Competitor analysis - OnSight Analytics

Save valuable time with Shop Intelligence

Whether you’re writing a book or developing a marketing campaign, the most time-consuming part is always the research. Because most of the time, a lot of research has to be done. You need reliable and accurate answers to questions like: What are the others offering? What do we have to compete with? How does the competitor make shopping easier for X customers? What products is he currently pushing? What special promotions are running? Are freebies being distributed? And that’s for every single competitor. You can’t get that much information with just a few clicks. Or maybe you can?

In fact, our Shop Intelligence can answer all these questions. Easily, quickly and accurately. How? Firstly, by analyzing the newsletters of competitors – after all, newsletters are the information carriers of all.

With them, the stores present trends and promotions to their customers, entice them with offers and freebies. And as the name implies: You always find out the latest (news). With Newsletter Intelligence it is possible to look at the collected newsletters of competitors at a glance and get a general insight, browse through the collected newsletters and even look at their frequency.

However, if the flood of newsletters threatens to overwhelm or you want to get a specific information faster, it is possible to get targeted results with filters. For example, you can filter by competitors, time period, specials such as gifts and discounts. Just like with the overview, it is also possible to click directly into the newsletters and get an exact picture.

But our Shop Intelligence can do even more! In the general overview, you can quickly see the various services that are offered to customers. This way, you can quickly see what is really popular and most widely represented – and whether you should perhaps also offer Click & Collect, for example?

But even this information can be scaled down to provide precise answers to individual questions, because under the Shop Details tab, competitors can be viewed individually with a list of the services they offer.

Research doesn’t get much easier and faster than this. Would you also like to quickly research how your competitors are doing? Then why not arrange a demo and save yourself a lot of time and effort!

Get relevant informations fast with Newsletter Intelligence

The time between the holidays is known to be used for resting. Not so with us. We are busy developing, optimizing and researching. The result is a number of new features in our OnSight Analytics tool. To present all of them now would go beyond the scope of this article… And what fun would it be to shoot all the powder at once instead of finely portioning it and thus benefiting from it for a longer period of time?

Be curious what we have to report in the near future!

But now to an exciting new feature: the Newsletter Intelligence!

What is the Newsletter Intelligence?

With one glance you can see how many newsletters have been sent. When you mouse-over the points, you will receive several pieces of information, for example: How many newsletters were sent on this day? In addition, you can find out which coupons are offered, which collections and freebies are advertised. Of course, you can also click on the individual newsletters from this date below to take a closer look.

Instead of subscribing to your competitors’ newsletters yourself and going through them manually, you can let OnSight analyze tens of newsletters for you and stay up to date with your competitors’ marketing strategies.

Are you curious? Then test our demo and see for yourself what is possible!

AI AI Competitor analysis Newsletter Newsletter Intelligence OnSight Analytics OSA Picalike

No shying away from new technology

OnSight, our new market intelligence tool, is very versatile, with numerous functions, personal alerts and the various reports. Nevertheless, it is not witchcraft and very intuitive to use. There is no need to be afraid of learning a new tool!

So, right when you log in, you are invited to a tour of the tool, where you are explained all the different things on the dashboard, many features and possibilities that are offered to you. You will also find a user manual that goes into various FAQs and the answers are well illustrated with screenshots.

Personal support and lively exchange

Franziska in the home office during onboarding

But nothing beats a personal exchange. At OSA, every customer or pilot partner is personally introduced to the operation. Franziska Weiß, Key Account & Customer Success Manager at Picalike, is responsible for OnBoarding: “It is very important to me that every user understands our tool and knows directly how and where to find what. After all, they should also be able to work well with all the data and have fun using the various functions.” That’s why she, as well as other Picalike team members, is always available to customers if they have questions or if something doesn’t work the way they’d like it to. No question is a nuisance here: “We are very happy to receive feedback from our pilot partners, even if they point out a bug or tell us what else they would like to see. Because that’s the only way we can create an even better product,” says Sebastian Kielmann, founder and CEO of Picalike.

Do you also want to test OSA? Then sign up as a pilot partner!

Competitor analysis Onboarding OnSight Analytics Picalike

OnSight is in the pilot phase

For the past 2 weeks, we have been onboarding our pilot partners with OnSight, our new competitive analysis tool. Together with our CEO Sebastian Kielmann, our developers have been working on OnSight for a long time until a tool was created that we are really proud of. With it, it is possible to see how the competitors are positioned: What quantity of what items they offer, what the price range is, what discounts they give, and, and, and.

You can even define which stores are the competitors to be monitored. You can also set alerts that inform you about certain developments. You can also download reports on a regular basis or have them sent automatically with the information you specify. Our data is checked by our Quality Assurance and updated weekly. But that’s just a sample of the many things OnSight has to offer!

