eCompShop

The Tools You Need

Whatever your product category and industry, it is always changing. Technology improves, new players enter, distribution channels change, and players exit.

To stay abreast of industry trends and innovations and to quickly identify new products and new entrants, companies need to regularly conduct a competitive analysis in their space. This type of analysis will also help to identify price and product gaps in an assortment which is a key part of Product Line Reviews and Business Reviews.

At Total Retail Group, we have developed our own proprietary tool for competitive insights called eCompShop.  eCompShop automatically gathers data on all relevant items in the category, including both online-only and in-store offerings. This data includes all available attributes for the items such as retail price, features, star rating, number of reviews, the image, and more. eCompShop’s strength is the ability to match these attributes across many retailers.  So even if retailers use different terminology, eCompShop lines up the attributes so that all items can be compared directly. This is a distinct advantage over other approaches and tools that only line up items with the same model number.  For instance, eCompShop can compare all of the 65 Watt equivalent A19 bulbs at different retailers even if the light bulbs are different brands and the retailers use different names for shapes and wattages.

eCompShop allows the user to visualize all assortments by price and key feature, which can be changed by the user.  The advanced business intelligence engine can allow for filtering by retailer, feature or brand. Filters can also be drawn dynamically on the scatter map to drill down to a certain part of the market.  If the client is using the volume estimation feature of eCompshop, the size of the dots for each item reflect estimated annual sales.  This part of the tool is particularly helpful when identifying gaps in the market.

Below is our presentation on eCompShop: