10 Ways Your Competitors Are Outsmarting You in the Ecommerce Marketplace

With the rising number of eCommerce sites on the web today, stiff competition is inevitable. In a recent survey of eCommerce executives, more than 84% of eCommerce companies recorded fierce market competition levels.

That explains why most small businesses halt their operations within their first year of operation. You may offer quality products, conduct marketing campaigns, and generate new ideas. However, if you exert less effort than your competitors, you may be out of the game before you know it. 

If you are losing your customers and facing difficulty attracting new ones, it is time to review your strategies and see where you go wrong. This will enable you to devise better strategies to beat the competition. 

In this article, we look at the 10 ways Your competitors outsmart you in the eCommerce marketplace. 

Pricing Strategy

Most customers always look for eCommerce stores offering the same product quality at competitive pricing.  You might be tempted to lower prices which isn’t the best strategy to beat the competition considering the market is segmented into lower, middle, and top-tiered customers. 

Most successful online retailers opt for a competition-based pricing strategy. With this technique, you ignore existing consumer demand and product costs to focus on the current market rate for services and products. You can then come up with prices that fall within your competitor’s price range.                                     

Use of Online Marketplaces

You are missing out if you only rely on your eCommerce site to attract customers and make a sale. Most eCommerce businesses are now leveraging multiple online marketplaces alongside their eCommerce stores to create awareness about their brand, reach a wider audience, and generate more revenue. 

Although the list of eCommerce marketplaces is endless, it is best to only work with reputable platforms to get the most out of it. Selling on Poshmark will be a better starting point to keep up with the stiff competition. Some eCommerce businesses even list products on multiple online marketplaces to reap the benefits of each platform. If you plan to do this, review each platform’s requirements to see if they are favorable.

Media and Review Monitoring

Savvy online retailers benefit a lot from media and review monitoring. It is often easy for eCommerce customers to share their experiences with a brand, whether good or negative. Those reviews offer an opportunity for targeted expansion and easy conversion of competitor’s customers.

Your competitors could be tracking and carefully analyzing your positive reviews to highlight the cause of the customer interaction success. They then compare it with their policies and procedures and implement better strategies to disadvantage you.

On the other hand, eCommerce managers can use negative reviews from your frustrated customers to fix their sales funnel issues and generate highly converting promotional and marketing materials. Through that, they highlight their key messages and win more customers.

Level Of Customer Service 

Ecommerce businesses that provide memorable customer service differentiate themselves from the competition and build a chain of loyal customers. It starts with customer support team members showing gratitude while interacting with clients and providing the necessary information to ensure they get the right products. They also leverage a problem-solving approach to provide solutions to customer queries. 

If your team players seem demotivated, boost their spirit through constant motivation and rewards. By doing that, you will build a customer-centric eCommerce business powered by dependable staff who focus on raising the level of customer satisfaction.

Leveraging Multiple Marketing Channels

Getting stuck to the same marketing channels you have been using and feel comfortable about is easy. But by doing so, you might be giving your competitors an edge, especially if they leverage different channels to reach the audience. 

You might be running a Facebook ad, yet most of your potential customers are on TikTok. Shifting your campaigns to TikTok through short product clips and videos would be the perfect way to win them over, even if your industry doesn’t use the channel. Other marketing channels you can turn to include content marketing, PPC, SEO, email marketing, and affiliate marketing.

Competitor Analysis Audit

Outsmarting the competition can be extremely challenging if you can’t tell what your competitors are doing. Successful eCommerce business owners run competitor analysis audits to highlight competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. This makes it easy to identify gaps and figure out how your eCommerce business can seal them.  

The best way to determine the current state of your business in relation to your competitors is to conduct a SWOT analysis. That involves looking at the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats and planning on how to improve.

Consistent Product Quality

Being inconsistent in product quality might be why competitors are winning more and more of your loyal customers, lowering your sales. It can easily happen if you offer a wide range of products and become overwhelmed to be keen on the overall product quality of each item. This makes leveraging the newest technology applications crucial as it can help you automate repetitive tasks, thus focusing on improving the quality of your products.

Customer Retention Efforts 

Evaluate the effectiveness of your established efforts to retain the customers you’ve obtained via digital marketing campaigns. Keap in mind that it costs five times more to win a new customer than to retain an existing one.  Some ways to improve customer retention include maximizing each customer’s value, improving customer support, setting up loyalty programs, and providing referral bonuses. 

Brand Image and Communication

Ecommerce businesses with good branding and communication appeal to customers’ emotions, attract positive perceptions, as well as connect and collaborate effectively. This is often achieved by developing a unique selling point and paying attention to SEO best practices.

Clear communication of your product prices, shipping charges, and refund policy and making every crucial information easy to access on the website goes a long way in building customer loyalty. 

Ecommerce Website Responsiveness on Mobile 

Mobile devices account for more than 59.16% of global website traffic. An eCommerce site with an impressive mobile experience will most likely attract more repeat customers.

If you run a poor mobile responsive site, you could be losing leads and sales in the market. Optimizing it for mobile will improve its user experience and boost its ranking on the Google search engine.

As competition stiffens in the eCommerce industry, it will be best to generate winning strategies to remain relevant. Track what your competitors are doing and keep up with industry trends. You should also leverage the latest technology to streamline business operations and enhance efficiency.