3 Ways to Track Competition on Amazon Marketplace
Easier Than it Seems…
When you try to sell something on Amazon Marketplace, it’s always a ton of competitors out there. Whatever the quality of your products are, there are always some alternatives.
One of the main ways to get ahead of your competition is competitive pricing. You often need to set your prices lower than the competition, but higher than their costs.
It sure is a challenge. But there are ways to overcome this challenge. I want to list the most used 3 of them.
1- Track Manually
If you have one or two products, it may be acceptable to do the research manually. I admit that it’s really hard sometimes, and you can’t always predict when the competitors change their prices. Let’s find out how.
a) Finding Competitors
To find your competitors, you need to search for the Amazon Marketplace with the name of each product. It’s also possible to go your product page and find competitors there, but it’s not the general case, and there will be fewer than you can manually find.
b) Create a Google Sheet
I personally use Google Sheets, but you can use MS Office, OpenOffice or iWork to do the exact same thing. Just create a new sheet and start adding your competitors there.
The columns may be like “competitor name”, “competitor product url”, “latest price”, “latest initial price”, “latest discount” etc.
Then you need to start filling the rows. It seems hard, but it’s not the hardest part. If you want to track price changes of your competitors, you need to check periodically and enter the prices to separate sheets.
c) Generate Graphs out of Data
It’s the most complicated part for non-sheet-experts. But there are ways to visualize the data you have and see the bigger picture of competition.
The main way to do this is trusting Google to create some charts via “Explore” feature. It creates beautiful charts though, so you can experiment the features to refine your charting skills.
d) Generate Reports
While a sheet seems like a report, you need to extract the data needed to find the right pricing for your products at the right time. For example, you need to notify your team on price changes. Another example, you need to report where you are in the competition of each product.
e) Result
It’s hard. It gets harder and harder when you have more products to sell and more competition to track. But it may be reasonable for a couple of products. So if you have more products than you can track manually every time, you should read on.
2- Amazon Marketplace API
API stands for Application Programming Interface. Amazon has a cool API in terms of tracking your competition. But you’ll need at least one developer in your team to utilise this feature. Let’s take a look at the steps.
a) Join the API Program
Amazon gives tokens to its users in order to use the API’s they have. It’s basically the access code for you to reach the endpoints. You need to signup to get one.
b) Read the API Documentation
Like every cool API, Amazon Marketplace API has a documentation. It gives you the endpoints you can reach, the calls you need to make in order to reach them and the parameters you should send and receive.
c) The Code
There comes the harder part. You need to arrange your development team to build a product out of the API you have. It needs to do the things we discuss on the previous part. You’ll basically need an automation code for the task we described.
d) Result
It may be hard and costly for you if you’re not a developer yourself. You’ll need to arrange a development team, or at least a developer to utilize the Amazon Marketplace API. Then you’ll need time and resources to host the program they write, bug fixes etc.
But there is an easier way. Much easier actually.
3- PriceCute
Here comes the fun part.
PriceCute is an online tool for Amazon Marketplace Sellers to track their competition easily. You just need to enter the url of your products and their competitors, and PriceCute does the rest. Let me explain the steps.
a) Signup to PriceCute
Go to pricecute.com and create an account. It gives you 15-day risk-free trial with no credit card needed. There is also a demo dashboard where you can experiment with the actual product.
b) Enter the URLs
After confirming your email address, you can login to see your dashboard. Simply enter the urls of your products, then their competitors to your dashboard.
It takes approximately 5 minutes for PriceCute to analyze the urls and start tracking prices.
c) Focus on Selling Awesome Products
PriceCute will regularly go to the products and get their current prices, initial prices and discount percentages. It’ll track the prices and report them back to you.
It also gives you competition graphs to see the big picture of the price history for each product.
You can even download excel reports to create detailed analysis.
And here comes the best part: You can get email alerts when it detects any price change.
This way, you can really focus on selling awesome products and let PriceCute do the rest.
d) Result
It doesn’t matter if you have two or two hundred products, PriceCute can track every single change and reports them back to you.
According to its users, it’s really cool that you don’t need to do anything else!
What’s Your Opinion?
So, what do you use to track your Amazon Marketplace Competition? You can add comments and share your ideas.
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