How to do an e-commerce competitor analysis, with a template to copy

This guide is for a store that already sells and wants to know who it competes with, and how. Each step says what to read, where to find it in SellWinners and how to check it by hand. The template at the end turns your notes into one table you can compare from one month to the next. If you are still choosing what to sell, start with how to find winning products and come back once you have products to compare.

What does an e-commerce competitor analysis cover?

Five areas, read in the same order for every competitor:

Step 1: find your real competitors

Your real competitors are the stores your buyers compare you with, which is rarely the biggest brand of your category. Look for three kinds:

• Direct competitors sell the same kind of product to the same buyer at a similar price. They go in the template.
• Ad competitors chase the same buyers on Meta, Google or TikTok, sometimes with another product. Watch their ads.
• Category leaders set what buyers expect: delivery times, returns, bundles. Read them for standards, not for numbers.

To find them in SellWinners, start from a product or from a store you already know:

1. Open Shops in Explore, set Match to Product name and type your main product. Sort by Growth 30d to see who is rising.
2. Open a store that competes with you and go to its Similar tab. Each shop there has a similarity score, its monthly visits, its 30-day growth and its active ads. It is the quickest way to find a store's competitors.
3. Open Advertisers, type a niche word, set the match to Ad copy and sort by Active ads. The pages at the top run the most Meta ads in your niche; sort by New ads 14d to see who is launching now. The top Facebook advertisers page explains each sort.

Find competitors in Explore

By hand, search your main product on Google and note the stores that come back, then search the same words in Meta's Ad Library. Keep the stores that show up in both.

Step 2: analyze each competitor's store and traffic

Open each competitor's shop page and write down what its header shows: monthly visits with the change over 30 days, estimated monthly sales with a low and a high figure, active Meta ads with the number launched in 30 days, and the product count. The Overview tab adds the traffic chart, the top countries of its visitors and its estimated sales over the last 90 days.

• Read sales as a range. Sales figures for another store are estimates built from public signals. Use them to compare stores and trends, not to plan your own revenue. The guide on how much a Shopify store makes explains how far to trust each method, and the FAQ explains how the estimates work.
• Markets before country. The top countries of a store's visitors say more about where it sells than the country it is registered in.
• Technology and trust. The header names the Shopify theme and shows the Trustpilot rating with its review count. The Apps and Pixels tabs list the Shopify apps the store loads and its tracking pixels: a reviews app or a TikTok pixel tells you where it invests.

For a full teardown of one store, see our post on how to analyze any Shopify store, and Shopify store analytics for every field of the record.

Step 3: compare their products and prices

The Products tab shows a sample of a store's catalog: its best sellers and its newest products, sorted by popularity, price or newest. For each competitor, note its five best sellers and their prices, which give you its price band; the products it added lately; and which of its best sellers compete with yours, at what price.

A best seller is ranked inside its store and carries no sales figure of its own: units sold and estimated sales are figures for the whole store. Read the ranking as a sign of what the store pushes, then look for ads on the same product in step 4.

Then visit the store as a buyer would. Put a best seller in the cart and note the shipping cost, the free shipping threshold, the delivery promise, the return policy and the bundles. These details win the sale when two products look alike.

Step 4: analyze their ads on Meta, Google and TikTok

Ads show what a competitor pays to say, and for how long. Advertisers tend to stop ads that lose money, so an ad that has run for a month or more is likely paying for itself. It proves nothing on its own, but it is quick to check.

1. On the shop page, open the Ads tab, set the status to Active and sort by Longest running.
2. Open the long runners for their copy, their hook, the video transcript, the landing page and, for ads shown in the EU and the UK, their reach and estimated spend.
3. Read the media mix beside the list: the share of image and video shows which format the brand relies on.
4. Open the Google tab for its Google ads by country and format, and the TikTok tab for its TikTok profile and posts.
5. Before a big season, open the Q4 season tab to see how the brand advertised from November 1 to December 4 in past years.

Write down what repeats: the hooks that open several ads, the offer in the copy, the landing pages most ads point to. Many new ads sent to one new page often mean a new product or offer.

By hand, two free sources come from the platforms themselves. Meta's Ad Library lets anyone search the active ads running across Meta's products, and keeps ads delivered in the EU for a year after their last impression, according to Meta's page on its Ad Library tools ("Meta Ad Library tools" in its Transparency Center). Google's Ads Transparency Center is a searchable record of advertisers and the ads they served on Search, Display, Gmail and YouTube: search it by advertiser or website name, then filter by date and location, according to Google's help page on ads transparency. We read both pages on October 26, 2026. They are the platforms' own records, so they are the place to confirm a single ad. Our guide on how to use the Facebook Ad Library walks through Meta's, and Facebook Ad Library alternatives shows what it leaves out for research.

Two limits. In SellWinners, reach and estimated spend exist only for Meta ads shown in the EU and the UK, and TikTok results carry views and likes, with no reach and no spend. For more depth, read our posts on competitor Facebook ads analysis and how to see competitors' Google ads.

