Ecommerce Market Research

Before we start selling our products online, we must carry out a market research in order to find out  if our products are demanded by the market and if ther is a gap for our company amongst our competitors. In order to carry out our research, we can use certain tools such as Google Trends, Google Adwords and our competitors´price monitoring software, Minderest.

How can we use these metrics then?

Demand: To find out if our products are demanded by clients, we can use Google trends. With this tool we can measure internet user´s interest on certain keywords. For instance, if we are going to sell cosmetics, we could measure the interest of keywords such as “buying cosmetics online”, “online cosmetics shop” and so on. We can even go more in depth and measure how popular would some of our products are.

Competition: Is there a gap for my company amongst competitors? At this point it would be interesting to check out if a leader or several leaders in my sector. The greater the number of big competitors, the higher competitiveness index. The ideal scenario would be to find several competitors but no leader.

Another interesting tool to measure the competitiveness level is Google Keyword:

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Searching by our keywords, we will know what is its demand and competition. The greater the competition, the higher the advertising cost of our campaigns.

Profit margin: If we want our company to be viable, we must have a comfortable profit margin, which also allow us to sell at similar prices than our competitors. That is to say, if our competition prices are so low that we are unable to reach, our company´s success will be very limited. We can obteain this information monitoring several competitors ‘catalogues and comparing those prices with our target selling prices. When we do so, do we still have profit margin? Are our prices going to be in the top or in the botton line?

Carry out an e commerce market research, is a must which for a reasonable cost will help us evaluating our company´s success or failure.