Win on Amazon with FBA Competitor Tracking
Competitor tracking may save your Amazon FBA business. Discover how and why you need to implement competitor tracking and reap its many benefits to win on Amazon.
Imagine you’re an Amazon FBA seller, and you’ve managed to hit the top of page one in organic ranking. That’s a pretty remarkable feat considering the millions of competitors you’re up against.
But hitting the number one placement isn’t enough these days, and if you’re not swift to act, your Amazon FBA Business could be in jeopardy.
Competitors can sneak up on you out of nowhere, and boom, before you know it, they’re taking your prized placements and your sales. That’s why tracking is vital to the growth of your Amazon FBA business and can make or break your success as an Amazon FBA seller.
Competitor tracking provides real-time discovery and analysis of nearly every move of your Amazon FBA competitors. With this valuable insight, you can strategize against your competition and dominate your market share on Amazon.
In this article, we’ll share how you can easily track your Amazon FBA competition and keep ahead of your competition.
How to Find Your Amazon FBA Competition
Before we dive into what competitor tracking is, it’s crucial to have a good grasp of just exactly who your competition is on Amazon.
Without understanding who your main competition is leveraging your competitive advantage on Amazon becomes cloudy at best.
Step 1 Niching Down
When we talk about competitors on Amazon, we like to look at several key attributes. The first step in finding your competition is to perform a broad-based search in the Amazon.com search bar.
Let’s use the example of a knife block to help you understand selecting competitors on Amazon.
There are many different types of knife blocks to choose from on Amazon.com. Some are magnetic, some have slotted storage space, and some offer canister storage space among other things. To find the knife block most like the one you’re selling, you’ll use a broad search term like “knife block”.
From there, you’ll closely review your search results by narrowing in on products that are highly similar to the one you are selling. In the case of the knife block, you’ll look for products that offer 15 pc storage slots that are almost an exact match to the knife block you are selling.
Niching down on Amazon
The process of refining your search is commonly referred to as “niching down”. Eventually, the search results will heed an almost identical product and offer an exact search term that corresponds to your product.
Now, let’s review the long tail keyword “15 PC Knife Block”. Using this long-tail keyword in your search rather than simply “knife block” yields knife blocks with 15 pieces of slotted storage, and it avoids products such as magnetic knife blocks or canister storage knife blocks that are not at all similar to your product.
These new results are your main competitor listings.
Niching down is a great start to helping you find your top competitors on Amazon.
Step 2 Analyze Your Top Competitor Listings
Once you’ve clearly defined your main competitor listings, you’ll want to analyze the selected products by reviewing the following data points:
BSR (Best Seller Rank) - This figure awards a number to a product once a sale is made. The BSR can indicate how well a product is selling on Amazon. The higher a BSR, the lower the sales volume. The lower the BSR, the higher the sales volume.
Review the BSR of all the main competitors you found while niching down.
Pricing - Which of your main competitor listings are you priced most closely to? Does your product reflect a similar value as your main competitors?
Pricing can help you narrow down your competition as opposed to competing against a large number of ASINs priced out of scope to your offer.
Review Count - How many reviews do your main competitors have stacked up against the number of reviews in your listing?
Reviews are an indicator of customer satisfaction, and lower review counts can decrease sales and customer satisfaction. Your review counts and star ratings should be similar to or above your competitors.
Compare prices on Amazon
Compare Your Listing - You’ll want to compare your listing’s title, bullet points, images, and video content to your main competitors on Amazon. Are your images and videos of similar quality in comparison to your competition?
Marketing Efforts - A great way to get an overall consensus about your competition is to review your competitor’s websites and social profiles.
Look for similarities and differences in marketing efforts to help you understand who your main competitors are in the landscape on and off of Amazon.
Once you’ve found your exact product, its main keyword, and analyzed your competitor listings, you should be able to determine who your top 5 competitors are. These are some of the competitors that you will choose to track on Amazon.
Why is Competitor Tracking Beneficial to an Amazon FBA Business?
