Carrying Out
E-Commerce Research In 2018
To succeed in any business, you need to plan, research and understand the market. Unless you have a clear idea of who your target clientele are, what’s on offer from other e-commerce sites, and how the market is anticipated to grow, you may find it tough to create a practical business model.
A Good Way to Start Your Research
After creating a research report, most e-commerce market research firms publish press releases to get the word out. Subscribing to the RSS feed of sites like PRWeb and PR Leap too can help.
Try Other Resource
From combing through e-commerce industry blogs and news sites to reading posts on review sites and social media, you can get useful insight and data related to market research.
Research Using These Might Give Some Insights
With Google Keyword Tool, you can conduct fast and easy keyword research to know the words or phrases related closely to your products/services that people are searching for.
Probe different social media channels to know how your brand and offerings are perceived by customers, what they talk about, their opinion about your business and the industry as a whole etc.
Take a close look at the market to find out if there’s a clear leader, if the market is saturated or if your competitor has a weakness that you can take advantage of. Even if the market feels full at first glance, you shouldn’t get disheartened.
The modern commercial landscape is constantly changing. Knowing what’s happening out there to what’s new and what’s coming next, researching market trends will let you interpret what’s likely to work and what’s not, you can take tadvantage.
Forming Focus Groups
Rather than gathering data from friends, family and persons you know, you should gather them from focus groups of your intended target market. Such feedback is advantageous, as it can reveal problems that your e-commerce team may have overlooked.
Tools That You Need
Google Trends is the online search facility provided by Google that allows users to see related search results for any query. In Google Trends, you can query for a maximum number of five topics or words simultaneously.
Alexa is useful for e-commerce marketers to analyze traffic on the stores of their competitors. Just put competitor’s URL and Alexa shows global traffic rank, search analytics, average site load time, audience insights, number of websites linking in and much more.
Google Alerts lets you place specific keywords in its set up and you can receive emails when they’re mentioned in news stories. Though it’s quite a useful service, you may receive irrelevant or uninteresting news if you fail to set it up properly.
This tool helps you analyze keywords and the volume of traffic attracted by those keywords. You can also narrow down the search by incorporating certain product categories like cosmetics, apparel etc and landing page URLs.
Market research isn’t an easy task and can look particularly difficult if you’re on a tight budget that doesn’t allow you to either buy costly reports or pay research firms to perform the job for you. Remain flexible, modify your marketing strategy in accordance with your ecommerce market research and stay competitive.