How to Run an Amazon Seller Competitor Analysis

Do you ever wish you could spy on Amazon competitors in your market to know how they run their businesses? Amazon seller competitor analysis helps you better understand your market, why top performers are successful, and what Amazon marketing strategies and tactics can provide you with a competitive edge.

Competitor analysis and related tools can give you an advantage over sellers. But, what is competitive analysis and how can you do it for your Amazon products?

What is Amazon Competitor Analysis?

Amazon seller competitive analysis identifies and evaluates brands that sell comparable products and compete for a similar audience. You can conduct a general Amazon seller competitor analysis or tailor the method to look into specific aspects of your competitors’ business.

Don’t confuse this technique for SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats). A competitor analysis goes beyond those aspects. You can use the results to redefine your objectives and predict market demand and supply.

Why is it important?

Competitive analysis includes researching other sellers’ marketing strategies and using this information to distinguish their strengths and weaknesses. You can understand how to improve your product and product listing by researching how your audience perceives your competitors.

Benefits of Running Amazon Competitor Analysis

Make Improvements

By pinpointing your business’s strengths, you can communicate to your target audience why your product is the best option. But, you can understand where you fall short of your customer’s expectations by recognizing your business’s weaknesses.

Understanding what your customer appreciates about a competitor (or doesn’t) makes it easier to make changes to your product, product listing, and more.

Get Inspiration

One of the most significant benefits of competitor analysis is illustrating holes in the market that need filling. In addition to discovering how to improve your products or service, you may get ideas for additional products to sell and expand your profitability.

Likewise, you may find ways to expand your business outside the platform. Amazon has a built-in customer base of more than 300 million, but brand enhancement could make you more independent and avoid those platform fees.

Extra Motivation

When doing a competitor analysis, you should include companies larger and smaller than yours. Larger and well-established businesses can be models for success. Reviewing reputable sellers in your industry can help you set benchmarks for future growth.

Smaller and newer sellers, alternatively, can indicate threats to your future market share. An average of 2,000 new sellers register daily, meaning you must put in more effort to stay competitive.

Plus, they can give you ideas on how to tweak your offerings or better explain your offerings to your customers.

How to Conduct Amazon Seller Competitor Analysis

1. Keyword Research

Target keywords are the words and phrases your potential customers use to find your (and your competitors’) products.

Just like searchers on Google, most Amazon users are only looking at the top search results for their query. Think to yourself: when have you ever gone to the second or even third Amazon results page?

Including the right keywords is essential to creating a listing that searchers will see. Sellers will need to include keywords in descriptions, product titles, product bullets, and even in alt text.

Some keywords are intuitive, such as “t-shirt” or “desk.” However, short-tail keywords like those are broad and results have high search volumes. Long-tailed keywords are more specific, such as “funny golfing t-shirt” and “adjustable standing desk.”

To get the highest possible quality search results, consider using one of Amazon keyword generator tools and keyword research tools.

Keyword generators: Keyword generator tools are AI-powered platforms that use existing data from Amazon searches and product listings. They generate a large number of relevant keywords that can be included in your Amazon listing, as well as additional data about the keywords like the search volume, competitiveness score, average cost-per-click (for advertising), and more.
Keyword research: Amazon keyword research tools also use AI and machine learning algorithms to provide a list of the most relevant keywords for your listing. They analyze Amazon’s algorithm that decides the order of sales results and then determines which keywords create the most effective product listings. Armed with that list, you can then integrate those keywords into your listings and then rank higher in Amazon search results.

2. Find (and Organize) Your Competitors

The simplest way to identify your competitors is to search for your product name or category on Amazon search. Then, divide the results into the following three categories:

Direct competitors who sell products similar to yours to the same target audience
Indirect competitors who sell products that differ from yours to the same target audience
Replacement competitors, who are the hardest to identify because they sell products from different categories that satisfy the same target customers’ needs

Direct and indirect competitors should be your primary focus, but keep an eye on replacement competitors that could replace or disrupt your industry. For example, a mushroom-based supplement instead of coffee for a morning energy boost.

3. Estimate their Monthly Sales

Knowing how much your competitors sell each month helps you understand the demand for your product and how much you can potentially make.

However, estimating your competitors’ monthly sales can be almost impossible without using Amazon analytic software. Amazon sellers tools give you these insights.

