’s all about the cut-throat competition to become the top seller in your product category.
But just like wars, selling online is not easy. Customers just not come lining up for your products; they have a lot of options to choose from. And it gets even more difficult when you cannot interact with them directly while they are looking for options. In such scenarios, you have very limited control of what customers perceive about your product and how you make them like your offers in the first look. So, selling on Amazon requires a good amount of planning and a proper strategy.
Sometimes you might think that you’ve got the best product offering in your niche, but still, you are not able to capture the market. Why is that? It may be possible that there are ten more sellers for the same product that you are not aware of, and people are going to them instead. So what should you do in such cases? Simple. Start from basics. Know your market, know who you are competing with, and stay ahead of the curve. How? By doing thorough competition analysis.
Amazon Competitor Analysis & Tracking
The current competition demands not only the best services but also know-how about your competitors & their strategies. As a seller, if you want to stand out among the hundred others, you must have a proper idea of what your competitors are doing and how they are getting results. Only this way, you can outsmart and outsell them, and it never harms to play smart.
You should be able to know your competitors each step – what are their products and tactics, keeping track of how they are performing, and based on these results, what tactics can defeat them, etc.
Competition analysis will help you to have a better understanding of your Amazon product by comparing it to your competitors’ and finding out the gaps. This way, you can fill these gaps easily and reach the top of the Amazon search list. Now let’s see how we can do that.
How to Run a Competitor Analysis on Amazon?
Most of the sellers are not aware of how to run Amazon competitor analysis and how to process and make use of that data. It’s really simple, though. You just need to follow a structured process to start with, and with the help of the right tools, you can get amazing results. Let’s have a more in-depth look at how you’ll be able to do that.
Step 1: Identifying Your Competitors
“Keep your customers close, but competitors closer.”
This is the first and most crucial step. Find out who you are competing against. Try listing them out by searching for your product category and see how each seller is doing. How many products have they sold? It is also essential to keep a check on the number of sellers already in your product category and analyze if it’s worth the effort to sell into an already crowded space.
This step is particularly useful if you are new to Amazon selling. There are several tools that can help you list down the sellers for your product. Knowing about the competition can help you decide which product niche to choose from (the one with fewer sellers).
2: Listing quality
Your product listing is your storefront on Amazon. It includes product name, description, features, images – in short, all the product details. So, maintaining the quality of your listing is one of the critical factors, more detailed and customer targeted the page is, the better are your chances to increase sales.
Pay close attention to your competitors’ product listings to find out what their strengths and weaknesses are. Take inspiration from the ones already doing well and add your thoughts and creativity to make your listing the best. It is necessary to continuously optimize your Amazon listing to discover even more significant impacts on your ranking and conversion rate.
Step 3: Product Research
Now that you know your competitors, it’s time to dive into their product/listing analysis. A good practice is to observe every detail like:
- Title: Do they follow Amazon’s recommended format — Brand + Model + Product Type? Is the product name informative enough for the customers?
- Brand: Which brands are they selling? Are those brands more/less liked by the customers?
- Features: What is your competitor’s USP? What features do they have? Can you counter them?
- Description: What product information do they provide? What’s the tone and language used? How in-depth is that information? Is it useful for customers?
- Queries: What kind of questions do their customers ask? Are they all answered? Can your product fill those gaps?
- Visuals: What is the type and quality of images/videos uploaded? Are they high-quality graphics? Is it helping in increasing the traffic?
Researching these details would help you in understanding your competitor’s products and their customer behavior better. You can use them to refine your product placement on Amazon.
Step 4: Breakdown the Product Reviews
Reviews are becoming the most important criterion while buying any product. Keep a close eye on what your competitor’s buyers are saying about their product. A seller may be very confident about the product, but the reviews might tell a different story. Reviews show the real picture of how good or bad the product is doing in the eyes of customers. The competition reviews can be analyzed through a two-step procedure:
- Evaluating the reviews on different aspects
- Asking questions based on the reviews
Some of the review features to look at are:
- Product Rating: Check the average rating for each product. Also, note the individual rating for each feature. Compare them to your ratings to check where you are lacking.
