How do you figure out what a competitor actually sells?
We are launching SKUmio on Tuesday, and before that I would like to hear how other people solve this today.
The usual route is a traffic estimate: visitors x conversion rate x average order value. Three guesses multiplied together, and the error compounds.
We went a different way: read the shop's published stock levels every few hours. Stock goes from 84 to 79, that is five units sold. Multiply by that day's price and you have revenue, per product and per variant.
It works wherever a shop publishes a number, which turned out to be more often than we expected (351 platforms so far). Where a shop only says in stock / out of stock, you still get sell-out and restock dates but no unit counts, and we say that up front rather than inventing a figure.
Two questions I would genuinely like answers to:
What are you using today, and do you actually trust the number it gives you?
If you could read a competitor's stock every few hours, what would you look at first? For us the surprise was sizes. Seeing that size 38 sold out in four days while size 44 has not moved since March is a buying list, not an analytics chart.
There is a live demo with two shops and their full history, no sign-up: https://skumio.com/en/demo
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