4. Audit Product Listings

Your Amazon competition chart should include the following aspects of other sellers’ listings:

Product titles: How do their titles compare to yours? Do they include a high-ranking keyword that drives organic traffic to their listing?
Product images: Photos are one of the most critical aspects of your listing since your target audience cannot touch products before purchasing. Consider what works for your competitors’ images and how to make your images stand out.
Bullet points: Bullet points contain the most effective selling points, so see which features your competition highlights.
Product descriptions: High-selling businesses know how to focus on the crucial information buyers want. Pay attention to tone and details to include or exclude.

Frequently asked questions from buyers can help you emphasize certain product features to increase sales conversion.

5. Check Competitor Reviews

You can understand more about Amazon competitors through their customer reviews. Negative reviews can show you how to beat out your competition–but so can positive reviews. Uncover what customers love about your competitors’ products and see how you can update your product or product listings so you can match up.

However, this can be very time consuming. Luckily, Sellesta does this automatically. You can filter reviews by aspect and sentiment to see what customers are saying about any product on Amazon. The AI analyzes key tags and the emotional tone of key tags to break down what customers really think about your competitors’ products.

6. Look at Amazon Ad Campaigns

Analyze your competitors’ Amazon ad campaigns before you start running yours. Note what keywords they’re bidding on and which ones they’re winning. Products with a “sponsored” designation are running ads:

7. Review Off-Amazon Marketing

You should also find out where other Amazon sellers are running shopping ads to drive buyers to their products. Enter one of your primary keywords through a search engine – like Google – to check for similar product advertisements on social media platforms, blogs, and other off-Amazon forums.

Pay attention to where your competition is advertising for your target audience. And take note of the type of information posted, post frequency, and the average amount of engagement. If your competition is paying for Facebook ads but generating little traction, that may indicate that it isn’t working.

Everything you’ve absorbed from your competitor analysis can help you form a marketing strategy without making the mistakes your competitors made.

8. Analyze Pricing

Pricing is all about balancing the line between attracting and satisfying customers while still making enough to keep your business running.

This rings especially true if you have an Amazon audience. Forty-nine percent of Americans shop on Amazon for lower prices and 79.8% choose Amazon for both fast and free shipping.

You’re working with a more cost-savvy audience but you still need to bring a profit. Here’s how:

Conduct A/B testing to examine which prices bring you the best reviews, sales, and profits.
Research dynamic pricing strategies to understand how, why, and when to change the pricing of your products
Use Amazon’s Automated Pricing tool or other Amazon pricing tools to update pricing automatically based on market drivers and competitors.

What to do after Running Amazon Seller Competitor Analysis

After analyzing your competitor analysis, you should be able to see holes in the target market. You can use this information to source products that bridge those gaps or update the marketing for your own.

1. Update Your Listing Content

Sellesta’s listing optimization

First and foremost you should optimize your product listings based on the information you discovered. From product description to titles and keywords, optimizing your listing can improve rankings, traffic, and sales.

Read our guide to optimizing your Amazon listing here.

2. Determine the Right Prices

You can set competitive prices once you know how your competitors price their inventory. If you can’t sell at a lower price than your competitor, you should show why your product is worth the value. Does your product have better features or higher-quality materials? Highlight those details.

Your expenses directly affect your products’ price and profit margin. If you can’t lower your price without going into the red, you should evaluate your expenses, such as creating and shipping your product. Repricing software can automate this process by adjusting the price based on the rules you set.

3. Track Improvements

Once you’ve made updates based on your research, confirm if they have improved your metrics. Your ranking is one of the most important, as it sets your product higher on the search results. Shoppers typically use search results to find what they want. And most won’t scroll past the first page.

The Amazon Seller Performance Metrics tells you your product ranking, and the platform updates your rank hourly. The higher your Amazon rank, the more sales you will make, so it’s in your best interest to regularly improve your product ranking.

A high conversion rate indicates that your product is selling. You should implement strategy changes to produce better results if you have a low conversion rate. And, of course, more sales and higher profits mean that your efforts are working.

Get Support with Amazon Seller Competitor Analysis

Thanks to the power of artificial intelligence, you don’t need to spend hours researching your competitors’ best practices. Sellesta offers advanced keyword research, listing optimization, and review analytics to boost your Amazon sales.

Our AI identifies your business’s direct and indirect competitors, so you can see how you size up to them. In addition to targeting keywords relevant to your products, it tracks competitors’ listings, keywords, pricing, and more. Then it only takes a few clicks to improve your product listings.