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.
How to Spy On Your Competitor’s Marketing Strategy
- Why spy on ecommerce competitors?
- How to Spy on Your Ecommerce Competitors
- Step 1: Sign up with Panoramata and search
- Step 2: Start spying on their marketing strategy
- Step 3: Take notes and create lists
- Frequently Asked Questions
- How can I spy on competitors for free in ecommerce?
- Is it ethical to spy on your competitors?
- Is it legal to spy on your competitors?
Why 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.
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.
Aside from those, you can also learn how eCommerce products are shipped, the eCommerce platforms that your competitors use (and how that stacks up against your own chosen platforms), and more.
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.
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.
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:
How to Spy on Your Ecommerce Competitors
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.
