5 Useful eCommerce Competition Monitoring Tools: A Review
Image Credit: Gavel International
Succeeding in eCommerce is not all that different from succeeding in the brick-and-mortar business world. To get ahead, you need to know your competition.
But in some ways, this is harder online, as the market is already overflowing. However, keeping on top of your competition has never been easier now that there’s a wealth of eCommerce competition monitoring tools to choose from. Which one (or ones) you choose depends on the type of business you run and what you want to know about the competition.
We’ve compiled a review of 5 affordable competition monitoring tools to help you make an informed decision.
1. Owletter
Owletter covers an overlooked but important aspect of competitor analysis—emails. Owletter automatically captures, stores, and analyzes every single email a competitor sends. It will notify you whenever a competitor sends a particularly valuable email as well.
You can learn all about your competition’s email strategy by seeing when they send emails, how often they send them, and what strategies they use to drive business success through email.
Owletter also tracks your competition’s performance so you can see which part of their email campaign significantly influences their success. You can spot trends and get all the information you need to send better emails than your competition.
Owletter creates a dashboard with all the emails sent by your competitors, organizing it into categories of information. It will also send you monthly summaries detailing the important information gleaned from the emails.
At $19-$79 per month, Owletter has a very reasonable price and is a highly useful way to understand your competition’s email strategies.
2. Prisync
Image Credit: Prisync
Prisync is a competitor price tracking tool that keeps note of competitor prices and stock availability automatically. Not only that, it relays the information via a web dashboard or email alert. It helps you keep on top of the fluctuating prices in your industry without having to check your competition manually.
When there’s a change in the market or a particular product price, you’ll receive a notification. You can monitor sites worldwide and in any currency, see category or brand performance analytics, and it gives you access to the API and price history of any given site.
The payment plan depends on how many products you want to track, ranging from $49 per month for up to 100 products, to $209 for up to 5000 products. There is also a free version that gives you more general market and stock information without having to track individual products.
3. Ahrefs
Image Credit: Ahrefs
Ahrefs is particularly useful for learning about your competitors’ SEO strategy and the organic search traffic to their website. It will show you what keywords your competition uses and ranks for in search results.
With the backlinks analysis that Ahrefs provides, you can see which websites link to your competition, and you can even analyze the quality of their link profiles. Besides from helping you understand your competition’s link profile strength, this can also uncover new avenues for finding links.
Ahrefs shows you useful data about a competitor’s organic search traffic, as well as their paid search campaigns like Google and Facebook ads. Ahrefs is a great all-around tool for tracking your competition’s SEO strategy and organic search traffic over time.
Price plans range from $99-$999 per month, so there is a package to fit all budgets.
4. Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo focuses on content, particularly what’s generating ‘buzz’ online. It’s great value for money, as it shows you both content from your competitors and any other top-performing content that’s relevant to your brand.
It’s great for helping you find topics that will attract web traffic at any given time. You can analyze the success of topics your competitors covered, and discover ideas that will let you hop onto whatever is currently hot on the Internet.
Buzzsumo lets you see who is sharing your competition’s content on social media, giving you useful insights about where you could earn shares for your content too. It also shows you which content got your competition most of its shares.
If you have an idea for a topic, Buzzsumo can show you who’s currently performing well for that topic. The amount of information you get with Buzzsumo is extensive. It sends you alerts when your competitors publish something, detailed competitor content performance reports, and much more. Starting at just $99 per month, Buzzsumo gives you a real bang for your buck.
5. Mozbar
Like Ahrefs, Mozbar is also related to SEO, except that it’s a toolbar that gives you instant metrics when viewing any page or SERPs. It’s a highly useful extension to have, as it shows you how much of an authority your competitors are in Google’s eyes, which is a pretty accurate metric.
It does this by showing you their domain authority and page authority score. It offers a page analysis to explore various attributes for each page, and finds and highlights the keywords in a page and separates them by type. It provides all of this, as well as link metrics, personalized searches, and more for free. In other words, it’s an absolute must for any eCommerce business.
Other than the toolbar extension, Moz offers paid services that give you access to more information. For example, Mozpro provides more detailed information about the link profile of a website, and offers more tools such as Open Site Explorer and the Keyword Difficulty Tool.
However, these services aren’t as extensive as the tools provided by websites like Ahrefs, so they probably won't add value if you already pay for another SEO monitoring tool.
Final Thoughts
We have covered a wide range of eCommerce competitor analysis tools that you can use to find out various forms of information about your competitors. All the aforementioned tools are highly useful and affordable, though how many you decide to use depends on what information you need and your company’s budget.
What’s important is that you have some kind of competition monitoring strategy that gives you an edge. We hope that this review will help you make informed decisions to develop or refine that strategy. Once in place, it can only serve to boost your bottom line and improve your sales.
