Our experience has proven time and time again that copycats never win. Taking a design or site functionality, and slapping it on your ecommerce site; although you may share the same industry and sell the same items; is never a good idea.

A recent client of ours took the same exact PPC campaign ad of a competitor, worked for weeks on it, and was shocked with 0 conversions at launch. Worst of all is within a couple of weeks, the competitor had completely shifted to an entirely different design.

We always encourage our clients to keep tabs on competitors. It’s important to know what they’re up to, are they optimizing and testing? What new features have they included? But all of this information should not drive e-tailers to make the same exact changes as competitors, but rather, continuously improve upon their own site considering their very own target market.

This all came up when we were approached by a new client, and lo and behold they had the same exact assurance center as a previous client of ours that sold nursing scrubs. The assurance center’s color was the same, it happened to have the same text, same shape, and the placement was also consistent between the two sites. The two sites are not in the same industry and have no connection, but maybe along the line they hired the same designer? Whatever the reason, we have seen too many company’s copy competitors and other sites, only to be surprised that it didn’t bring them the uplift they expected.

The problem does not stop with ecommerce companies following, but even “conversion” experts tend to take an idea and generalize its importance. When we published an article in the Internet Retailer online magazine on our success with Metrouniforms and their assurance center, we started hearing all these experts talk about the importance of an assurance center.

But don’t these “experts” know that there isn’t a single rule that applies to all online stores? Each ecommerce store has a specific market they cater to, and what works with that same market on one site, does not necessarily work on another.

We aren’t against getting ideas from other sites, but there’s a lot of analysis that goes into whether or not an idea would work for your particular site considering the current design, customers, objections, market conditions, analytics, etc.

How to properly monitor competitors:

1. Compete.com – Not always accurate, but it gives you sense of how they are performing relative to your site.
2. Spyfu.com – are they spending on PPC? Spy on them to figure it out – what ads are the running, keywords ranking for, etc.
3. Snapshots – every couple of days take snapshots of your competitors to monitor any changes. You can always go to the waybackwhen machine and pull up a competitors site to figure out how a competitor’s site evolved through the years.
4. Change according to YOUR market and YOUR analytics. Although a competitor may have made changes on the homepage, they doesn’t necessarily mean you should too. Figure out the pages that have the greatest index value and begin optimizing there.

Copycats can only get so far, so monitor the progress on a competitor’s site, but never copy unless you have justification that the change would make sense for your site from a market and analytics perspective. Have you ever copied from a competitor’s site? What was the result?