How to Research Your eCommerce Market

From the outside looking in, it’s easy to think that eCommerce is just about listing some products on a website and then selling them. After that, the money should just roll in – right?

Well, not quite.

eCommerce requires you to wear many hats and think about things that you otherwise would have had no idea existed. For example, you must make sure that you’re meeting your target market’s demands. Without doing this, you’ll find it very difficult to generate consistent long-term revenue.

Market analysis can take several forms, and knowing where to focus your energy is important. While the principle itself is quite straightforward, you will encounter difficulties if you aren’t prepared. To help you do better research, we’ve put together this comprehensive guide.

Besides learning how to do eCommerce market analysis, you’ll also find out how to present your data effectively. That way, you can make better choices moving forward.

TL;DR:
eCommerce market analysis is the process of researching your target audience, competitors, demand trends, and performance data to make informed business decisions. By combining customer feedback, social listening, Google Trends, analytics, and industry reports, store owners can identify opportunities, reduce risk, refine products, and adjust strategy for sustainable long-term growth.

Market analysis has several advantages in eCommerce. Above all else, it helps you determine whether your current efforts are fruitful. Once you’ve performed effective analysis, you will understand exactly what your customers think about you. Because of this, you’ll find out your strongest areas and potential weak spots that you should consider improving.

Understanding where you are is an important element, but it’s not the only thing you should think about. When you perform market analysis, you will also understand where your competitors are flourishing – and where you can potentially find gaps to use for your own advantage.

Once you’ve done market analysis, reaching all of your other goals will become much simpler, too. You can use the data you’ve found to successfully adjust your strategy, along with your products and services. Over the long run, you’ll build a successful eCommerce business.

One thing worth keeping in mind is that while market analysis is essential, it’s only one component of running a successful business. You need to have the right infrastructure in place, including a strong hosting provider. With free SSL certificates and multi-location private servers, Verpex is an affordable solution to your needs.

The way that you do market analysis for your eCommerce store will depend on various factors. For example, your strategy will differ if you have an established store compared to if you’re starting from scratch. To help you perform more effective research, we’ll outline some of the best ways in which you can do this.

Ask Customers for Direct Feedback

Your customers will always tell you what they want if you give them the opportunity to speak. More importantly, they’ll tell you what they need. Both of these are invaluable in ensuring that you get the information required to enhance your products for them.

Besides improving your products, customers can give you opinions on other aspects they might find useful. For example, they may tell you what they like and dislike about your website. As a result, you can improve aspects such as design and navigation for them.

You can ask your customers for feedback in several ways, and doing so is one of the best ways to achieve eCommerce customer retention. One of the simplest options is to include a survey form when someone buys from you. You can invite them to leave their thoughts and provide potential ways for you to improve in the future.

Inviting feedback on social media, along with customer review sites like Trustpilot, can similarly help you get more tips and tricks on how to grow your business. When customers give you feedback, be sure to acknowledge it.

Good to Know: Don’t ignore negative feedback. This can be just as important as positive feedback, if not more so. Many of the principles of dealing with negative feedback as a hosting reseller also apply to eCommerce store owners.

Social media can form a crucial part of your eCommerce content marketing strategy, and the likes of Instagram, Facebook, and X are useful tools for building brand awareness. Beyond that, though, you can use these tools to perform market analysis and further improve your products and other offerings.

Monitoring conversations on social media, also known as social listening, can take multiple forms. For example, you can search for your brand to see what others are saying. On top of that, you can search for hashtags on platforms that allow it – such as X.

Beyond that, be sure to keep an eye on your mentions. If people provide feedback, keep it in mind and acknowledge them. Your private messages can also be a helpful place to find this information.

You can perform social listening directly in each app. However, you might want to centralize everything if you manage multiple social accounts. To do this, you can use third-party tools like Hootsuite. While these typically cost a monthly subscription, they’re worth it if you prefer to minimize the manual work.

Trends differ depending on the time of year, and preparing your campaigns in advance can help you significantly enhance your revenue. Google Trends is one of the best ways to do this, and it’s completely free to use.

You have a couple of options for performing market analysis with Google Trends. In many instances, you’ll find it easier to manually type the topic you want to see demand for. You’ll find a search bar where this is possible.

Otherwise, you can click on the Explore tab. Here, you’ll find different trends and be able to break them down by country. You can choose the timescale for which you wish to see these trends, which makes it easier to get a better overall picture.

Google Trends has a handy feature where you can filter not just by search results, but also by Google Shopping trends. As a result, you’ll have better guidance in how you move forward with your products and services.

You do not need a Google account to use Google Trends; simply go to the website and search for your results.

Regardless of the industry you’re in, you will likely find high-level reports released every year, half, or quarter. These generally include first-hand research and can be invaluable for uncovering helpful information and trends that you may otherwise not have been aware of.

When you read industry reports, you’ll often find them broken down by sector. Even if you don’t find anything for your specific version of eCommerce, you will find general eCommerce industry research papers.

These reports are often cognitively demanding, so be sure to allocate some time to reading them without distractions. You should read them in small chunks and make notes while you’re doing so. Use this information to then guide how you move forward in the world of eCommerce.

Adding Google Analytics to WordPress should be one of the first things you do when launching your eCommerce site. This free tool offers incredibly powerful insights that allow you to adopt a data-driven approach to building your business over the long run.

When using Google Analytics, look at your site engagement across multiple pages. You can see how many people view each page, along with their average time on these pages. Depending on how you’ve set up your campaigns, you can also check and see how much revenue you’ve generated.

In Google Analytics, you can break down your data into multiple timescales. As a result, you’ll find plenty of useful information to help you move forward. On top of that, you can see which countries are the most frequent visitors to your website.

Once you’ve acquired the information you need, it’s important that you know how to present your market analysis. The way in which you do this will largely depend on what you’re collecting.

If you have a lot of data, you should consider putting it into spreadsheets. Google Sheets and Excel will both do the job; Google Sheets is better if you manage a remote team, since you can easily collaborate with others.

In other instances, you might find it easier to include everything in a document instead. Consider using project management tools, such as Notion, to keep everything organized if you have lots of different kinds of information. There are plenty of remote work tools to collaborate with your team more effectively.

Even if you choose the right way to perform market analysis for your eCommerce store, it might not be enough if you don’t know how to make everything more effective. First and foremost, you need to identify your goals. Without these, you will not be able to extract everything you need.

When doing your eCommerce market analysis, you also need to think about any previous research you’ve done. Without this, you will find it more difficult to come to the correct conclusion on your topics.

Market analysis is a fundamental part of running a successful eCommerce business, and it needs to be done on a regular basis. It’s crucial for determining where to begin if you’ve only just started a business, but beyond that, you must also continue performing analysis to see what does and doesn’t work with your current services. By knowing how to, you’ll find it easier to get all the information you need.