Amazon Competitor Analysis is about understanding your competitors' strengths and weaknesses, then creating counter-strategies that help you redirect their traffic to better serve your customers.
This guide will help you study your competitors, from dissecting their product listings to evaluating their offers to gathering information about your customers.
Let’s dive right in.
Why Conduct a Competitor Analysis?
Competitor analysis is a vital part of improving your marketing strategy.
Here are some reasons why it's beneficial to your business:
Discover Your Competitors’ Strengths and Weaknesses
By analyzing your competitors, you can determine what they are doing well and where they are falling short. This can help you identify areas where you can improve your own business and differentiate yourself from your competitors.
- What are your competitors’ strengths? Can you replicate them?
- What are your competitors’ weaknesses? Can you turn them to your advantage?
- What makes your product unique? Can you highlight it in your marketing materials, especially on your product page?
Understand Your Customers Better
Studying competitors is not just about gauging your competitor's strengths and weaknesses. It's also about having a deeper understanding of your customers' needs: their pain points, problems, desires, fears, complaints, and more. All this information can help you tailor your products to satisfy your customers. Plus, knowing your customers' objections in advance can help you address them on your product page.
Sharpen Your Marketing Strategy
Ultimately, the information you can harvest from analyzing your competitors can help sharpen your marketing strategy, helping you make informed decisions about product listing optimization, pricing, positioning, and more.
What to Never Do When Conducting Competitor Research
While it's important to understand what your competitors are doing well, simply copying their strategies or product offerings is never a good idea. Instead, focus on identifying what makes your own product unique and find ways to differentiate yourself from other alternatives.
Here are the common mistakes that businesses make when analyzing competitors:
Relying on Competitors To Find New Product Ideas
While it's true that checking your competitors can provide some valuable insights into the market and potential product opportunities, you should never rely solely on them when finding new product ideas for your Amazon business.
That’s because competitors don’t create the demand for any product. The market does. So if you depend on most of your product hunting from competitor research, you may miss out on the chance to be the first shark in a new subcategory, or the Blue Ocean, as savvy marketers call it.
Focusing Solely on Amazon Reviews
While customer reviews can be helpful, they should not be the only source of information you use to analyze your competitors. Consider other sources of information, such as sales data, bullet points, product descriptions, and advertising strategies.
Losing Sight of the Main Goal of Competitor Analysis
The main goal of studying what your competitors are doing is not to be a copycat of your competitors but to discover how your product or offer is different from theirs, so you can clearly communicate to your customers why they should choose yours over theirs. You cannot beat your competitors for being who they are, so focus on capitalizing on your unique strengths.
How to Identify Your Main Competitors
When doing competitor analysis, focus on the top products that pose the biggest threat to yours. Here’s how you find your top competitors:
First, go to Amazon and enter your product’s primary keywords.
Pro Tip: Use long-tail keywords to narrow the search result to your direct competitors.
So let’s say your long-tail keyword is “manual coffee grinder.”
If you search for "manual coffee grinder," Amazon will give you the top products that rank for that keyword, which, basically, are your product's top competitors.
Next, copy and paste the top 10 product links into a spreadsheet. Then repeat this process for other keywords you want to compete for in search results.
Once you’re done, narrow down your list to the top three to five competitors, then start analyzing them.
How to Analyze Your Amazon Competitors
Now that you know your main competitors, you can start studying them to determine their strengths and weaknesses.
Below are some ways to analyze your competitors.
Research Product Features
Creating an inventory of your competitors’ product features helps you identify ways to improve your own offer and uncover the benefits you should highlight in your marketing copy.
- Scan their product pages
- Harvest every feature you can find
- Store them in a spreadsheet
After researching your competitors’ product features, you can see where your product is superior. These findings can be valuable when asking questions such as:
- What features do they have that I don’t?
- Are some of my features better?
- How do my features match up against them?
Dissect Product Listings
If you want more sales, you need more people to visit your product page. To achieve that, you must optimize your product listing for Amazon A9 and your customers.
And one of the best ways to help you build an optimized product listing is to decode your top competitors’ listings optimization strategy and adopt their best practices to improve yours.
