4 Tips On How To Perform E-Commerce Market Research

Did you ever set up a lemonade stand as a kid? Thoughts of handing out lemonade to hundreds of customers floated through your mind and by the end of the day, you’d be a whole $22.50 richer!

If you walked outside only to find that your neighbors on both sides had also set up lemonade stands, that might dampen your expectations. If there are three stands on the curb, how are people going to choose? No one really needs three cups of lemonade, do they? Suddenly, those dreams of $22.50 goes out the window and you’ll be lucky to get $5.

Little did you know, but this situation could have been avoided by performing a little bit of research ahead of time. You could have told your neighbours your plans ahead of time or even picked out a different street to set up shop.

Even though you might not be in the street side lemonade business, performing market research before you open your doors for business is incredibly necessary. Today, we’re going to focus on one of the fastest growing businesses in the world: ecommerce. With around 20% of the world’s population shopping online, it’s a lucrative business to jump into. But, you need to make sure you’re finding a way to stand out and capitalizing on potential customers. 

This article highlights four tips for conducting market research that you should consider before delving into e-commerce. Everything from your domain name to your eCommerce platform should cater to your ideal buyers.

1. Have A Customer Target in Mind

It would be wonderful if everyone on the planet was clamoring to buy your products or services, but unfortunately that’s not the case.  

When exploring your market, you need to be thinking of two things: what need am I filling and who am I doing it for? This is not a time to be general, and you need to really narrow down your audience. Think about age, gender, educational level, income, family status, location, and language.

This is going to help you find a way to break into your market through fewer steps while also being able to plan adept marketing strategies. You can find out their needs, buying habits, and other demographic information that will help you corner the market. Thankfully, this is a bit easier with an ecommerce business as you’ll be able to better track your customer activity and personas. 

2. Engage With Customers

Now that you have your target audience in mind, you need to engage with them to have a more specific idea of what they want as customers. You can do this through a number of ways.

One, you can go through the analytics and research certain keywords that your audience uses when they examine this particular market. From here, you’ll be able to get a sense of the real potential this market has and be able to set realistic goals for yourself.

Secondly, you can conduct market research through surveys, focus groups, interviews and more. It’s always good to offer some kind of incentive here as well so people will participate.

The more data you have, the better. You’ll be able to have more targeted ad campaigns or be able to tweak certain products or services to your customers’ liking. 

3. Examine The Competition

Just like a sports team, it’s wise to scout out the competition ahead of time. You don’t want to enter into a niche market that is already over-saturated.  

But if you do, you need to find out through your research what makes you different. What are your competitors not doing? What can you offer that they don’t? Look at their targeted customers and see if your research overlaps who they are targeting.  

How do you find your competitors though? Well, simple searches can do the trick. Start with Google, scroll through social media, and even see what businesses are listed on LinkedIn. Track those businesses and make a list of those that seem to have the strongest foothold in your market. While it’s important to be comprehensive, you don’t want to waste precious time and money researching businesses which may not pose the biggest threat to you.

4. Analyze Your Data & Make Projections

What good is all this data if you’re not going to use it? By now, you should have researched your customers, their personas, the competition, and thought of ways that you can enter the market.  

Use this data to adjust prices, think about future promotions, devise social media strategies, update your budget and see the growth potential. It’s important to be realistic, especially if you’re just starting out. Having grand and wonderful goals is great but creating realistic benchmarks for yourself is just as important. You want to make sure your future plans are efficient and each dollar you spend goes towards helping your business grow and prosper. Be flexible and ready to make changes for the future as time goes by.