Do you think doing some competitor sleuthing is wrong or a waste of time? Do you find yourself wondering what ads your rivals are publishing and what emails they're sending out to their list?
With competitor spying, you don't have to wonder anymore.
You can "spy" on your competitors in peace knowing that it's perfectly legal (with limitations) and even advisable to do so. Learning how to spy on ecommerce competitors is one of the smartest things you can do to revise and perfect your own marketing strategy.
Wise people learn from others’ mistakes but to add to that, when you learn how to spy on eCommerce competitors and other businesses, you'll learn from more than just their mistakes.
By spying on competition, you can gain insights that you won’t find elsewhere, understand market demand, dig deep into the nitty-gritty of consumer behavior, and craft your own marketing campaigns to put you on a winning path.
Why spy on ecommerce competitors?
Jack Welsh once said:
“Number 1: Cash is King. Number 2: Communicate. Number 3: Buy or bury the competition”.
We won’t think as aggressively as Jack did. However, we do believe that you should spy on eCommerce competitors.
You can call it spying or you can call it market research. Whatever term you choose, it's the smart thing to do.
With each of your competitors (as far as the marketing landscape goes), there’s always a lot happening.
- Changes made to their website
- New products launched
- New campaigns rolled out
- Several hundreds of email marketing campaigns (from the competitor brand to their respective customers) going out stealthily, week after week.
New ad campaigns. - New dedicated landing pages for each of those ad campaigns.
- Several new pieces of content are added weekly on their blog posts, social media channels, etc.
This is just one single competitor. What if you had 7,14, or 280 different brands to compete with?
Yeah, we thought as much.
But don’t let the heft of the tasks available to you as a business or a marketing team distract you from what’s critical for us to understand.
Here are five reasons why you should spy ecommerce competitor brands:
Understand Target Audiences & Value Proposition
Spying eCommerce competitors starts with the Who, Why, What, When, & How rodeo. Competitor analysis is about knowing everything about the industry or sector you operate your business in.
Who are your competitors? What kind of profile do they have? What are the products and services they sell?
What various channels do they use for marketing? Given each digital channel (and offline), how exactly are they promoting their brand?
In a series of steps, you can list down names, the digital strategies (and offline marketing strategies) they employ, and more, down to the details like the exact campaigns they use, ads they run, landing pages they deploy, and more.
Without knowing this, it’s like trying to get to a destination when you don't know where you are going. It’s called drifting. Businesses cannot afford to drift aimlessly.
Understand Marketing Channels That Work Best: No Blank Canvas (Ever)
This isn’t like the times when Charles Dickens wrote The Tale of Two Cities, Joseph Conrad wrote Nostromo, or when Adam Smith wrote Wealth of Nations.
Those popular authors spent months and years staring at their aging typewriters -- while musing, thinking, dreaming, and struggling with “writer’s block” or when they slipped into days of zero creative input.
You can’t do an Adam Smith with your business. You need to hit the ground running and you’ll do well with faster execution, blazing fast speeds when it comes to setup, and quick action.
Spying on competitors immediately shows you the marketing channels that work best for them.
This tells you what you need, the other properties you need to set up fast (apart from the eCommerce store), the digital channels you should double down on, and more, fast.
Identify Best Practices (By Tracking Competitors Over Time)
After you list down your primary and secondary eCommerce competitors, track them over time to identify best practices in marketing, positioning, branding, strategy, and digital strategies.
By using a tool like Panoramata, you can create multiple lists (by using exclusive filters, parameters, and attributes).
Use these lists for continuous tracking. Each list is updated in real-time depending on the campaigns, ads, marketing assets, and changes to campaigns in granular detail.
These lists give you a snapshot view of the best practices competitors use -- each brand backed by hours of research and analysis of its own.
Chances are that you cannot possibly cover everything you thought you should know about your ideal target audiences.
For instance, you sell hair care and skin care products and you assume that Gen Z and early millennials make up the majority of your target audience. Hence you decide to double down on Meta (+ Instagram).
Spying on eCommerce competitors, however, helps you cover blind spots. You realize that late millennials and even baby boomers purchase haircare products.
Improve Your Marketing Strategy
Thanks to ecommerce competitor spying, you can identify your blind spots and improve your overall marketing strategy.
Consider this: you know your audience, and your target market, and you’ve done your research. You know exactly who you are promoting to (right down to the ideal customer -- listed out in great detail along with specifics including location, demographics, lifestyle, habits, and more).
Or, you were doing Google ads (including shopping ads) but missed several other channels such as YouTube (and ads), X (and ads), and more.
The key to spying on eCommerce competitors is to observe, learn, and take account of everything they do so that you know what you should (or shouldn’t do).
Track Promotion Schedules & Content Calendar
What is the frequency at which your competitors send out email marketing campaigns? What’s the kind of “spam score” your competitors get for the email subject lines they use?
Do they use emojis in their subject lines? What kind of email copy and design are the perennial choices for your competitors?
What’s the promotion schedule like? What kind of ads do your competitors run (and where)? Is there a content calendar your competitors use? What kind of content are they focusing on?
Find answers to all of those questions above without having to spend hundreds of hours researching manually.
