RESEARCH YOUR COMPETITORS: Step 2

EXAMINATION

After your competitors have been identified and categorised, you can move on to the next stage – examination. To come closer to these rivals and discern more details you need to analyse their websites as a client and become their client.

Thus, this stage consists of two steps: external (visual) and internal examination.

External (Visual) Examination

Firstly, we advise getting started analyzing the websites of your direct competitors. Just take a view of their online store, and answer several questions:

Check, if their design is attractive, clear and user-friendly.
Is their website optimised? Do they have a mobile application?
How do their navigation and filters work?
Are their product photos and other images high quality? Is there any stock content?
How do their product cards look like? Where are their CTAs placed?
What is the quality of their text content?
Do they have a blog?
How do their promotion banners look like?
Do they have links to social media? Where are they placed?
Are their social media pages or channels active? What content do they publish there? How do they interact with their followers?
How many reviews do they have? How often do they answer questions?

Pay attention to all the areas and features you wanted to have on your website, and please do not forget to make notes.

Internal Examination

To get deeper expertise, fall back on secret shopping. This step will be necessary for improving the customer experience on your own website. Therefore, try to be a difficult customer if you want to find out all pitfalls of the purchasing process, and learn from their mistakes in future.