To succeed at e-commerce, you need to learn how to reach the front page of search results, win price comparisons without losing profit, and claim coveted featured spots like the Amazon Buy Button. You could try to reinvent the wheel and explore how to do this on your own, or you could observe the brands that are already crushing it and learn from them.

Competitor research is essential to business. In e-commerce, you need to research how much a product will cost to produce, so that you can determine how much you need to sell it for in order to make a profit. Then, you’ll need to research your would-be competitors to find out if the market is willing to buy at that price point.

If you don’t know what your competitors are doing, you can’t meet or exceed what they are offering. In sports, for example, opposing teams and players invest hundreds of hours into researching and studying their competition to learn their moves and tactics. Colonel Harland Sanders meticulously researched McDonald’s before launching KFC. Sam Walton regularly visited competing stores to find out what they were doing. Steve Jobs famously quoted Pablo Picasso, saying “Good artists copy, great artists steal.”

continue reading »