According to Merkle, seller spend on Google Shopping Listings is up 36% year-over-year. Even Amazon has rejoined the ranks of sellers advertising on Google Shopping. Naturally, Google Shopping holds value for retailers that leverage the platform to sell products to the masses. Regular, in-depth analysis of Google Shopping can also reveal a wealth of competitive data to help you create more intelligent, strategic merchandising strategies.

Identification of close competitors

Tracking your closest competitors is an important practice for making wise merchandising decisions, and many retailers rely on third-party platforms and vendors to reveal comprehensive pricing and assortment insights of their direct competitors. Sometimes, however, the biggest threats to a business’ profit in a category or on a specific product don’t come from traditional competitors.

This is a natural phenomenon of the marketplace revolution. Not only are you competing with the biggest names in retail (Amazon, Walmart, Target, etc.), along with those specialty retailers that match up against you in certain categories, you’re also facing off against niche or independent sellers that have identified a gap in the market, putting your revenue streams at risk.

Google Shopping can be a key tool to help zero in on those critical but hard-to-identify challengers, especially “overnight” e-commerce sensations, revealing which vendors you have significant product overlap and price competition with. The list of retailers, and smaller vendors, that you find may end up surprising you, but once you understand who you are up against, you’ll be much better positioned to decide how to compete with them.

Shopper preference insights

Understanding the customer is ground zero for retailers. But Google Shopping lets you go one further with insider knowledge on what shoppers think about your competitors. Knowing shopper sentiment towards your closest competitors will help you determine how difficult they will be to displace, along with specific weaknesses to exploit like poor customer service or perceived price gouging. Collecting this information manually would take eons, but there are tools available today that can crawl Google Shopping’s pages and collect the data automatically.

Early detection of emerging trends and threats

Keeping tabs on competitors and demand via Google Shopping can also provide early indication of emerging product, brand, and seller opportunities and threats. Naturally, significant disruptions in supply or demand in the market must be quickly acknowledged and understood in order to insulate the business from runaway market changes. Due to their magnitude, these large shifts are often quite easy to see, but can be especially dangerous for your business and you shouldn’t wait for these to revise your merchandising strategy.

It is far more cost-effective to evaluate early, subtle supply and demand signal changes, which can be identified by monitoring the breadth of activity for products and vendors on Google Shopping’s marketplace.

Instead of being a potential victim of market changes that place stress on your inventory, you can position yourself to capitalize on it. Instead of facing fire sales to reduce excess inventory, or being haunted by out-of-stocks when an item suddenly takes off in popularity, you can monitor the entire market to better understand a shift in demand—up or down.

The more you know about the market for your product assortment, the sellers you’re facing off against, and the consumers who want those products—and the sooner you know it—the better prepared you will be to revise and optimize your merchandising strategies in real time. In a game where the only constant is change, the timely lessons learned on Google Shopping can provide the spark you need to succeed long term.

360pi provides data about online retail product pricing and selection.