Traversing the eCommerce landscape is like steering a ship across the Pacific Ocean. There are plenty of obstacles to overcome, shoppers can be far apart, and you want to carry the right amount of supplies. You should have enough to help you successfully voyage the wild seas, but too much can cause your ship to sink or be slowed down.

In online retail, you want to optimize your product assortment. That means that carrying the right products at the right time is the name of the game, as long as they fit your brand. But at the same time, avoid extra inventory that you’ll eventually have to sell at a loss.

Compare and Contrast

Finding this equilibrium can take a lot of work and research. The best place to start, however, is with your competitors. The best way to measure how your assortment stacks up to your competitors’ is through a gap analysis. Gap analyses show where your assortment overlaps with the competitor and where you’re a unique seller.

Think of it as a Venn diagram. Each circle represents one retailer’s assortment, and the overlap is where you share products. The individual parts of the circles indicate where each retailer is selling unique products. This way, you can see where you have advantages and opportunities to improve your competitive positioning.

When it comes to measuring product assortments across multiple competitors, there’s a lot of room for error because there’s an awful lot of data. It’s great to optimize your assortment, but how much work is too much when it comes to assortment optimization in eCommerce?

Keep The Analysis Slim

Instead of scanning for every product in a competitor’s assortment, why not simply focus on the top 100 selling products? For the sake of time and money, limiting your investment to the top 100 products of each competitor’s category is the best option to make sure you really sell what matters most to the consumer.

Wiser’s Best Seller Assortment does exactly this. Instead of meddling with products that don’t have big impacts on your revenue, Wiser keeps the competitor assortment analysis centered to spend more time focusing on what matters most: your own assortment. It focuses on the top 100 best selling products across numerous major retailers to see how your own assortment stacks up.

But why stop with a simple gap analysis? It’s great to monitor your competitors’ assortment, but how about some actionable insights? Wiser’s Best Seller Assortment takes it a step further to make sure your assortment is completely optimized for your business.

Are the Products Good for Your Margins?

Best Seller Assortment does more than simply extract competitor assortment data. It also mines the products’ prices, and can advise on whether carrying them is a worthy investment or not. By using pre-existing or estimated costs of the products, Wiser can determine if the product that you’re missing will fit in well to your selling strategies. Because what’s the point of having the product if you can’t sell it at a competitive price?

Best Seller Assortment will not convince you to sell an item that you cannot afford to offer at a decently competitive price. But there’s so much more that goes into the shopper’s purchase decision, and Best Seller Assortment takes those factors into consideration as well.

For example, Wiser can measure the product’s average rank across multiple sellers. If some sellers have the item as their top-selling product and others have it missing from their top assortment, that’s not a good sign to sell it. It also measures the product’s position over time. Is the product steadily in the top 10? Or is it volatile and all over the place? This information is crucial because a volatile product can lose its popularity over time.

Do Customers Like the Products?

You can also learn how many sellers carry the product in their assortment. If a plethora of sellers carry it at competitive prices, it can be hard to justify selling the product. This includes Amazon. If Amazon is selling the product, you may have a hard time competing for shoppers’ attention.

Best Seller Assortment also tracks reviews and stars on the Amazon marketplace. If the reviews are overwhelmingly negative, you might want to leave that product out of your assortment. Amazonian star reviews are key indicators of the product’s success. Don’t carry a product that shoppers might not like, it will save you headaches in the future.
A simple gap analysis is certainly a great way to gain an understanding of how you stack up against your competitors’ respective assortments. But there is so much more to it than whether your competitor is carrying a product or not. Wiser’s Best Seller Assortment takes assortment intelligence to the next level to make sure you’re carrying a lean, mean assortment that will serve you well on your quest for eCommerce success.