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10 Things Your Competitors Can Teach You About Online Selling

Kyozou / Management Strategies  / 10 Things Your Competitors Can Teach You About Online Selling

10 Things Your Competitors Can Teach You About Online Selling

You can always learn from others. When you’re growing your online selling business you don’t always have enough time to think and strategize. Knowing your marketplace is one thing, but looking a bit deeper into your competitors can give you some great insights on how to run your business. Make sure you know who your successful competitors are and then learn from them.  

Here are 10 things your competitors can teach you about online selling

 

Promotions:

Sign up for their newsletter to see what types of content and promotions they send out to their database of leads and customers. They may have ran successful online selling campaigns before and you’ll discover what their audience engages in. Your target market is this group. The newsletter is a great competitive tool to use to get a heads up on promotions that drive sales.

 

Products To Sell:

Someone did some research to determine what products to sell. You can leverage those insights to help you. When you’re strapped for time, your successful competitors are ones you should watch for ideas. You can track the amount available for sale and see how it’s selling.

 

Pricing:

The price to sell a product at can help drive the sale. When listing a product, sometimes sellers will try different pricing. Checking out what prices your successful competitors are using can give you insights into what pricing works. If you don’t know where to start with pricing yourself, read this blog on how to price products for online sales.

 

Social Sharing:

By looking at the social channels your competitors are in, you can gauge how active their social media and sharing is. You can maybe able to find reviews, determine how many people are following them and if they use those channels to promote sales.

 

Customer Service:

Try buying a product from your competitor and see how responsive they are. Some online sellers send thank yous, follow up emails, requests for feedback to name a few. These types of engagement help build and nurture long term customer relationships.

 

Return Policies:

Read what your competitors’ return policies are in relation to yours. When you try buying a product to check the Customer Service, return the product to see what it’s like. It can help you determine a responsive return policy that your target market will like.

 

Shipping Rates:

This can be the most expensive part of running an online selling business. To know if you’re rates are competitive, you can check what buying a product from the competition is like once you add shipping. Or do they offer free shipping and if so, is that a promotional strategy and the shipping is actually covered in the cost of the product? You’ll be able to decipher shipping rates to compare to yours.

 

Paid Advertising:

It can cost money to make money and what channels your competitors are advertising in can be a good clue into the spend. Whether it’s paid search with Google Adwords, Google Shopping, digital ads or remarketing, the investment to some of these tools helps to drive sales. If your competition is tracking the ROI, then you’ll be able to determine what did work and try implementing that for your online store. Advertising doesn’t just make sales, it also builds brand awareness.

 

Tools To Run Business:  

As companies grow to scale, they turn to automation to manage operations. Online sellers may use free tools, or ones that have pricing models that allow for scale. Some of these may include MailChimp, Hootsuite and Shopify.  It will also give you a basic idea of how much they may be spending to run their business. Features they may be using with these tools could be driving their success.

They may even use Terapeak to check what you and other successful online sellers are doing. Learn more about that here at this blog.

 

Where To Sell:   

Check if your competition is selling on Amazon, ebay, other marketplaces. They maybe even have their own webstore. They may be increasing their sales by selling in multiple channels like these. There are software tools they are using to manage multi-channels that you can look into.

 

Try these tactics and see what you can leverage in running your online selling business.

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