Competitor analysis for an online shop
For a small online shop, competitor analysis is not a report you write once a year. It is knowing what the few shops a buyer compares you with charge today for the same goods, and whether they have them. This guide covers which competitors to pick, what to compare, how often to check, and how to stop doing it by hand.
What competitor analysis means for an online shop
In marketing textbooks, competitor analysis covers everything: market share, a SWOT analysis, advertising, search engines. For a shop with a few hundred products, a narrower part decides the week's sales: who sells the same goods, at what price, and whether they have them in stock.
A buyer compares prices in a minute, on a price comparison site or with a few tabs open. If a competitor cuts the same product by five euros, the buyer hears of it first, not you.
Most sellers do this. In the Competition Council's 2022 survey, eight in ten marketplace sellers in Lithuania said they watch competitors' prices online, and more than half of those do it by hand.
Which competitors to follow
Not every seller in your category. Three to five shops that a buyer sees next to you are enough. Type your best-selling product's name into a search engine and into a price comparison site: whoever shows up on the first page with you is your competitor.
Follow both the large chains and the small shops like yours: the buyer compares you with each. If you sell on a marketplace such as pigu.lt or varle.lt, the other sellers of the same product are your competitors too.
What to compare
The price, regular and on sale. Stock: when a competitor sells out, buyers look elsewhere, and that is your chance. Delivery cost and time, because the buyer compares the total. Sale periods, above all before Black Friday and Christmas.
Do not compare the whole catalogue. Pick the 10 to 30 products that matter most: your best sellers, the ones you earn most on, and the ones buyers compare most. Their prices decide whether the buyer buys from you.
How often to check
Prices change without warning. If you check once a week, you can miss a three-day sale entirely. In the big sale weeks prices can change every day.
Most shops do it by hand: they open competitors' product pages one by one and write the prices into a spreadsheet. Ten products at three competitors is thirty pages every time. A spreadsheet helps you record, but it does not tell you when something changes.
How to stop checking by hand
There are three ways. Price monitoring services for large retailers compare thousands of products across shops. They are worth it when you have thousands of products.
A programmer can write a script that reads competitors' pages. It works until the competitor changes their site; then the script needs fixing.
The third way is to watch a specific page. That is what Gairė does: you paste the address of a competitor's product page, choose what matters (price dropped, price increased, sold out, back in stock), and get a text or an email when it changes, with a link to see what changed. One watch is one page, so ten products are ten watches. Free, you can watch ten pages and get 30 texts a month, with no card; pages are checked once an hour.
What Gairė does not do
Gairė does not follow a whole category or read a competitor's thirty pages of listings: one watch reads one page. It does not match your products to a competitor's, and it does not change your prices.
On a marketplace product page it follows the main offer's price and stock, not every seller's. It checks once an hour, so it can miss a sale that lasts a few minutes. Texts go to mobile numbers in Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland and Portugal; email works anywhere.
Questions
- How is competitor analysis different from price tracking?
- Competitor analysis is the wider job: who your competitors are, what they sell and for how much, how they deliver. Price tracking is the part of it that has to be repeated all the time, so it is the part worth handing to a tool.
- What does Gairė cost?
- Ten pages free, 30 texts a month, no card.
- How often is a competitor's page checked?
- On a free account, once an hour, day and night.
- Can I follow a competitor's whole catalogue?
- No. One watch is one page. Gairė suits a few dozen products that matter, not thousands.
- Does Gairė work with pigu.lt and varle.lt?
- Yes. On a product page it follows the main offer's price and stock. It does not follow other sellers' offers for the same product.