With millions of private label sellers vying for top ad placements and sales, it’s easy to become lost in the shuffle against your competition.
If you’re not careful, that once lagging competitor of yours could soon gain a surprising advantage over your Amazon FBA business and dominate sales in your category.
Competitor tracking on Amazon allows you to keep tabs on your competitors in the following ways:
Get updates to Amazon image changes - By tracking your competition’s images, you’ll be able to learn if and when they change their images or reorganize them.
Without proper image tracking, one swift change in a hero image could mean a significant decline in sales if you don’t act quickly and make changes as needed.
Discover changes in the copywriting of a listing and product offer - Sometimes one minor change in the title or bullet point can clarify consumer benefits, making that listing significantly more desirable to consumers.
You’ll want to know if your competition adjusts any of the content in their listing, and you’ll want to evaluate if this is a relevant change for you to consider in your own content.
Review differences in advertising placements - Pay-per-click advertising is pretty much a given on Amazon. How do you know where your competition is placing if you aren’t combing through a mountain of ppc data to find out?
Visual tracking can help you see if your ads are showing up where they should be in relation to your bids and your competitors.
Once you view this data, you can take the necessary steps to either maintain your bidding strategy or adjust it more competitively to outbid your competition.
Review advertising placements on Amazon
Review counts - What if your competitor has an additional 25 reviews in one week, and you have no idea? Your sales could take a big dip, and you could be left wondering why.
Tracking helps keep tabs on review counts so you can take action and hit that “request a review” button and bolster your numbers.
Stay current with pricing changes - A little-known fact on Amazon is that pricing fluctuates by the minute and sometimes by the second.
Tracking pricing allows you to make dynamic changes on the fly and possibly steal those sales at a slightly lower price point or higher value depending on your competitor’s numbers.
If you’re manually tracking these data points once a month or even once a week, you can easily miss massive opportunities to beat out your competition or, at the very least, keep up with changes in your market.
What is the Best Type of Competitor Tracking for Amazon FBA Sellers?
One of the biggest pain points Amazon sellers face is task saturation.
Amazon sellers often struggle to track their competitors in a consistent and comprehensive manner because manual tracking is time-consuming and requires diligence.
So, what’s the solution?
Screenshots.
Mega corporations rely on screenshot tracking because it’s a simple and effective automated process to gather that secret spy-like data that can provide businesses with a leg up against their competition.
What is Stillio Screenshot Tracking?
Users can set Stillio screenshots to capture data every day, every week, or even every hour. The results, if you’re an Amazon seller fighting for the top of your competitive landscape, can be staggering.
Screenshot capturing may be a new concept in the Amazon FBA ecosystem, but its massive benefits can help sellers gain transformative advantages across each Amazon marketplace.
How Does Stillio Help Amazon FBA Sellers?
Stillio operates with powerful AI technology that completely automates the screen capture process for the user. Users can set automated screenshot tracking for multiple Amazon ASINs or URLs at once.
Automation - Stillio’s AI technology is automated with a “set it and forget it” ability to track your top competition on Amazon.
Track Your Competitor Listings with a Fine Tooth Comb - Gone are the days of manually targeting and pulling up 10 or more different listings for your review.
Stillio’s screenshots take automated screen captures of your competition so that you can review every aspect of each listing in detail.
Discover if your competition has updated a new hero image, learn what updates your main competitors have made to copywriting and pricing, and never miss even the most minor changes to a listing again.
Custom Titles - Add a custom title that allows you to organize your screenshots. If you don't enter a title, the URL will be used as the title, and you can always update the title at a later date.
Track Multiple ASINs At Once - What if a new seller comes on board and you’re not aware, or an out-of-stock seller replenishes but at a lower price point? Now you can track multiple ASINs at once, and have a record of the biggest threats in your category.
Organize Your ScreenShots with Tags - There’s nothing worse than collecting a pile of information and not having a way to properly organize these large data sets. Stillio allows Amazon FBA sellers to add tags and neatly organize screen captures by the category of each tag.
