Monitoring competitors: product portfolio (part 1)

Welcome to ‘How to monitor your competitors’ series!

Through 3 articles covering this topic you will be able to get an overview on how to monitor your competitors’ offer by carefully examining their:

  1. product portfolio

  2. pricing

  3. promotions

How to monitor competitor’s product portfolio?

  1. Get to know total market product portfolio

  2. Select a single retailer to analyse

Analysing total market product portfolio

First of all, let’s define product portfolio. When we are talking about a single product category, ex. washing machines as a part of Home appliances product group, a product portfolio of a certain retailer would be the complete offer that a retail has online. Let’s take Serbia as an example market.

First, we start by evaluating digital shelf share (also known as display share) on the total market, where all brands with share higher then 2% are shown. The rest are condensed in ‘other’. Depending on the product category, other can be minimal, or it can have up to 20% of display share if there are a lot of sm aller brands present.

Visual overview of the last 12 months + current month + today provides a good idea on market movements and brand share in the overall online offer.

If you would like to examine it more thoroughly, on mouseover you will be able to see exact digital display share by brand for each column.

For easier analysis of a certain brand, select one in the legend and it will be emphasized by color.

After getting a good feeling of brand shares, check the Digital position count graph which will show you how many active digital positions is currently active on the market.

Mouseover on each col umn will again give you an exact number of digital positions.

Note: if you notice a significant increase of cumulative digital position count in two consecutive months, it can be caused by one or two reasons (single or combined):

  1. a new line/series of products is launched by a brand with a significant share, so overall position count has risen because most retailer have listed the new products upon launch (example, when Apple launches new iPhone series, up to 40 new SKUs can appear, listed in 10-15 retailers on the market, making 400-500 new digital positions within a month)

  2. a new retailer is added in the panel – the data cannot be retrieved retroactively, so position count will be higher from the month it was added onwards.


 

What is a digital position?

 

Be aware: on every chart you can choose which positions you want to observe – All stock or In stock. What is the difference?

By choosing In stock the charts will show only digital positions where the goods are available to buy. By choosing All stock the charts will show all digital position, including the ones that are currently unavailable to buy or can be ordered on request. Depending on the market movements and supply chain situations, differences can be quite notable.

Analysing a single retailers’ product portfolio

First stop in analysing a single retailers’ product portfolio is Retail brand share chart. This chart is showing digital shelf share (or display share) of each retailer for a selected time frame (ex. today).

For easier analysis, you can choose the retailers you want to observe in this graph and in which period (today, last quarter, last year and custom – any time frame in the last 2 years). 

Now let’s say we want to investigate Shoppster’s product portfolio more thoroughly. In the chart Brand portfolio we can select Shoppster as a retailer, then in the Brands dropdown we choose up to 8 brands to be plotted on the chart.

Depending on the selected time frame and x-axis parameters, we can observe how a selected retailer has changed its offer during the last 12 months (or during a full past year, ex. 2021, 2020…) by month.

Now when we know digital position count of every brand in the retailer’s offer, we can observe the average price compared to total market average. In our case Shoppster’s offer is comparable to the market’s average for Beko, Gorenje and Whirlpool, and a bit higher (~+15%) for Candy and Vox.

Note: This doesn’t mean by default that Shoppster’s prices for Candy and Vox are 15% higher the the total market. It can mean their product portfolio of these brands is made of high-end models which have relatively higher price.

To investigate further, you can use My Market search tool. Let’s check Candy product portfolio in Shoppster’s offer.

By selecting Shoppster as a retaile and Candy as a brand in Search filter, we will get following results.

 

Interpretation:

This is a part of the search results which is clearly showing that indeed Shoppster hase 3 high-end models of Candy washing machines that other retailers do not offer, so the average Candy price for Shoppster is higher then the average market.

Monitoring competitors – what’s next?

In the next article we will show you step-by-step how to analyse competitor’s pricing by using KLIKER market Dashboard charts, Alerts and My market search.