How To Reverse Engineer Your Competition Using Our

10-Point Checklist

Number of Sellers (1 of 10) •  How many sellers sell something that’s very

similar to what you’re thinking of selling? •  How many sellers are selling in your price point?

Number of Reviews (2 of 10) •  How many products on page 1 have 300 or more

reviews?

Review Rating (3 of 10) •  What is the average star rating of your

competitors reviews? •  If most are 4-star or less, do you have an

opportunity to be the 5-star seller?

Review Velocity (4 of 10) •  This is really important… •  How many new reviews have your top

competitors got over the past month? Past 3 months? Past 6 months?

•  Are your competitors aggressively working on getting reviews?

Brand Websites & VIP Clubs (5 of 10) •  How many of your top competitors have

websites (and are the websites good?) •  Can you figure out if they have VIP clubs

– We always buy the products of our competitors to see exactly what they’re doing with their post-sales communication and VIP clubs

– Obviously you should also steal the best ideas about your competitors products…

•  Packaging •  Materials used •  VIP cards •  Customer support templates (email them and ask

questions!)

Extended Product Lines (6 of 10) •  Do your competition sell other products?

– How many? – Are they related (same niche/brand)? – How successful are their other products?

•  Scan in an instant using eFormula Analyzer

•  Are they full timers, or hobbyists? •  What are their strengths and weaknesses? •  Could you crush them in a marketing war? How?

Pricing (7 of 10) •  Don’t bother launching if you’re going to have to

compete on price… •  As a general rule, avoid launching any products

that you can’t eventually customize (can be the same as someone else to begin with, but you NEED to differentiate to survive in the long term)

•  There’s nothing worse than getting into a price war... everyone loses.

Market Position / Pricing (8 of 10) •  What tiers are other sellers selling at? For

example: – How many sell in the $15 - $20 price range? – How many sell in the $20 - $25 price range? – How many sell in the $25 - $30 price range? – How many sell in the $30 - $35 price range? – How many sell in the $35 - $40 price range? – Etc.

•  Is there a gap in the market that you can fill?

PPC (9 of 10) •  How many of your competition running Amazon

PPC ads? •  If they are NOT, is it because they couldn’t make

them profitable (margin and competitiveness will normally determine this)

•  If everyone is running ads, then they must be profitable (especially if you notice ads running for a long period of time)

•  Test by typing in different keyword variations

Listing Optimization (10 of 10) •  How many of your competition have optimized

their listings, and what have they optimized? – Title – Photos – Bullets – Description

•  Can you do better? And if you can, will your competition simply be able to copy you to eliminate your advantage?

Key Considerations 1.  Number of Sellers 2.  Number of Reviews 3.  Review Rating 4.  Review Velocity 5.  Brand Websites & VIP Clubs 6.  Extended Product Lines 7.  Pricing 8.  Market Position (pricing) 9.  PPC 10. Listing Optimization

Analysis Tools •  eFormula Analyzer (working well these days!) •  Jungle Scout •  AMZ Tracker

Name to be confirmed ☺

Internalize These Things •  Whenever we’re analyzing a new opportunity, or

giving your ideas a sanity check, these are the things we instinctively look at

•  We no longer need to ‘follow the list’… it’s all second nature

•  With a little practice (and some useful tools), you’ll be able to analyze an opportunity in a matter of seconds!

The Perfect Product Does NOT Exist

(and the more you do this research, the

hard it gets!)

It’s always better to try something, than to

just try nothing!

If you never try, you’re guaranteed to fail.

Q&A