Filter your Screenshots by Marketplace - Because Stillio offers a specialized domain filter, Amazon sellers can use this feature to refine your categories by each Amazon marketplace. You can filter by .com, .ca, .eu and more.
Prioritize your Most Valuable Amazon Screenshots - Another big benefit of Stillio screenshot software is that it allows you to mark your most valuable and favorite screenshots into a favorites list for your immediate review.
Analyze Your Advertising Placements in Detail - A big part of selling on Amazon means utilizing the pay-per-click advertising the platform offers.
In some cases, Amazon sellers may notice that their products do not show up in the correct ad placement in accordance with their bids.
Generally speaking, sellers have to rely on manual tracking to submit this information in case files to seller support. The problem is that manual tracking can misrepresent the information you may be trying to submit to Amazon for reconciliation.
Stillio’s proprietary screenshot solution can help you track your ad placements and ensure you are getting the most bang for your Amazon advertising buck.
Discover Pesky Listing Hijackers - If you’ve sold on Amazon, you know about that term every Amazon seller loves to hate - “hijacker”. A hijacker is someone attempting to sell counterfeit goods on your listing.
While there is software in the Amazon FBA ecosystem that provides updates to a seller’s Buy Box status, this software can often delay reporting. Stillio provides Amazon sellers with screen captures so they know exactly who is attempting to gain control of their Buy Box and when.
How to Maximize The Benefits of Stillio As An Amazon FBA Seller
Now that you better understand just how beneficial Stillio is to you as an Amazon FBA seller, you may be wondering how you can maximize the outcomes of Stillio screenshots in your Amazon FBA business.
Stillio offers a wide range of cloud-based integrations which can help Amazon sellers manage all of their screenshot data effortlessly.
Get Email Notifications - Perfect for your team of Virtual Assistants if you’re managing multiple brands on Amazon, or great for the individual seller looking for current notices of changes to your own listings or competitor listings.
You’ll get up-to-date email notifications letting you know when these changes take place, so you can take action and protect your assets.
Build A Robust Screenshot Archive - Stillio’s technology allows Amazon sellers and account management holders to set up access to Dropbox and Google Drive so you can save and organize your screenshot catalog in a straightforward and accessible archive.
Sync to the Webhook Workflow App - Managing an FBA business or brand means you may require access to a workflow system like Webhook.
Stillio’s integration to Webhook allows Amazon sellers to create custom workflows for every screen capture and integrate them to Zapier for a full plan of action in a streamlined workflow.
URL Sharing - You’ll be able to easily share individual screenshots or share your entire archive of screenshots to everyone on your team in your Amazon FBA Business.
Monthly ZIP Downloads - Store your screenshot archives indefinitely with the monthly zip download feature.
How Do You Integrate Stillio Into Your Amazon FBA Business?
One of the best parts about Stillio is just how user-friendly the software really is.
It’s as easy as adding your listings URL and your competitor URLs to the web address page either in single format, multiple, or sitemap format.
Add a title to clearly define your screenshots, and in seconds you’ll have access to an automated process of tracking your Amazon FBA competition like nowhere else online.
Summary
Selling on Amazon offers massive potential to those seeking financial freedom. Nonetheless, the Amazon platform is competitive and to stay ahead of your competition you’ll need the best competitor tracking software available to you.
While you could try manually tracking your competition, the results may leave you lacking accurate and up-to-date data. You’ll be left with a highly inefficient way of processing your data that costs you more of your hard-earned time.
Ditch the arduous manual Amazon tracking you've become accustomed to, retire those old lengthy excel sheets, and find a seamless approach to tracking every move your competitors make with automated screenshots.
Stillio may be a new name to the Amazon ecosystem, but with its robust tracking capabilities, it is a name every Amazon FBA Seller or brand manager should remember.
How are you currently tracking your competition on Amazon? Let us know in the comments below.
Want to try Stillio? Get your first 2 weeks free, and find the most comprehensive competitor tracking for your Amazon FBA business to date. Start today!