If you want to dig deep, you can put yourself in the shoes of your target customers and see how the entire experience is like: visiting eCommerce sites, browsing products, placing orders, a sneak peak at their transactional emails (such as order confirmation emails or order updates), shipping speed, returns, customer support and more.
These are the kind of eCommerce business insights you won’t get elsewhere.
Convinced?
We built Panoramata as a premier eCommerce campaign benchmarking solution—an effective way to keep tabs on the world of eCommerce businesses, eCommerce advertising campaigns, eCommerce email campaigns, and more.
Use Panoramata to easily identify your industry or sector, spy on eCommerce competitors, create lists with chosen competitors, identify their marketing strategy overall, and drill down on specific campaigns, ads, email marketing messages, SMS marketing messages, landing pages, SEO profiles, and so much more. One web-based tool.
One dashboard. A wealth of information at your fingertips.
Panoramata also makes it ridiculously easy for you to spy on eCommerce businesses.
If you haven’t done so yet, sign up with Panoramata and follow along.
How to Spy on Your Ecommerce Competitors
As an example, pretend that you have an ecommerce supplement business which falls under the broader category of health and wellness.
Now, let’s get cracking on just how to spy on eCommerce competition in less than 5 minutes and improve your own marketing campaigns:
Step 1: Sign up with Panoramata and search
Sign up, login, and hit up search by category. You'll have a list of eCommerce businesses that are already tagged as “health and wellness” and if you click through, you’ll notice from the gallery of eCommerce brands displayed that you’ll also see a subcategory of “supplements” listed underneath a few brands (if pertinent).
You’ll be able to quickly discern just how many brands are listed on Panoramata for the main category and the subcategories you choose.
In our case, we found at least six eCommerce brands listed under health and wellness and supplements.
For instance, we might find these interesting for us in this case:
- Heights - https://www.yourheights.com/ - braincare Supplements
- Aime - https://aime.co- skincare Supplements
- Cuure - https://cuure.com/ - health Supplements
- Standard Dose - https://standarddose.com/ - haircare supplements
- Happy Tuesdays - https://happytuesdays.com/ - post-rave wellness packs
- Semaine - https://www.semainehealth.com/ - health supplements
Step 2: Start spying on their marketing strategy
You'll also quickly access their ad creatives, email campaigns, and more, a great way to see what these brands do marketing-wise.
Click on emails, ads, and other tabs to see the actual marketing campaigns (email campaigns, ads, and so on).
You’ll have a lot of data to sort through, on top of the actual ad or email creatives themselves such as subject line length, typical dates and days of the week emails are sent, software used to send eCommerce emails, spam score, email list size, and so on.
Checking out your competition or other eCommerce businesses helps reveal the sales channels and marketing strategies they use. You can also find out the assortment of products they sell, how eCommerce businesses upsell, how eCommerce products are bundled and sold, pricing strategies, market share, product feedback, and more.
Using the Landings tab, you can quickly check on the changes any of these brands have made to their home page or other website pages. Not only that, but you’ll also be able to see before and after scenarios if snapshots are available for that brand.
Step 3: Take notes and create lists
As you peruse through ad creatives, email copy, campaign angles, changes made through snapshots, take notes. Ask yourself the following:
- What kind of copy are they using?
- What creative types (text, video, images, or a combination) seem to work best?
- What kind of angles are your competitors using? For example, are they publishing ads with scarcity? Ads or emails with product reviews? Video testimonials of actual users?
You can do more than just take notes with Panoramara. Create lists (just like you create a list when you create an email marketing calendar) for keeping tabs on the campaigns you pick.
This is ecommerce marketing benchmarking at its best.
Note: Without Panoramata, you’d have to individually go to websites of each of these brands, do some high-level snooping, search on Google or social media, sign up for emails for each of the brands before you can see the creatives.
Frequently Asked Questions
How can I spy on competitors for free in ecommerce?
You can spy on your ecommerce competitors for free by doing it manually. Visit their website, landing pages, and customer reviews. Go on Facebook and Google Ads to see what ads they’re running.
Tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, and SpyFu can get you started but their main features are locked unless you pay for a subscription.
Doing all this is understandably a timesuck. It takes a lot of time, effort, and organization to pull off. You’ll end up subscribed to dozens of newsletters and having a camera roll full of screenshots.
Thankfully, Panoramata does all of the above and more automatically so in essence, you can go ahead and fire yourself from the exhausting role of “competitor detective”.
With Panoramata, you can spy on your competition’s email content and frequency, current promotions, homepage changes, and ads.
Is it ethical to spy on your competitors?
Yes, it’s ethical to spy on your competitors. Spying is just another term for market research or competitor analysis. Savvy marketers all spy on competitors so as long as you don’t pretend to act on behalf of a customer or steal restricted documents, it’s all good.
Is it legal to spy on your competitors?
The answer is again yes but with caveats.
It’s legal to “spy” on competitors (for competitive analysis or intelligence) but there are legal and illegal ways to do this. You shouldn’t hack into your competitor’s servers and retrieve confidential information. Beyond that, anything that’s publicly accessible is okay to view.
