Knowing who your competitors are is only the beginning.
A good competitor analysis for an e-commerce business is about far more than listing rival companies. Which products do they sell? What do those products cost? Which ones are out of stock? Have they added new products, or are they running a campaign right now that you only heard about when a customer asked whether you could match the price?
In short: checking prices and product ranges at a couple of competitors works fine in a spreadsheet over an afternoon. However, doing the same thing by hand every week quickly becomes impractical once you have a few thousand products spread across several competitors. At that point it stops being a spreadsheet problem and becomes a data collection problem. Jump straight to how to automate it →
In this guide:
- What should an online retailer analyse about their competitors?
- How do you do a competitor analysis? 5 steps
- The problem with manual competitor analysis
- Free competitor analysis template
- How do you automate a competitor analysis?
- When is it worth automating?
- What does it cost to automate?
- Frequently asked questions
What is a competitor analysis?
A competitor analysis – sometimes called a competitive analysis – is a way of examining and comparing the companies competing for the same customers as you. That way it becomes easier to understand how they behave in the market and where there is room for you to stand out.
For an e-commerce business, it usually comes down to comparing:
- prices and price changes
- product range and selection
- stock status
- new products
- campaigns and discounts
- product information
- shipping terms
- SEO and visibility
The list of competitors is rarely the interesting part. Instead, it is the information the comparison produces – and what you do with it – that actually matters.
What should an online retailer analyse about their competitors?
Which data points are worth tracking depends on your business. For most online retailers, it is above all changes in price, range and stock that produce useful information. At the same time, the other data points can deliver valuable insight when you need to understand a competitor’s strategy in more depth.
| Area | What can be compared? |
|---|---|
| Price | Product price, discount, campaign price |
| Range | Number of products, categories and brands |
| Stock | In stock, sold out, on backorder |
| New products | New products and categories |
| Campaigns | Sales, discount codes and campaign periods |
| Product data | Titles, descriptions and specifications |
| Shipping | Shipping cost, delivery time and free shipping |
| SEO | Categories, content and visibility |
At the same time, you do not have to collect everything at once. Five data points you actually use every week beat twenty that gather dust in a spreadsheet nobody opens.
Prices
Price is often the most obvious thing to compare: what a competitor charges for the same product, whether it is discounted and by how much, how the price moves over time, and whether the competitor consistently sits above or below your level.
A single price comparison does not say much. A history of price changes, on the other hand, can tell you considerably more. If a competitor cuts prices across a large number of products at once, it is rarely a coincidence. More often it signals a larger campaign or a shift in pricing strategy.
Product range
A competitor’s product range can send signals at least as valuable as the price. For example, you can compare the number of products, categories and brands, and see which products you do not sell yourself and which ones the competitor has removed.
On top of that, it is often worth asking why a competitor starts selling a new brand or opens a new category – whether or not you decide to do the same.
Stock status
A product being out of stock at a competitor can be immediately relevant if you happen to have it in stock at that moment. In addition, stock changes over time can carry valuable signals.
For instance, a product that repeatedly sells out at several competitors at the same time may indicate high demand across the whole market, not just at a single store.
New products
Spotting new products manually at a competitor with thousands of items is effectively impossible. Instead, you can follow changes in the range over time and catch new products and categories more or less as soon as they appear.
Campaigns
This can cover things like percentage discounts, campaign prices, discount codes, free shipping or seasonal sales. Monitoring that continuously gives a better picture of how competitors actually sell – not just the price they happen to have today.
Product data
Here you can compare product names, descriptions, specifications, attributes and categorisation. That way you can both analyse the range and understand how competitors package and present their products.
Shipping terms
Competition is not only about price. Shipping cost, free-shipping thresholds, delivery time and delivery options can influence the purchase decision at least as much as the label on the product.
Already at this point it starts to become clear why keeping track manually gets heavy once you have more than a couple of competitors with a few hundred products each. Read why competitor analysis becomes a data collection problem →
How do you do a competitor analysis? 5 steps
A competitor analysis does not have to be complicated. Here is how to get started:
1. Pick 3–10 competitors
To begin with, you do not need to analyse the entire market at once. Choose a limited number of relevant competitors instead – direct competitors, larger players in the same category, niche stores or businesses that compete with you within specific product areas.
Three to ten competitors is often a good starting point, even for larger online retailers.
2. Decide what you want to measure
For example, you might start with price, stock status, new products and campaigns. It is better to measure a few things consistently than many things sporadically – an analysis carried out half as often as planned is in practice no analysis at all.
3. Collect the information
Visit the competitors’ websites, check the products and type the information into a spreadsheet. That works well at a small scale, but the problems grow quickly as the volume of data increases.
4. Put the information into a comparison matrix
| Product | Your store | Competitor A | Competitor B | Competitor C |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Product A | €99 | €104 | €97 | €99 |
| Product B | €149 | €139 | €149 | €144 |
| Product C | €79 | €84 | €79 | Sold out |
That way the analysis becomes concrete. You see immediately which products you are consistently more expensive on than the market, and can then decide whether that is a problem or a deliberate choice.
5. Look for changes
This is where a recurring competitor analysis becomes genuinely valuable. Instead of asking ”what does the product cost today?”, you should be asking ”what has changed since last week?”
A new product category, a new brand, or a handful of products that suddenly go on backorder at the same time can all be important signals. Changes of that kind are usually more useful to act on than a snapshot of today’s prices.
In addition, recurring monitoring generally returns more value than a one-off analysis, even though the latter is easier to get started with.
The problem with manual competitor analysis
A manual competitor analysis works well when the volume of data is small. Five competitors and a limited number of products – then it is relatively quick to visit the websites and fill in a spreadsheet.
But do the maths instead: 5 competitors × 2,000 products = 10,000 products to check.
