Consistently watching your competitor’s top listings and products will give you intelligence about their business, products and pricing strategies that are/are not working, and inform you on how to avoid threats and identify opportunities. Tracking competitors is easier than ever with ShelfTrend’s scheduling capabilities.
Premium subscribers can schedule up to 3 monitors, saving up to 10 reports for each monitor. Access the data from Dashboard to view in the ShelfTrend app, or download to csv.
Here is a step by step on how to monitor your Competitors.
1. Run a Top 500 Live Live Listings Report by seller.
Select the Country (eBay marketplace) where your competitor has active listings. In the Sellers field, enter your competitor’s Seller ID.
2. Sharpen the report. If you are watching a fairly large seller, you may want to edit the configurations of your report by adding a keyword or category to confine the data to the most relevant parts of their business. Re-run the report until you have the data you want to monitor.
3. Click the clock icon to schedule your report. For the Top 500 Live Listings Reports, start with a report that is once a day. If you find that the metrics hardly change, extend the frequency of reports to 3-7 days.
4. Compare reports from different days. From the Dashboard you are able to compare report-level metrics to glance over any changes to a seller’s situation. Click on the image below to see how the summary metrics change.
In the example in the above picture, we compare this seller’s Top 500 ranked listings on 25 Sep 2018 versus 29 Sep 2018. There are a few discrepancies to note:
Their total listings on the eBay.co.uk site dropped almost 20,000 listings. Small in comparison to their million plus listings, but 20,000 is still a lot to end in 4 days.
There has obviously been a shift in their Top 500 ranked products.
The highest priced product on 29 Sep is £70 more than that 4 days earlier.
There were 6 Brands within their Top 500 on 25 Sep, but 4 days later there are 9.
5. Deep-dive into the data. Click through to compare the different reports to investigate any hunches and drill into changes that could produce meaningful insights into your competitor’s business. Download the data to csv for even more data.
Carrying on with the example above, we open the seller’s Top 500 ranked listings on 25 Sep 2018 versus 29 Sep 2018. Click on the above picture to see the comparison.
Immediately the top ranked listing is different. In 4 days, a listing that doesn’t even rank on 25 Sep is now top ranked on 29 Sep. It is an 8-disc box set compilation album by Bobbie Gentry, only released days earlier on 21 Sep. The listing has made only 6 sales, but it’s sales velocity and potential is such that eBay ranks it this Seller’s top ranked listing on 29 Sep.
The Elf movie from 25 Sep has been shuffled to rank 2 and the Diary of a Wimpy Kid has dropped to rank 328 on 29 Sep. Although it is not shown in the above images, the Diary of a Wimpy Kid had a very minor price increase that possibly made it less competitive than this seller’s other listings.
Exploring and comparing the data further, other insights about this seller become apparent:
This seller’s Huawei and Google Pixel listings are some of the new brands that are building momentum.
Minor price increases in some of their top listings seem to have shuffled their rank, but might not have affected their sales.
Their Top 500 category penetration is largely in DVD and CDs, but they are making a strong play in gaming consoles and smartphones.
6. Return regularly to view and download the data
Premium subscribers can schedule up to 3 monitors, saving up to 10 reports for each monitor. That is a lot of reports to be able to compared.
Access the data from Dashboard to view on ShelfTrend, or download to csv. After 10 reports, the oldest report will drop off and be replaced with the newest report. Return regularly to view and download reports to avoid any data gaps.
By keeping an eye on your competitor’s Top 500, you will get an idea of their strongest categories, their merchandise buying strategies and overall market response to their product offering.