How to Benchmark Against Competitors with AskBiz
AskBiz can compare your performance against industry benchmarks — helping you understand whether your margins, conversion rates, and growth are strong or weak for your category.
What AskBiz can and cannot do for competitor benchmarking
AskBiz is primarily a tool for analysing your own business data. It does not have access to your competitors' internal data (revenue, costs, order volumes) — that information is private and not available to any third-party tool.
What AskBiz does offer:
1. Industry benchmarks: AskBiz has built-in benchmarks for key metrics (gross margin %, conversion rate, return rate, repeat purchase rate) by business category. These are derived from industry research and allow you to see where your business sits relative to the typical range for businesses like yours.
2. Market intelligence alerts: AskBiz monitors publicly available signals (Amazon search rank, pricing data where available, app store ratings for SaaS) to flag when competitive dynamics in your category shift.
3. Your own trend data as a benchmark: your year-on-year and quarter-on-quarter performance is itself a benchmark — are you improving relative to your own past?
Accessing industry benchmarks
Industry benchmarks are built into the AskBiz metric views. When you look at any core metric (gross margin, conversion rate, customer retention rate), you will see:
- Your current figure
- The industry benchmark range for your category (e.g. 'UK eCommerce fashion: 22–38% gross margin')
- A visual indicator of whether you are above, within, or below the benchmark range
You can also ask directly:
- 'How does my gross margin compare to the industry average for eCommerce?'
- 'Is my repeat purchase rate typical for a health and beauty business?'
- 'What conversion rate should I be targeting for my category?'
AskBiz will answer with your figure, the benchmark, and a plain-English interpretation.
Monitoring competitor pricing signals
For Amazon sellers, AskBiz monitors the Buy Box price for your product categories and alerts you when prices shift significantly — which may indicate competitor activity.
Go to Intelligence → Market Intelligence → Pricing Signals to see:
- Average category pricing trends
- Buy Box price for your products vs your current price
- Alerts when a competitor appears to be discounting aggressively in your category
These signals do not tell you which specific competitor is doing this — that information is not publicly available — but they give you early warning to review your own pricing before losing Buy Box share.
Using your own data as a competitive lens
The best competitive insight often comes from your own data:
- Traffic from competitor keywords: if Google Analytics is connected, ask 'Are any of my customers coming from searches that include competitor names?' — this shows you whether you are winning conquest customers.
- Return customers who lapsed: ask 'Which customers ordered 6–12 months ago and haven't returned?' — these are customers who may have switched to a competitor. A targeted re-engagement campaign can win them back.
- Marketplace rank trend: Amazon rank data (imported via Amazon integration) shows whether your search visibility is improving or declining — a proxy for competitive position in your category.