- Quality: Look at the quality of the reviews. The more detailed review, the better quality it has. Does the review include likes and dislikes? Do the users highlight the best feature?
- Quantity: Amazon prefers products with high-quantity, high-quality reviews. So, check out how many reviews do your competitors have. How do they compare to yours?
- Issues: Try to point out the competitor’s product issues. Or what is the most criticized feature of their product? How did the seller respond? Do your products solve this problem?
Analyzing such questions can help you assess your product better and in detail to find out the missing feature that can up your game. You can simplify the whole process by assessing the reviews feature-wise using the review filters provided by Amazon. This can make it much easier to list down the pros and cons of your products by comparing the reviews.
Step 5: Know the Competitor Keywords
The most important part of Amazon’s competitive analysis is to understand the competitor’s presence. Monitor what kind of keywords are they using to reach out to their buyers. You can install SellerApps’s Amazon Keyword Ranking & Index Checker chrome extension for tracking the keyword ranking for Amazon. The product title, including keyword use and descriptions, is what helps the buyers catch attention.
Based on your product listing audit, you probably have an idea of what keywords your competitors use. In most cases, sellers include their primary keyword in their product title, so it becomes easier to extract the competitor keywords.
Go for long-tail keywords instead of shorter keywords to make your visibility better to your audience. This determines how easy or difficult it is for their customers to find the items. With optimized keywords, sellers will receive more clicks and traffic than sellers
who don’t take this extra step.
Step 6: Know Their Pricing Strategy
Price is the most important factor for a buyer and can shift their decision totally in buying one product over another. Hence, it is crucial to understand Amazon’s pricing game. You can use Amazon seller software for obtaining data-driven pricing strategies of your competitors.
You can also monitor their pricing trends, when do they increase or decrease the price, how low they go while cutting the cost price, when do they give discounts and offers, etc. This can help you in understanding the Amazon pricing strategies and optimize your product price accordingly for increasing sales while maintaining a profit.
Step 7: Understanding Competition’s PPC Strategy
Paid campaigns are not always fruitful. They can help you only if the campaign is run smartly. Managing your PPC strategically can help in bringing down the CPC. Track the competitors’ keywords targeted in their ads. What is the CPC and search volume of those keywords? Build a better strategy by getting an insider’s view of your competition.
Analyze and compare it with your campaign to shortlist the effective keywords by negative keyword optimization. These are the keywords that you are paying for but aren’t bringing any traffic to your product. Getting detailed PPC data can help in pointing out these keywords and reduce ACoS (Advertising Cost of Sale) and outperform the competition.
Conclusion
The key to being a successful seller on Amazon is to know each and everything related to your product listing and market through Amazon’s competitive analysis. You’ll need basic research at the minimum to boost up your Amazon conversion rates. Here’s what an Amazon ad specialist has to say about the Amazon Competitor Analysis.
But this sounds like a tedious task, right? And it’s not even possible to get all this data manually. You’ll need an Amazon Seller Software which can perform all the data-digging, comparison, and analytics for you. See how SellerApp comes to your rescue here. You can start from scratch at the SellerApp – from finding which product to sell to implementing hardcore data analytics to bring you to the top of the list.
Likelike in a war, you don’t get a second chance; similarly, you may lose your customers if you are not raising the bars. You have to outperform your Amazon competitors along by offering better products at a better price, or the buyers may not give you a second chance.
Author BIO:
Arishekar is a leading SEO and digital marketing expert in India, he is the Senior Marketing Manager At SellerApp, he specializes in digital marketing, inbound marketing and lead generation In addition His areas of expertise include enhancing the organic ranking on search engines with innovative digital strategies and online promotions.