Step 5: read their emails and offers

Email shows a brand's rhythm and the offers its ads often leave out. The manual way is a research inbox: sign up to each competitor's list with a separate address. It works, but you only see the emails sent after you sign up.

In SellWinners, a shop's Emails tab lists the emails the library holds for it, newest first, with Email stats beside them: its emails of the last 90 days, the average per week, how they spread over the days of the week, and a calendar for any month you pick. Pick last November to see how it ran Black Friday. The competitor email analysis page explains how to read a sending rhythm, and our post on the email flows Shopify brands rely on covers the welcome and abandoned cart emails.

Then list the competitor's offers in one place: the discounts in its emails, the offer in its ad copy, the banners on its store. In the email marketing library, keep the shop in the Shop filter and add a promotion type, such as Discount % or Free Delivery, to see how often it sells with each one. A brand that rarely discounts and still grows sells on its product, its content or its reviews. Know that before you start a price war.

Fill in the competitor analysis template

Copy this table into a spreadsheet. Keep one column per competitor, with your own store in the first, and score each row from 0 to 2: 0 when the competitor is behind you, 1 when you are even, 2 when it is ahead.

Add up each column for a score out of 22: the highest total is the competitor to watch most closely. Then read across each row. A row where every competitor scores 2 is a market standard you are missing, and the first thing to fix. A row where none scores 2 is ground nobody holds yet. Write the date next to every figure, because estimates move.

How to turn your findings into tests

Turn each finding into one test with one number to watch:

• A standard you lack. When every rival offers free shipping above a threshold, test one of your own and watch your conversion rate and average order value.
• An angle that lasts. When several rivals keep ads with the same angle running for weeks, write your own version for your product and judge it on your cost per purchase. Borrow the idea, never the creative.
• A price gap. When your price sits above their best sellers, test a bundle or a stronger guarantee before you cut the price. The break-even ROAS calculator shows what a lower price does to the ads you can afford.
• An empty channel. When no rival advertises on TikTok or sends a welcome series, the channel is open. Check first that your buyers are there.

Run one test at a time in each area, so you know which change moved the number.

How to track competitors every week

The template is a snapshot. Competitors launch products, ads and offers every week, and a competitor ad tracker catches those changes without a new search. In SellWinners, press Track on a competitor's shop page, or type its domain in the Brand tracker. Then check, each week:

1. Radar. It splits your tracked brands into those that launched ads yesterday, those active this week and those quiet this week.
2. Scaling ads. For each brand that moved, the ads that gained the most places among its own ads over 7, 14 or 30 days: the ones it chose to push.
3. Evolution. How a brand's ad texts, headlines and landing pages changed. Texts and headlines are recorded once a day from the day you add a brand, so add your rivals early.
4. Latest. On a shop page, its newest Meta, Google and TikTok ads and its newest emails in one place.
5. The template. Update the rows that changed, with the date.

Put your direct competitors in one folder, open Across brands for it and pick a report (top ads, scaling ads, hooks, ad copies, landing pages or media mix) to read it for the whole group at once. An account tracks up to 200 brands, in up to 200 folders.

Open the brand tracker

Run the analysis with an AI agent or the API

The MCP server gives Claude, Cursor, VS Code and other AI agents the same data as tools. It is on paid plans. The Free plan includes the MCP server too: 150 credits a month, 10 requests a minute, the first 10 results of each search. brief_competitor sums up one competitor from its domain, find_similar_shops lists the competitors of a store, analyze_shop_emails reads a store's email program, and daily_radar and analyze_brand_changes report what your tracked brands launched and changed.

A prompt that works: "Find the five closest competitors of allbirds.com, give me a brief on each, and put their monthly visits, growth, estimated sales range, active ads and emails per week in one table."

Through the REST API, on paid plans, each check on a store is a call that takes its domain. Listing a store's competitors is one of them:

# Shops similar to a shop id or domain
curl "https://api.sellwinners.com/v1/shops/allbirds.com/similar?sortBy=growth30d&limit=20" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY"

GET /v1/shops/{shopId}/similar Parameters and fields in the docs

Tracking a competitor is another:

# Track a brand
curl -X POST "https://api.sellwinners.com/v1/brandtrackers" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"domain": "gymshark.com"}'

POST /v1/brandtrackers Parameters and fields in the docs

The brand tracker API reference lists every report, and the API documentation every other route.

What can you do on the Free plan?

On the Free plan, search a competitor's store by domain and open its overview: traffic, estimated sales and best sellers. Read its Meta ads on its shop page; the search across every brand is on paid plans. The demo brands are open in full on the website, so you can try every tab, the emails and the brand tracker on a real store. On paid plans: the API; Google ads, TikTok and brand emails; advertiser pages and brand trackers; product search; full shop analytics, shop filters and sorting; boards, favorites and share links.

Compare the plans and start free. Still choosing a tool for store research? See the best Shopify spy tools.