How to Find E-commerce Competitors (Track, Learn, & Compete)

Keep your enemies close, keep your competition closer. 

Know what? Let's make sure we keep them under your eyes, monitoring their every move.

Learning how to find e-commerce competitors puts on the offensive. It helps you identify your competition, track competitors, learn from their efforts, and apply those learnings to help you grow your e-ecommerce business. 

Knowing your competitors, the ability to track and learn, and the willingness to put in the work needed to tweak your own marketing strategy depending on what your competition is doing at any given time is the hallmark of contemporary leadership for e-commerce. 

Start with Google (and Expand) 

Like most of us do, start with Google. Conduct your search as anyone does (for almost anything). What shows up when you type in anything that closely resembles your brand, your business, your products, or your services? 

Then, expand from there using techniques and tools. For instance, you can expand searches to sub reddits on Reddit, Q & A sites like Quora, and specific forums where your potential audience is likely to hang out at.

Depending on what you are trying to find (and your own business, of course), look out for several Google’s features and tools to help identify a typical prospective customers’ journey. 

Google’s product images, Google Shopping, Videos (from YouTube), Google Map Listings, Google rich Snippets (powered by Schema), and other Google search features. 

Also, take advantage of Google’s “People Also Ask”, “Related to this search”, and a cluster of related keywords shown at the bottom of the search results page. 

Drill Down on Specific With Special Tools

After covering the basics, move to high-quality search tools such as SimilarWeb, BuzzSumo, Panoramata, BuiltWith (to inspect tech stack of any business), -- which can help track various marketing aspects of your competitors, at a fraction of the price (of any of the above tools). 

Each of these tools is purpose-built to find highly relevant competitors as far as web presence, search results on Google, backlinks of an e-commerce site (or any site), content marketing efforts of your competitors, and more. 

You can expand your toolkit to add tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs as well to drill down on several other aspects of content marketing or paid marketing that your competitors are undertaking. 

SEMrush, for instance, allows you to do backlink audits, identify your competitors, show you the keywords that your competitors are ranking for, display the exact paid ads they use (on Google and elsewhere), and also reveals how you can improve performance of your own web pages when compared to competitors. 

For instance, you can get a quick glimpse of how several brands in the apparel and fashion industry send emails (including the frequency of emails, subject lines, email design, email content or copywriting, and the actual emails themselves). 

Panoramata also gives you access to SMS marketing campaigns, website changes over time (with snapshots), and more. 

Social Canvassing Or Social Monitoring

Chances are that you’d easily be able to track and follow your competition on social media as well. You can do it naturally, one after the other. Follow them on Instagram, make lists on Twitter, or subscribe to their respective YouTube channels. 

Thankfully, there are several tools available to you for social media monitoring or social media canvassing when you are looking out for your competitors. 

For instance, SparkToro allows you to look at what shared audiences (with your competitors) talk about, spy on other accounts, let you in on some of the frequently asked questions or frequently used phrases. 

The Facebook Ads Library gives you instant insights on what kind of ads and campaigns your competitors are running on Facebook (or Meta).

Take advantage of Panoramata to check on your competitors’ display ads, regular PPC campaigns, email campaigns, website changes, and so much. 

Use SocialBlade to monitor growth of social channels of any band and use Phlanx to quickly check on any brand’s Instagram Engagement. 

How are you going to track, learn, and follow your competitors?