Unlock Your Store's Potential: Learning from Competitors

So when you're looking at growing your store, trying to scale, one of the best things you can do is looking at competitor sites for ideas.

I'm always going back to competitors, but not just competitors in the space that I'm selling in, but also competitors in other niches too. What I try to do is I try to find the top selling competitors in each niche. And the way to do that is you can use different tools, SEO tools, or just looking at their store and kind of get an idea of how many different brands they have, if they have the top brands compared to the other competitors, that kind of thing.

If you look at their collection pages and sort by bestsellers, some of them you'll see the top selling brands that have sold, some of them you'll see they're not. The ones that do have those top selling brands that are selling, those are probably the older stores with lots of sales data. So I try to note like which stores, which competitor stores are the ones that I want to extract ideas from.

And usually they're also going to have other things set up like additional optimization features like, you know, add-ons and free gifts and extended warranties, really good laid out product descriptions, custom YouTube videos, either review videos or like some sort of assembly videos made. They might even have some kind of a showroom, you know, online stores will sometimes set up showrooms.

And so, yeah, the best thing to do is just continuously, maybe every week or every month, go through competitor sites, get ideas, make a checklist of ways to improve your store, and then kind of slowly work on that. You're going to be scaling in many different directions at once all the time.

It's going to be like getting more suppliers, adding more products, figuring out new ways to enhance your store, new ways to enhance your marketing, obviously controlling your ad spend, scaling your ads, but also controlling it so you still get a good ROAS, sales and customer service, warranty support, return management.

There's just a ton of stuff going on with these businesses all the time, right? But the main thing is you have to have a full checklist of things you got to do in order to get to the top. And that's sort of what I developed with my high-ticket job stream masterclass. It's like a full checklist with training videos so I could show my VAs how to do it, and then I made that public. So if you're interested in checking that out, go to ecommerceparadise.com slash masterclass.

So when it comes down to it, just always check your competitor sites, get ideas. If you're not sure what plugin they're using for a specific feature on their site, you can always right-click and use the inspect feature in your browser. Usually if it's Chrome browser, then you just go to the bottom of the menu. Units inspect and look through the code. And usually if you can have a sharp eye, you can identify the name of the Shopify app.

Of course, you can just kind of take the general idea of the app and type it into the Shopify app store as well. You know, so if like, for instance, this app that at the top says frequently bought together, just type frequently bought together into the app store and you'll see a bunch of apps that offer that. But what I like to do is I like to figure out exactly what app my competitors are using. And, you know, especially for things that look better than other apps I've used.

Like sometimes I have an app that I've used for certain things, but their features are lacking. And then I look at a competitor site and I really like that app more. And so like it just, it looks better, it displays better, it works better. So which app are they using? We'll inspect it, find the name of it in the code. And then, because usually like in the code, they're going to have a section above and below the code that notates that it's a particular section of code

related to that app. and it's just easier for developers to work that way. So you can find that in the inspect feature in your browser. So just by doing that, you'll be able to get know the exact Shopify thing. And then you kind of get an idea, like when it comes to free gifts, it's usually a good idea to sort through particular brands and then particular products. Just check your competitors and see what they're doing, product by product.

So you start with a brand, like a best-selling brand, and you see on your competitor's site, okay, they're offering free gifts. It's usually like a package, like multiple products, you know?

And usually it's only on high-margin stuff. So with free gifts, it's like two through maybe four to five products, freebies. They're usually accessories, obviously. They're cheap accessories, but they're add-ons. They kind of like pimp out the product that they're using, whatever it happens to be. Or they just like revolve around the experience of using the product to enhance the experience. So those free gift packages are really, really, you know, really, really good in the eye of the customer.

And oftentimes they'll buy from the store with a free gift package over the store that doesn't have it just because obviously, you know, they're getting those free gifts. And the free gifts might only cost you an extra $50 to $100. But when you're making $1,000 on a sale profit margin, obviously that's totally worth it to get that sale. So free gifts really work well, and free gift packages and all that stuff.

And then another thing, of course, is the add-ons. So when it comes to add-ons, there's two different types of add-ons. There's accessory add-ons, which are kind of similar to the free gifts, but you actually charge for them instead of offering them as free gifts.

And if you really don't have much competition in your niche, and the competitors aren't offering free gifts yet, But you might consider not offering the free gifts, but instead offering them as add-ons until a competitor comes in and starts offering them as free gifts and undercutting you. And then you'll have to switch your thing. But that's kind of what I did in the past is with my stores is I offered things as add-on purchases instead of free gifts.

People would have to upgrade their purchase and pay extra for those products instead of, And then people came into my niche and started offering that stuff for free. And then I had to offer them as free at that point. So it just really depends on the competition. If there's a lot of competition, you're going to have to match their offer, unfortunately. And if it's just too much, if the margins are too low, it might not be worth it.

Because if there's a lot of competition that makes the CPCs really high and the ad spend, and then the margins are so low because they're offering free gifts and discounts, and then the risk is high, maybe the product is a delicate product or something, it can get broken, then it's probably just not worth it, even being in that niche or selling that particular brand's product anyways.

You want to look for brands that have higher margins and more control over map pricing and a smaller dealer network that don't just let everybody join but control it.

It's really cool to get on with a supplier early on and then years later they're telling everybody no, we're not accepting new online dealers because that way it controls the competition. If you find that a supplier that you have is best-selling you can talk to them about it and be like hey, look, you guys are best-selling on our website.

We'd like to maintain this good relationship with you by not having new competitors come in and undercut us we'd like to talk to you about that maybe you know we can spend more on marketing and advertising in exchange for you guys promising us you're not going to bring on new dealers for at least a certain amount of time or whatever we can see how it works out and then you can kind of build that relationship and come up with a win-win situation

and secure that maybe be one of their only or one of a few online dealers for that particular supplier so that's kind of the sweet spot with the business model is becoming that sort of like special online dealer for best-selling high margin or at least decent margin supplier. That's where you can take a store to the next level. It really is based on the suppliers. Beyond that, the best thing you can do is just private label your own products and take those brands to the next level.

But yeah, it's either you work really good with the suppliers and you get them to make you a special dealer. Or you build your own brand and make it really good. Those are kind of the two ways that you can scale these businesses really high.

So get that locked in, guys. Think about it. Consider it. Compete better, but also compete in ways that maybe your competitors aren't considering, and especially your future competitors. Because there's always people trying to come into e-commerce all the time. All the time they're trying to start. Sometimes I have to tell people, like, it's probably just not a good idea to start now because things aren't very good.

But what really the truth is is that it's always a decent time to start even if economy's down stuff like that it just really depends on you and your ability to you know secure deals and stuff like that to negotiate and get better contracts with suppliers and you know to build a business and how much time and effort you have and how much experience you can get if you can find a mentor that that likes you and wants to work with you then that's usually going to be obviously like

a huge plus and you know if not then obviously just figuring out on your own works too but try to do your best and you know just communicate with suppliers and that's the best thing you can do is just talk to them ask them for advice how you can help them all right guys i hope this was helpful definitely check out my website for all of my free offers as well as all of my services i provide ecommerceparadise.com and see you guys out there take care.