Here are some steps to follow:
Review the Product Title
Amazon product titles are a crucial component of search engine optimization (SEO) on Amazon. By analyzing your competitor's product titles, you can gain insights into the keywords they are targeting. This can help you optimize your product titles for better visibility in search results.
Ask yourself questions such as:
- What information do they include in their title?
- What information comes first? What’s the order?
- What information are they missing?
- Is there something that hooks my attention?
- What words and phrases are they using that I haven’t considered before?
- Do you see keywords that you can use to improve your title?
Check the Product Images
Analyzing your competitor's product images can also give you ideas for how to improve your images. For example, you may notice that your competitors use certain angles to make their products look more appealing.
Incorporating similar elements into your product images can help you improve your visual presentation and make your products more attractive to customers.
- What do you like about your competitor’s product images?
- What do you dislike?
- Are there new ideas that pop out after looking at their images?
- How can you make your product stand out against them?
- What elements grab your attention?
Review the Bullet Points and Product Description
Read your competitor's product description to analyze the language, tone, and messaging. Determine whether they are effectively communicating their product's features and benefits and addressing any common customer concerns.
- What features and benefits do they highlight?
- What words and phrases do they use?
- Is there a word or phrase that stood out to you?
- What’s the structure of each of their bullet points?
- What information do you wish they included if you were a customer?
Analyze Questions and Answers
Get ideas on improving your product descriptions and customer service by reading your competitors' Question and Answer section.
For example, you may notice that customers frequently ask questions about sizing or compatibility that your competitors need to be addressed. By addressing these issues in your product descriptions and providing better customer service, you can improve the customer experience and differentiate yourself from your competitors.
Read Customer Reviews
Customer reviews can provide valuable insights into customer preferences and pain points related to your competitor's products. By analyzing the reviews, you can identify common themes related to product quality, features, and customer service that customers appreciate or find lacking.
Suppose you notice that customers consistently mention certain features or benefits that your competitors offer, but you are not. In that case, it may indicate an opportunity to differentiate yourself by offering those features or benefits in your products.
Check Monthly Sales
Evaluating monthly sales is a way to gauge how much revenue you make if you can outmarket your competitors.
If your competitor consistently sells a high volume of products each month, it may indicate a significant demand for those products in the market.
Also, checking your competitor's monthly sales can help you benchmark your performance in the market.
So how do you know your competitors’ monthly sales?
Though Amazon does not provide public access to its competitors' sales data, you can use third-party tools to get sales estimates for any product, like SmartScout’s Sales Estimator tool.
All you need to do is select the product's category and enter its Best Seller Rank (BSR) to get a product's estimated monthly sales.
Track Competitors’ Pricing
Tracking Amazon product prices can help you stay competitive. It can give you insights into your competitors' pricing strategies, so you can counter them and redirect their sales to yours.
But be careful in lowering your prices. You need to make sure you're still profitable.
If you notice that your competitor is consistently lowering their prices, it may be tempting to match or undercut their prices. However, this can lead to a race to the bottom and ultimately hurt profitability for both you and your competitor.
What’s Next After Analyzing Your Amazon Competitors?
Once you’re done gathering information about your top competitors, you can start identifying areas of improvement for your product and start optimizing your listing.
Here are some ways to use your competitor analysis data:
Optimize your product listings: If your competitor's product titles and descriptions are more descriptive and informative than yours, you may want to update your product listings to be more compelling and detailed.
Differentiate your products: If your competitor is selling a product with a specific feature that customers value, consider adding a similar or complementary feature to your product to differentiate yourself in the market.
Adjust your pricing strategy: If your competitor consistently offers lower prices than you are, you may want to adjust your prices to remain competitive.
Improve customer service: If your competitor receives negative feedback about slow shipping times, consider improving your shipping processes to provide faster delivery.
Expand into new markets: If your competitor sells a high volume of products in a particular niche, consider expanding your product offerings to target that niche.
Overall, using your Amazon competitor analysis data to improve your own strategy requires ongoing monitoring and analysis of your competitors. That’s because the market changes. Your competitors evolve. Your once successful strategy can become ineffective in a few years, or even in a few months.
Stay updated about your competitors and customer preferences to position yourself for success in the competitive Amazon marketplace.
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