Before starting out in the e-commerce sector, businesses are advised to undertake market research to assess risks and opportunities.
Market research enables an SME to be more aware of its risks, its competition and its opportunities. It helps the company define its e-commerce strategy and refine its goals in terms of turnover.
For e-commerce, the SME can use a traditional market research format. Above all, this involves answering the following questions:
- What are the major market trends? What volume of sales does this represent overall?
- Who are the consumers? What do they need? Where do they live? How do they consume?
- Who are the competitors? How many of them are there? Where are they located? What are their strengths and weaknesses?
- What are the market opportunities and potential threats?
- Does an e-commerce project have a place on the market? What can it contribute in the face of the competition? Can it respond to a genuine need?
Competition and consumer behaviour
There are many tools for gathering information about the success of a competitor’s site as well as consumer behavior.
- Google Ad Planner. This tool, which is part of Google Ads, enables analysis of competitor sites' visitor profile (numbers, ages, etc.).
Other indicators provide a better idea of the success of a competitor's site. Tools like Hootsuite, Netvibes, Feedreader or Feedly allow a comparison of the number of subscribers to the RSS feeds of different sites. These aggregators are used for information monitoring and curation.
Another method involves exploring the statistics and activity of competitors’ pages on social networks such as Instagram, Facebook, X or TikTok. A tool like Metricool allows you to perform a benchmark to evaluate your company’s performance compared to that of your competitors on various platforms. Competitive social media analysis is divided into four stages:
- Identify the most relevant keywords for the business activity, for example, using the Google Ads’ Keyword Planner
- Identify the high-ranking companies for these keywords, both on Google and social media.
- Target five companies that are of interest to your target audience with Facebook’s Audience Insights and X’s Analytics, which the company wants to focus on.
- Know the activity of these companies on social media: which networks are they using? How many subscribers do they have? How often do they post? What is their engagement rate? What hashtags do they use?, etc.
- Conduct a SWOT analysis (see below).
- Follow up to ensure competitive analysis remains up to date.
SWOT assessment and comparison method
The SWOT analysis or matrix is a powerful business strategy tool. It allows us to identify our Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats to position ourselves in relation to the competition and to identify areas for improvement if necessary.
A SWOT analysis usually involves a visual representation of the four criteria to be evaluated.
