Ecommerce competitor analysis for online stores

Ecommerce competitor analysis has one main signal and five supporting ones. The main signal is a rival's ads, above all on Meta, because the Meta Ad Library shows every live ad with its offer, creative and landing page, for free. The supporting signals are product launches, prices and promotions, reviews, email and category pages in search.

Say you run a Shopify store selling running gear, with three rivals of similar size. Here is how to watch them.

Ads are the main signal

Meta. Search each rival's page name in the library. Ads that reached the EU or UK stay in the library for a year after they stop and carry more detail. Our walkthrough of the Meta Ad Library covers the filters. Read it for:

• Count of active ads. A jump from 15 to 60 is usually a launch, a sale or a big creative test.
• The oldest active ads. An ad running for three months unchanged is one they keep paying for, which is the nearest public signal of a winner.
• The landing pages. The products they pay to send traffic to are the ones they most need to sell, which is not always what the homepage features.
• Formats and hooks. User-generated video, founder story, discount-led, bundle-led. Count which type dominates.

TikTok. TikTok's ad library only holds ads shown in Europe; its own developer documentation says only European data is available for now. A rival advertising only in the US will not appear there, or in any tool built on it.

Google. The Google Ads Transparency Center lists a rival's Google ads by advertiser. Note whether they bid on your brand name, which you can also check by searching it.

Product launches: read the catalogue, not the homepage

Homepages show what a rival wants you to see. Their product data shows what they actually did.

Shopify stores publish a products sitemap. Add /sitemap.xml to their domain and open the products sitemap listed inside. Each product URL is there. Do not trust the lastmod dates on Shopify product sitemaps for launch timing, as they can change whenever stock or details change.

Many Shopify stores also answer /products.json. It returns each product with its created and published dates, price, compare-at price and availability per variant. Some stores block it. Where it works, a weekly copy gives you:

• New products, by published date.
• Discontinued products, by absence.
• Sell-outs, by variants flipping to unavailable.
• Markdowns, by a compare-at price appearing above the price.

Check once a week, not once a minute. You want a record, not a scraper that gets your IP blocked.

For thousands of SKUs across many rivals, use a dedicated tool from our list of price tracking tools instead.

Prices and promotions

Beyond individual product prices, watch the store-wide terms that decide the basket:

• Free shipping threshold. A rival dropping it from $75 to $50 is a price cut on every order between the two.
• Returns window. Longer returns are a conversion tactic for categories where fit matters.
• Sitewide banners and codes. Note the discount depth and how long it runs. A "sale" that never ends is the new list price.
• Bundles and subscriptions. Subscribe-and-save discounts and bundle pricing change the comparison more than single-item prices.

Map these against your category's calendar. If your category peaks in Black Friday week, the useful question is who starts early and how deep they go. The guide to monitoring competitor pricing covers what to do when a rival undercuts you.

Reviews: the store and the product

Store reviews. Trustpilot shows a store-level rating and review count. Read the newest complaints for delivery times, customer service and returns, which are the failures that send customers elsewhere.

Product reviews. On-site product reviews carry some of the best intelligence in ecommerce: sizing problems, materials that pill, features people expected and did not get. Read the one to three star reviews on a rival's three bestsellers. That is your product roadmap and your ad copy.

Email: sign up yourself

Email is a blind spot for most monitoring tools, so do this part yourself. Create a separate inbox, subscribe to each rival's list, and abandon a cart on each site.

Log the welcome discount, how often they send, which days, when sales start, and what the abandoned cart email offers. After a month you will know their promotional rhythm.

Category pages in search

Collection pages ("women's trail running shoes") rank for the searches that bring new customers. Check which rivals hold those positions, how much copy their collection pages carry, and whether they have written buying guides that rank above product pages. Our SEO competitor analysis guide shows the method.

A weekly ecommerce competitor analysis routine

Where Figo fits for online stores

Ours, so judge accordingly. Figo checks each rival weekly for new Meta, Google and TikTok ads (TikTok only as far as its library reaches), new and changed pages from their sitemap, their published pricing and offers, Google keyword positions and estimated traffic, Instagram and Facebook posts, Reddit threads about them, and their Trustpilot rating and review count.

It does not track SKU-level prices across a catalogue, email, on-site product reviews, Amazon listings or Etsy shops. If you sell mainly on Amazon, our guide to Amazon competitor analysis covers the tools built for that.

Figo starts at $49 a month for three competitors. A store with a catalogue of thousands of products that mainly competes on price should buy a price tracker first.