Whether it’s about automation or analytics, eCommerce is all about finding the proper tools to help you grow. However, knowing your competition is definitely one of the finest ways to learn about the correct tools. You will be able to construct a better and more optimized store in the future by learning from other players in the same sector.
However, doing the same thing as everyone else will not help your company grow or succeed. You’ll also need to know how to set your organization out from the competition. With that in mind, spying on your competition is a wonderful technique to identify your flaws and enhance your manufacturing process.
I’ve been testing all kinds of products lately for Shopify growth and the latest has been this amazing tool called Shopgram. Here’s how you can use Shopgram and what cool features it has:
Shopify Store lookups
The chances are, that when you start a new Shopify store you want to build the best website possible.
There are 2 things that you should always look for:
1- Who are the top Shopify stores?
There are more than a million Shopify stores available around the world, but are they what they claim to be? There are various ways you can see through the stores but if there was some sort of a ranking?
Shopgram does this for you. So the crawler has scraped more than 800,000 Shopify stores and has looked up their Alexa rank (For those not in the loop, Alexa rank is a general ranking for all websites in the world and ranks them based on various metrics)
So the top stores there are probably gonna be a good example for you.
2- Who are my competitors?
Now that you’ve seen the top stores around the world, regardless of their niche and products, you need to dig deeper and see who your direct competitors are.
Let’s say you want to open a socks shop in Australia, you need to dig deeper into Shopgram now, find the top socks store in Australia that are using Shopify in Shopgram and then go through each of them and see which can be your competitor and how you can beat them.
Shopify Product Research:
1- What Products are hot?
In the product section of Shopgram, you can see which products are hot right now. This may not be a feature for everybody as your product selection may be thin or even be a one-product store.
But if you’re a store that sells 10+ products and has a number of products that may be dropshipped, this is the perfect solution for you. Just jump in, see the products and you can see which stores are selling this product too (And their price!)
It has a nifty option of seeing which supplier has made this product and where you can supply it from. Whether it’s Spocket, Oberlo, AliExpress or any other dropshipping platform.
2- How should I price my products?
Setting the price for your product is a pain, you can use simple formulas like this one:
Production cost * profit margin = price
But if you are in a competitive niche, this becomes a rather hard thing to do. Customers have become more and more smart throughout the years and they can find products with better pricing almost instantly. Here’s how you can use the pricing feature of Shopgram for your adventure.
Select the categories you want to see and see how you stack up against your competitors. Sometimes you need to cut under in the pricing and sometimes if the other stores are not performing well (Not a good alexa rank, their design is flawed and their product description is stale).
Shopify Tools and Marketing Agencies
Shopgram can be used by Shopify app developers as well. Shopify app store now has thousands of apps for merchants to use and they need to market their apps to store owners.
Now, based on the various use cases of apps you can use Shopgram to market to them.
Let’s say you have an inventory app management that helps Shopify stores with hundreds of products run and manage their inventory the easier way.
You can select stores with more than a hundred products and reach out to them to know that there is an easier solution that they can use to grow their business.
Marketers and Marketing agencies can also use this full list of Shopify stores to their advantage. There are a huge number of agencies that create, build and maintain your Shopify store for you for the best output. Since some of these agencies and marketers have a deeper understanding of how the ecosystem works, they can help stores who are not doing great, turn their business into something more valuable.
Let’s say a Shopify development agency in Canada that has a number of clients and has helped them grow their business before, wants to know who their new leads may be.
They can browse Shopify stores in Canada and by finding those who are not doing great in terms of SEO, social media and social media marketing (Shopgram lets you see their Social media channels right from the dashboard too), reach out to them and let them know about the services that they can offer to them.
Shopgram Pros and Cons:
Shopgram is a free tool that any user (Shopify merchants, developers and marketing agencies) can use to grow their business that is built around Shopify.
Pros:
All the data is there for free: You can use all these data for free without worrying about your research getting too expensive
The Stores can be filtered: Filter by location or product type is a free tool that you must be using when you’re starting your Shopify store or even if you want to grow it.
The Product pricing becomes much easier: Using their pricing comparison between around a million Shopify stores makes setting pricing for your product much easier than before
Dropshipping info: Knowing how you can add a product to your Shopify store from a dropshipping platform is a question many dropshippers face, but with Shopgram, you can easily find the suppliers from the single product page
Cons:
Limits: If you spend too much time on the site and view too many store pages, you can face some limitations (I talked to their support and seems they will be removing the limits with some premium plans)
Conclusion:
All in all, if you’re starting your Shopify business, never forget to do some research beforehand and for this, Shopgram may be your best friend. Marketers and agencies can juice this platform a lot to generate valuable ecommerce leads too.
How are you using Shopgram and what hacks do you use in it? Let us know in the comments!
Author:
Mark Hanmill
Mark is an ecommerce guru that is always looking for Shopify merchants to grow their business using various tools!
Source: https://www.mikegingerich.com/blog/shopgram-the-shopify-tool-that-you-should-check-out/
- https://www.mikegingerich.com/
- Mike Gingerich
- United States
