Competition is a reality of running a business, whether online or offline. To succeed, you must strive to do better than your competition. And that is why performing competitor analysis is crucial to your marketing and business strategy.
While it is essential to focus on your products and business and devise ways to excel in your chosen niche, you should always be aware of what your competitors are doing.
This is especially true in the competitive nature of running a Shopify store. Analyzing your sales data and your competition could unlock missed opportunities for your business!
When I first set up my online store, it took months before I hit my store sales target. I was about to quit when I discovered the importance of studying the competition, which allowed me to refine my selling and marketing strategies.
Luckily, you won’t have to keep guessing how well your Shopify competitors are doing!
You have tools available to track the sales performance of other Shopify stores so you can implement the best strategies that align with your Shopify stores.
Moreover, you will learn how to use the data you get to improve your own store’s performance!
Article Overview
Why is Competitor Analysis Important?
What to Look for During Competitor Analysis
Key Takeaways
- Competitor analysis on other Shopify stores offers valuable insights into marketing and sales strategies that would boost your store’s performance.
- Competitive analysis can help identify underserved markets, identify brand strengths and weaknesses, forecast industry trends, and set benchmarks for future growth.
- Using a Shopify sales tracker lets you easily pull data from competitors’ Shopify stores, where you can see the number of sales and their revenue over a specified period.
- The sales tracker is valuable in analyzing sales data to determine demand within your niche or to identify potentially hot products you can add to your Shopify store.
How to Use the Shopify Sales Tracker Tool to Check the sales of another store
Do you want to tweak your Shopify store’s sales strategies and improve your store’s sales?
The ZIK Shopify sales tracker is an excellent tool that will empower your business to succeed and optimize your sales for your Shopify store easily, with just one click.
The data is available with one button click, allowing you to track sales and other accurate data for your competitor stores.
Use this detailed guide to learn how to use this tool for your Shopify business.
Step 1: Access the Shopify Sales Tracker tool from your ZIK Analytics account.
The first thing you must do is log into your ZIK Analytics account.
Once you are in the dashboard, the first thing to do is set the marketplace to Shopify.
The sales tracking tool is in the left-hand corner of the screen. Click Competitor Sales Tracker to start using the tool.
Step 2: Paste the Shopify store URL.
When you click on the Store Sales Tracker, you will be directed to a page that looks like this.
If you already know your competitors on Shopify, the next step is to paste their store’s URL on the search box. If not, it is best to research your competitors first.
For this example, we will use the Urbana Sacs Shopify store – https://urbanasacs.com/.
Paste the URL in the search box and click the Search button.
Step 3: Analyze the sales data for the Shopify store.
The sales tracker tool provides essential data about the store’s sales performance. You can set the sales date range from 7 to 30 days or add a custom date.
Adjusting this setting enables you to obtain the most accurate and relevant data for your competitive analysis.
It will show the following data upon searching and analyzing the store URL:
- Store Creation Date – It tells you when the Shopify store was established or the website launched.
- Social Channels – It provides a link to the Shopify store’s social media channels. These are clickable links, so you can explore them if you want to analyze the store’s social media marketing efforts.
- Products – It indicates how many products are available on the Shopify store.
- Sales – It refers to the number of sales for the store within the selected period.
- Revenue – It refers to the revenue that the store has generated within the specified period.
- Ad Channels – This shows the Shopify store owners’ advertising channels for their business.
- Store Apps – It shows the apps that the Shopify store uses.
You will need the data above to determine the store’s sales when doing a competitive analysis.
Whether it is a direct or indirect competitor, it is crucial to assess demand and analyze what products they have that could potentially boost your own Shopify store performance.
Step 4: In-depth analysis of the sales data and Shopify store analytics.
Additional features are available to provide a more detailed insight into the Shopify store sales and performance.
If you want to closely inspect the sales chart or data over a given period using a visual chart, you can click on the Show Chart option next to the Sales number. Clicking on this button will provide you with a detailed sales graph over the specified period.
For example, the graph shows that on June 25th, the Shopify store sold 7 products and earned $498 in revenue.
If you scroll further down the page, you will find three additional sections to explore:
- Best Sellers
- Recently Sold
- New Products
The Best Sellers section is where you can find the best selling products from the Shopify store. For each product on the list, you will find the upload date (or when the product was added to the store), listing price, number of sold items, and their revenue.
For this Shopify store, the top selling product has generated six sales and earned $348 in revenue.
If you want to capitalize on the demand for a particular product, you can consider adding similar products to your own store. Store owners can leverage this tool to find potential suppliers for those products without ever leaving ZIK Analytics.
Click on the box icon next to the products listed on the Best Sellers.
Let’s take one of the top-selling products as an example. The Shopify store owner listed this item for sale on their store at $20, and it has sold 3 times in the last 30 days.
The Item Finder tool on ZIK Analytics’ Shopify Store Sales Tracker tool found similar items on Aliexpress for $0.99 to $5.64. No matter which product you list on your store, you can capitalize on a high-profit margin potential of up to $15 per product sold.
Take advantage of this handy tool to track sales for competitor stores and identify winning products.
The Recently Sold tab is for the products the online store recently sold.
The New Products are for the newest items added to the online store listing.
Step 5: Analyze your competitors in one place.
On the Shopify Sales Tracker tool’s main page, you will find the “Search History,” where all your competitors are listed. If you want to analyze certain stores and their most recent sales data, you can access them all here in the future.
For each competitor, you will find the total products, sales today, sales yesterday, sales in the last 7 days, and total sold.
In the Favorites section, you will find all the stores you’ve added as “Favorites”.
Bonus Tip
Use the analyzer icon and click on it to get easy access to sales data and analytics for each Shopify store.
