Using some of the best e-commerce tools helps you know exactly who your competitors are, what they do, how they do, the campaigns they run, the target audiences they are trying to reach out to, and more.
As an e-commerce business, you might or might not need all of these tools (depending on the marketing channels you use), but it’s worth a look.
With some of these competitor tools you can also go deep and conduct thorough analyses of your competition, use benchmarking to figure out where you are in your journey, and take necessary steps to grow your business.
Use these competitor tools one after another, or in combinations thereof. You pick.
The Importance of Competitor Analysis in eCommerce
Why should you carve out time for ecommerce competitor analysis when you’re juggling many things at once?
First, the time spent analyzing your competitors is not wasted. Competitor analysis shines a light on your own brands’ strengths and weaknesses. Through this, you can fix the areas you’re lacking in before it grows into a bigger issue. You can also enhance your strong points and see what you have to offer that your competitors do not or don’t do as well.
It’s also important to analyze ecommerce competitors to better understand your customers and what they want. There might be a need that they’re not filling. Addressing that need will give you a headstart on your competitors.
Closely observing your competitors may lead you to more discoveries such as overlooked competition you didn’t consider before. Additionally, comparing yourself with competitors gives you benchmarks for future growth. It can serve as inspiration, if they’re better than you in some ways, to reach your full business potential. You can even learn from smaller competitors as they may have fresh ideas you haven’t thought of yet.
That being said, here are 9 of the best eCommerce tools for checking up on your competitors:
Panoramata
If email marketing is your thing (on top of landing pages, ads, paid search campaigns, and SEO), Panoramata is a powerful tool that helps you keep track of several leading e-commerce brands.
For each brand (in sorted e-commerce verticals and categories), you get a sneak peek of actual email messages sent, subject lines used, frequency of emails, ads, landing pages, website changes (with snapshots), SMS campaigns, and more.
Build inspiration lists, study lists, or track lists with Panoramata and track your competition the smart way.
Why it’s better to automate ecommerce competitor analysis
Automating the time-consuming work of analyzing competitors has obvious advantages, the main one being the time you save subscribing to emails and viewing content individually. Collecting data is an enormous task that automated tools can do faster and often better than we can. Making sure the content you collect is up-to-date is even more of a time suck because you have to visit those pages individually.
With automated tools, you also expand the amount of data you can collect on your competitors. The quality of data goes up, too, because automation reduces error and is unbiased.
Lastly, analyzing data by yourself takes skill and effort that are better off spent on other tasks. Automated tools can detect trends and give an overview of details in a snap.
The question is better framed as why shouldn’t you automate competitor analysis and give yourself a break?
If you want to save time and effort, you’re in good hands with Panoramata, the platform that monitors competitors for you in real-time and automatically and gives you unlimited inspiration for your marketing campaigns.
SpyFu
SpyFu is a comprehensive tool that provides data on your competitors' search marketing campaigns, including keyword rankings, ad copy, and website traffic. Specifically focused on SEM (Search Engine Marketing) -- which includes paid ads (PPC) and organic search analysis (SEO).
SEMrush
SEMrush is another powerful swiss-army style tool that offers a wide range of features for tracking your competitors' online marketing efforts. This includes data on website traffic (your own, and that of your competition), backlinks, PPC ads, and social media engagement.
With powerful features, deep indexing, and a wide library of websites covered, SEMrush truly helps you uncover who your competitors are.
More importantly, SEMrush can also be a valuable tool for making your own PPC campaigns and Search optimization better.
BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is a powerful ally when it comes to media intelligence, social intelligence, and to help you track what’s happening online (with your own brand and also with what’s happening with your competitors).
Discover who’s ranking (or is popular) for content, pieces of content that get maximum social shares, find influencers for your brand (or track the influencers working with your competition), and more.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is a popular SEO tool that offers data on website traffic, backlinks, and keyword rankings. One of the more interesting tools to use for finding out what your competitors are ranking for on search is the “Site explorer”.
But then, there are several other tools that can help you rank better on search, get more traffic, and make search marketing work for you.
Take advantage of ‘keyword explorer’, ‘content explorer’, ‘rank tracker’, and also ‘site audit’ -- to improve your search ranking game.
SimilarWeb
SimilarWeb provides data on website traffic, top marketing channels, and demographics of your competitors -- all in a single dashboard.
SimilarWeb has a full range of tools available for practically all kinds of research (including competitor analysis and competitor intelligence).
Benchmarking, company research, market research, audience analysis, competitive analysis, app intelligence, and so much more.
Builtwith
Want to know the technology or platform your competitors use? Would you like to find out exactly what kind of e-commerce platform they use, ad networks they are associated with, and so on?
BuiltWith is a “technology lookup” beast. It helps you get instant information on the website your competitors use, the technology they take advantage of, the ad networks they depend on, CRM integrations, APIs in use, the email marketing tools they use, and much more.
AdSpy
AdSpy is one of the largest libraries or databases of Facebook ads and Instagram ads in the world. If you ever wanted to find out the exact social media campaigns your competitors run, AdSpy can deliver.
With AdSpy, you get to discover compelling new campaigns, scout for new audiences or new markets, uncover new products, discover your competitors’ campaigns, and monitor your competitors’ brands.
Feedly
Want to get a glance on what your competitors publish on a regular basis, without you having to go to each competitor website and read? That’s where Feedly comes in.
Feedly is a social media aggregator that lets you track your competitors' social media activity in one place.
You can monitor PR mentions, news articles, independent bloggers, other publications, and more. If you wanted to, you can create lists and specify exactly what you want to track and the sources you want to generate the feeds from.
Use any of these tools (and there are more) to help you create a comprehensive marketing strategy for your e-commerce business.
What are some of the best competitor analysis tools you can’t get enough of?