In the meantime, we have been able to win some great pilot partners, including AboutYou and Madeleine. Does this sound exciting to you? Then join us and get to know OnSight for yourself. As a pilot partner, you’ll get 3 months of free access and have the opportunity to help define our roadmap for future features and service improvements. (Go to the demo registration)

Here’s a sneak peek of what it might look like:

Competitor analysis OnSight Picalike Pilot partner

Workshop: Strategic Competitive Intelligence

As much as you would like to plan the next steps ahead, sometimes someone or, in this case, “something” simply upsets your plans. This was the case last friday, when our workshop speaker Johannes Deltl got stuck at the Vienna airport and unfortunately landed with a delay in the far north. But as it turned out, the wait was worth it! Johannes is a real professional in the field of “strategic competitive intelligence”. As managing director of the consulting firm Acrasio, he can look back on more than 20 years of professional experience on the client and consultant side. As an author, university lecturer and speaker, the native Viennese explained to us, among other things, about the competitive intelligence process, evaluation possibilities and approaches in very different industries. With a short “hands-on” part from the agile project management area, the method of prioritization was illustrated.

Companies should actively consider who could actually become a competitor in the future.

Foresee the next, but also the steps beyond and after the next steps of your competitors, classify and assess them for your own company and then react appropriately. This is what is important in strategic competitive intelligence. With numerous examples, procedures, evaluation possibilities and practical examples from very different industries, Johannes brought us closer to the topic, so that afterwards (over beer, cider and pizza) there was a lively exchange.

Interview with the workshop participants

Interview mit Philip von DACAPO (Otto Group)

Hi Philip, introduce yourself for a moment.
My name is Philip and I am currently doing a 6-month internship at the Otto Group in the team of DACAPO. There I do data visualization and machine learning.

What are you studying?
I am studying Quantitative Finance in the Master’s programme in Kiel.

What exactly are your tasks at DACAPO?
Data visualization with tableau. That means I access a database that stores data from crawled online shops and create dashboards that our customers have requested. Or I compile dashboards that we think our customers might be interested in or where customers have already expressed the wish that “this and that” should be displayed. The input for the visualization comes 90% from the customers.

This is basically competitive analysis. And you guys answer questions like: What is the price strategy of my competitors, for example?
Yes, exactly. Or assortments, colours and much more.

And you offer them your dashboard and customers can draw the reports themselves? Or do you send the analyses to them proactively, so to speak?
We provide the data and/or the dashboards to the customers.

What did you take away from today’s workshop?
For me, the whole area of planning and also the evaluation was interesting in the end: What did our tool, which we provide, actually bring to the customer’s decision making or would it be interesting to look at other areas in the future? And to put more work into it together, either internally or together with the customer, to think about what is interesting in the end. Instead of running analyses for days, sending them to the customer and not knowing in the end whether the customer is even interested.

Buch über Strategische Wettbewerbsanalyse

Interview with Adrian from bonprix

Hi, Adrian, introduce yourself for a moment.
My name is Adrian, I come from bonprix and I am a project manager in a department that develops software products for the purchasing and supply chain sector. In other words, all in-house products that are primarily related to purchasing. And currently I am mainly involved in forecasting. That is, demand forecasting at product level.

What kind of lead time you have here?
Different. Ideally, it’s over 6 months. But it all depends. We have different types of products, of course. Some products have been around for over 15 years and they have never changed. However, a very large amount of products are only used once for a single collection and never come back.

How many collections do you have per year?
By now we have reached 12 collections per year, one per month.

What was interesting for you? Why did you come to this workshop?
I heard about this workshop from the head of my department. And it actually fits quite well into this forecasting topic, because of course competition details also play a role. Depending on how many products the competition is currently offering in any way, this can have an influence and we don’t take that into account – at least on this technical level.

That means that you are currently forecasting only on the basis of historical stock data?
Correct.

Is there a topic you find interesting for an upcoming workshop?
Actually everything around product attributes. So which you can possibly also extract from images. After all, these are also responsible for the success of forecasting. So I would be interested to know how much and what you can extract from images.

In other words, at the moment you know what sold very well, but you can’t give a title to it, whether it was the short sleeves or a certain pattern?
No, we also use a lot of attributes, but they are all entered manually and that’s something you could think about to automate. Especially when creating patterns for products, you have to create a lot of attributes for a product that may never see the market. And that is of course
some work. This would also be interesting, for example, that you could get automatic attribute suggestions based on photos.

Competitor analysis Strategic competitive analysis Workshop