For example, you can see the Trending Shopify Stores or Trending Products on the Market Insights dashboard of the Shopify tool on ZIK Analytics. Click the icon to go to a detailed page with sales insights on a particular Shopify store.
Why is Competitor Analysis Important?
Before diving into the benefits of analyzing your Shopify competitors, it’s crucial to define what it is first.
Competitor analysis is when you identify your competitors in the industry and analyze their marketing strategies and performance or a specific aspect of their business operations.
The goal of analyzing the competitors sales and performance is to gather information that will serve as a point of comparison to your business. Tracking sales and performance helps you identify potential strengths and weaknesses in your business to tweak strategies accordingly.
A well-executed competitive analysis can help you gain valuable insights that enable store owners to succeed in the Shopify platform. These are the benefits of analyzing your Shopify competitors and how to maximize this strategy.
Know Your Market
When identifying your Shopify competitors, you are learning more about your target market. It helps you tap into an underserved market you might not even know about and helps you fill the gaps in your products or services to cater to this new market.
If there are any shortcomings from your competition, you can use that as an opportunity to surpass them if you can satisfy your customer’s unmet needs.
Identify Industry Trends
Another advantage to competitor analysis is the chance to analyze industry trends. It allows you to study the industry from a bigger picture, helping you spot current trends and forecast future trends.
These valuable insights also help you align market trends with customer needs so that you can find ways to offer more value.
Know Your Strengths and Weaknesses
When you study your competitors, you can analyze what they’re doing right and wrong. It puts things into perspective in terms of your own Shopify sales strategies.
Based on your competitor strategies and their performance, you can see where your Shopify store is positioned in your specific market or niche. You’ll better understand how much sales you need to generate to reach their market position.
Knowing your weaknesses results from what strategies they are doing that you haven’t implemented yet, which differentiates them from your Shopify business or other Shopify stores in the industry.
When you know where you fall short, you can invest more time and resources toward improving to meet your customer expectations.
And once you identify your strengths over the competition, you can leverage that to increase your competitive edge.
Create Benchmarks
The ultimate goal of performing competitors sales and marketing performance is to set a benchmark for success. It provides a model to mold your business and strive for future growth.
This is not to say that you must copy what your competitors are doing. Instead, pick out strategies that align with your business goals and target market.
Furthermore, it is important to be aware of rising companies that could threaten your business and devise ways to keep up with the competition.
What to Look for During Competitor Analysis
So, you’ve decided to do a competitive analysis? That’s a good step toward helping your Shopify store establish success.
However, the most crucial part of analyzing your Shopify competitors is knowing the most important data and insights.
Products or Services
Your products are the focal point of your Shopify business. Without products, you cannot generate online sales.
Therefore, it makes sense to focus on your competitor’s products when doing a competitive analysis. The first thing you must do is identify your competitors’ top-selling products.
Identifying their best-selling products enables you to identify the market demand and determine if you can potentially meet that demand through products in your own business.
Focus on the features of the best selling products instead of fixating on the product itself. It will help you find similar products from your competitors that would address any demand on the market without necessarily listing the same items as your competitors’ best selling products.
Target Audience
Aside from identifying the top selling products, the target audience is another important component of competitive analysis.
A target audience is a group of people you want to serve through your products or services. Performing analysis allows you to discern the specific target audience for your target audience.
Now, you can analyze them against your target audience. Are there any similarities or overlap? What are their age, location, buying behavior and preferences?
You must break down the different aspects of your target audience – from age to gender and demographics – so you can market your products to suit them best.
Price/Value
Pricing strategy is another area to focus on when doing competitive analysis. Analyze your competitor’s stores and their pricing strategy. Using a Shopify sales tracker tool, you can gather essential data about their average order value and the price for each item sold.
Now, why is it important to analyze pricing? Knowing the pricing strategy for your competitor’s store will help you determine the pricing of your products for your own Shopify store.
If you have a similar target audience, you can determine the most suitable pricing for your products that your audience can afford. This ensures you are not over- or under-charging for your products, ensuring value among your customers.
Profitability is important, so consider that when analyzing competitor strategies regarding pricing.
Differentiators
If you want to improve your store’s sales and gain a competitive edge, you must distinguish your business from the competition.
Using the data gathered from other Shopify stores, you can determine what sets your competitors apart from other brands. You can do the same with your brand. Identify your top differentiators and communicate that to your customers through marketing efforts.
For example, you can showcase convenience as your differentiator through flexible plans and ease of ordering through your website. Another example is a focus on sustainability.
Highlight aspects of your business that promote eco-friendly practices, like recyclable packaging. Whether it’s affordable pricing or excellent customer service, leverage that differentiator to outdo your Shopify competitors.
Marketing
A competitive analysis involves analyzing your competitors’ marketing strategies to promote their products or services.
Evaluate their marketing strategies versus your own. Identify elements that work and that don’t. It will enable you to refine your marketing strategies based on conversions, brand awareness, and business reputation.
FAQs
How do I track best selling products on Shopify?
You can use competitive analysis tools that enable you to track the sales performance of Shopify stores that are also your competitors. It will help you identify which of their products sell best and the average order value, aside from the total amount of sales over a period of time.
How much does the average Shopify store make?
It depends on your niche or industry and from one store to another. According to Shopify, the average monthly revenue per store is $1,579 as of 2020.
What is the tool to see Shopify store sales?
Many paid tools are available to track down the sales data for a particular Shopify store.
One example is the ZIK Analytics Shopify Sales Tracker tool, which lets you see sales data, such as total number of products sold, sales in the last 30 days, and average order value. You can also use this tool to see a store’s best selling products.
