Ecommerce Web Design Blog

How to compete against larger competition
When you are in a market competing against much larger competition it can be easy to get demoralised and feel like you are in a David v Goliath battle. Sometimes the larger competitors will be very afraid of smaller competitors entering and taking their margins and resort to 'competition bashing' instead of trying to compete on what they can offer.

Competitive environment: Are your competitors using "FUD" to frighten your potential customers?

If your competitors are using FUD ("Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt") to try to knock smaller competitors out of the market then it's usually safe to assume that those larger competitors have noticed the smaller players like you and they are probably having an impact on their bottom lines. You should always take FUD as a complement.

How do you recognise FUD?  When larger competitors have promotional statments on their website like "Don't buy from small competition - you don't know who you are buying from", "Unlike others in the marketplace we are not a small backyard business", "Who knows what you will get from a home based business", "Buy from an established business like us not a one man band", then you know that you and other smaller competitors in the market have been noticed and are probably having an impact on those businesses' bottom lines.

Even if your competitors are using FUD techniques (it's not common nowadays fortunately but still happens) you can still compete effectively with some lateral thinking and good business instinct.

So how do you compete with larger competitors? Some ideas...

1. Find niches. If you compete head to head with larger competitors who are well established you may struggle with margins and their established product range. But they are probably not covering every corner of the market. Find a profitable segment that is not well represented by your competition and focus on that.
2. Build loyalty. When your customers do buy from you keep them coming back. Make their buying experience excellent and deliver outstanding customer service.
3. Personalised service. Larger businesses find it hard to deliver personalised service especially online. Keep your customers informed of their order and go beyond what they expect if you can. How many times will the owner of a large online business be able to respond directly to customer enquiries for example? This will help you build loyalty (see above point)
4. Use promotional tactics to gain market share. Offer a popular product at a loss for a special promotional period to get customers to your store for example
5. Ensure you are using the best shopping cart possible for your business, that it has an appealing design and have loaded it up with all the marketing add-ons you can afford.

Remember larger competitors were smaller once. How did they grow? Chances are they faced similar challenges as they grew but overcame them by staying focussed. Take a leaf out of their book and stay focussed.

Our final words: As far as we are concerned, it is absolute rubbish to say that a small business can't compete as well as a larger one - especially online.  Online business levels the playing field in terms of competition - a great shopping cart combined with a great offer can help you be just as successful as the offerings of larger competitors if you market your product innovatively to the right market and build traffic. 

Also don't forget that some very large businesses are still owned by just one person - so if you're not registered as a company it doesn't mean that you're not a big player in the market. Customers buy on a number of things so do it better than your competitors and people will keep coming back.  Prove those who doubt you wrong!

It is common practice for your ecommerce website provider to put an acknowledgement of their shopping cart software as a link at the bottom of your website.  One link is fair and enough, but what if your web design or ecommerce provider is filling your footer with spam links?

The link at the bottom of hosted ecommerce websites site is a useful search engine benefit for the shopping cart provider and a fair acknowledgement that they have provided the shopping cart product to you that makes your website a success. But why would they need multiple links all with similar but different names in customer sites? In our opinion this is very poor business practice.

It is therefore a good idea when buying a shopping cart website to visit the portfolio of the ecommerce provider and look at the links they place at the bottom of each site - is there just one or are there a multitude?

Osc Works only puts one shopping cart software or web design provider acknowledgement on each site we produce. Never more.