Market Research (I) - Top Store Analytics Basics

Getting your dropship store populated and published is a task in itself. However, generating traffic and customers for your store has steep learning curve associated with it. In order to make this easier for our customers, we analyze thousands of top retail stores daily and provide you with valuable insights that can help you to gain an understanding on what exactly other competitive stores are doing.

In this article we will review the user interface and get into some of the basics of filtering and sorting the data.

When you will go to Top Stores section of the app, you will see a list of most recent stores displayed as shown in the image below.

Essentially, just like our Product Catalog Tool, you will see following items on this page

1. Dropdown Filters: Here you can use various filters and sorting methods to narrow down the results
2. Search Function: You can search stores by keywords or a store name
   
3. Dropship Switch: This toggle switch allows you to switch between all the stores vs stores that are known to have products from major dropship suppliers such as AliExpress.
4. Store Listing Area: This area lists all the stores along with some store specific parameters and store logo.
   

The filter menu bar on the top provides you with several filtering and sorting options as described below.

1. Platform: This filter allows you to filter the results by shopping cart platform the store is using, for example Shopify, WooCommerce etc.
2. Category: This filter allows you to filter stores by various categories. Please note that this categorization filter does not cover all the stores in our database. You will not be able to see the store which could not be assigned any particular category.
3. Country: This filter allows you to narrow down your retail stores by the country it is serving.
4. Supplier Match: This filter allows you to see stores which show carry products that match with certain dropship suppliers as shown below:
   1. Aliexpress: Turn on the toggle switch to view retail stores that carry products from this supplier
   2. Dhgate: Turn on the toggle switch to view retail stores that carry products from this supplier
   3. Banggood: Turn on the toggle switch to view retail stores that carry products from this supplier
5. Sort By: There are multiple sorting options that allow you to see the stores you are most interested in. These sorting options are as follows:
   1. Global Rank: We assign each store a global rank by the amount of traffic it is receiving compared to all other sites on the Internet. Please note that lower the rank means higher the traffic it receives. For example, google.com has a rank of 1, facebook.com has rank of 2 etc. Most mid-sized e-commerce stores will have a rank starting from 100,000 and higher.
   2. 30d Global Rank Change: We re-evaluated the global rank for each store on a monthly basis and measure the change in rank on month-to-month basis. This sorting method allows you to sort the stores by the biggest rank jump it has seen in last 30 days. This is a very useful sorting method for determining stores which have been recently successful in attracting customers.
   3. Number of Items: We measure the number of items that a store carries on a frequent basis. You can use this sorting method to see the stores carrying large number of items on the top of your search results.
   4. Duration: This sorting method allows the stores to be sorted by how long they have been online. Longer running stores are obviously successful as they have stood the test of time. Therefore, this filter can be immensely useful for finding successful stores
   5. Date First Seen: We record the date when the store launched and the last time it was seen by our app. If you wish to see the stores that were launched recently or launched long time ago, you will use this sorting method.
   6. Date Last Seen: Just like the previous sorting method, this sorter allows you to see the stores that have been active recently.

Please note that all these sorting methods have Ascending (ASC) and Descending (DESC) ordering methods available and you can select either one depending on your needs.

Please Refer to the following figure for reference:

The search function allows you to search the stores by their names and/or keywords.

Now, let's look at individual store listing as shown in the figure below. Each retail store listing block has multiple elements containing very useful information as described below:

1. Date First Seen: This is the date (month/year) when the store was launched
2. Date Last Seen: This is the date (month/year) when the store was last seen by our app
3. Store Logo: Store logo image, if available
4. Store Domain: Store domain name
5. Platform Identifier: Provides the identification of shopping cart platform
6. Number of Products: Numerical values of products found in the store
7. Global Traffic Rank: Traffic rank of the store as explained above
8. Top Countries: Top 5 countries where the store is acquiring visitors from

The above article shows you the layout of the top retail stores section and provides explanation on how you can identify top stores in a particular niche using a variety of filters, sorters and search functions.