Suddenly it is no longer practical to do it by hand. What is more, the problem grows every week if the analysis is meant to be repeated – particularly since the most active competitors, the ones changing prices and ranges often, tend to be the most interesting to follow.
This is where most competitor analyses break down in practice. Not because the analysis itself is hard, but because collecting the data takes too much time. That is why it often pays to automate the collection itself – see how it works in practice →
Free competitor analysis template
A simple spreadsheet goes a long way to get started. Our template therefore contains the following columns, ready to fill in:
| Column | What you fill in |
|---|---|
| Competitor | The company name |
| URL | Link to the store, so you can quickly find your way back |
| Price level | Low, mid or high compared with you |
| Range | Which categories and product areas they cover |
| Number of products | Approximate breadth of the range |
| Brands | Which brands they sell that you do not, and vice versa |
| Stock status | How often products are sold out at their store |
| Campaigns | Sales, discount codes and how often they run |
| New products | What has been added since the last time you measured |
| Shipping terms | Shipping cost, delivery time and free-shipping threshold |
| SEO | Search visibility and which pages rank |
| Notes | Your own observations ahead of the next review |
Adapt the template to what you actually need to analyse. For some companies price matters most, while range, stock status or new products play a bigger role for others. So it is perfectly fine to ignore columns that are not relevant to you.
📥 Download our free competitor analysis template
Works straight away in Excel or Google Sheets. No sign-up required – but if you want it filled in automatically every week, see the section on automated competitor monitoring below.
How do you automate a competitor analysis?
The difference between a manual and an automated process usually looks something like this:
Instead of someone working through thousands of products by hand, the system can flag what has actually changed. That way the time goes into understanding what the information means, rather than into finding it.
In concrete terms, it can look like this:
Competitor A has cut prices on 37 products.
Competitor B has added 124 new products.
Competitor C has 18 products that are now out of stock.
Competitor A has launched a new product category.
That is the difference between collecting data and actually monitoring a market.
Read more about how we work with this on our page on web scraping and data collection – competitor and market monitoring, along with price monitoring, are two of the most common use cases we see. You will also find more examples in our case studies.
When is it worth automating your competitor analysis?
There is no exact threshold – it depends on how your business is set up. In practice, five factors usually decide:
- Number of competitors. Two can be tracked manually. Twenty, on the other hand, gets considerably harder.
- Number of products. 100 products is manageable. 10,000 products rarely is.
- Update frequency. One analysis a quarter can be handled manually. Every day or every week, however, quickly becomes unsustainable – especially if the same person has to fit it in alongside everything else.
- Which data points you need. A handful of prices is one thing. Price, stock, product data, campaigns and range all at once is something else entirely.
- What the information is actually for. If you use it for recurring decisions about price, range or campaigns, automated collection delivers considerably more value than a one-off analysis that ends up sitting untouched.
What does it cost to automate competitor monitoring?
There is no universal price here, and we would rather not promise anything before we understand what you actually need. The cost depends on things like the number of websites, the number of products, how often the information should be updated, which data points you want to collect and how you want to receive the result – report, dashboard or API.
There is also a large difference between a solution that collects a limited number of data points from a few websites and one that monitors tens of thousands of products daily.
That is why it usually pays to start at the other end: which business problem do you want to solve? From there you can work out what data collection is actually required to solve it.
Want to know what it would cost to automate your competitor monitoring?
Frequently asked questions about competitor analysis
Are competitor analysis and competitive analysis the same thing?
In practice, yes – the terms are often used interchangeably. Strictly speaking, ”competitor analysis” refers to the individual competitors (their prices, ranges and behaviour), while ”competitive analysis” refers more to the competitive situation and the market as a whole.
In this guide they are used interchangeably, because the method and the benefit are the same whichever term you search for.
What is the difference between competitor analysis and competitor monitoring?
A competitor analysis is usually a one-off mapping exercise, or something you do occasionally. Competitor monitoring, by contrast, means collecting the same type of information continuously, so that you spot changes straight away rather than at the next manual review.
How often should you do a competitor analysis?
It depends entirely on how fast your market moves. An industry with frequent price wars or rapid product turnover may need weekly or even daily updates. A more stable market, on the other hand, is often perfectly served by one analysis per quarter.
What tools do you need for a competitor analysis?
For a smaller analysis, a spreadsheet is enough – our free template above, for instance. Once the number of competitors or products grows, or the analysis needs repeating often, automated data collection quickly becomes more efficient than doing the work by hand.
Is it allowed to collect data from competitors’ websites?
As a rule you can collect publicly available information such as prices and product data from a website. That said, there are legal boundaries around how data may be retrieved and used. Get in touch if you would like to discuss your specific situation.
A competitor analysis does not have to be an Excel document
A competitor analysis can start very simply: pick a few relevant competitors, decide which data points you want to compare, collect the information, put it into a structured template and start looking for patterns.
For a smaller amount of data, that goes a long way. But as the number of competitors, products or measurement points grows, the problem changes. The question stops being ”how do I do a competitor analysis?” and becomes: how do I continuously collect the information I need in order to do one?
That is where automation starts to make a real difference. Continuous competitor data can inform decisions about prices (how do you compare with the market?), range (which products and categories are growing at your competitors?), stock (what is available or sold out at their store right now?), campaigns (which offers are being used?) and marketing (how is their visibility and content changing?).
The goal is rarely to collect as much data as possible. Instead, it is about getting the right information at the right moment – ideally before the competitor has already sold out.
Would you rather stop checking your competitors by hand?
We help online retailers automate the collection of data from their competitors’ websites. Instead of manually checking prices, ranges and other changes, we collect the information continuously and structure it around your needs – as a report, a dashboard, or straight into your own systems.