When Was The Last Time You Bought From A Competitor?

Seeing what your competition are up to is always an enlightening experience. You’re able to reverse engineer what their processes are and what the product quality & service is like and to gauge how you compare.

 

One of the businesses that I’m working with as part of ProjectE had an action last week, which was to investigate a potential competitor on a new marketplace. What was found is that they were lacking badly and there is potential in them exploring this marketplace further.

I have removed some details from the email so that it remains anonymous and replaced the sections with [comments] as applicable.

Hi Matt! Hope you’re having a good week.

My [product] has just arrived from [marketplace] in a crappy cardboard box (which I’m sure is supposed to have some reference to [marketplace] on the outside?). No invoice in the box. Just a badly cut slip of paper with more bad puntuation and grammar which is in keeping with the email they sent!

And the [product] .

The quality is appalling – none of the [key attributes] in places and poor [person’s] face is the weirdest colour I’ve ever seen!  We know that these issues are caused by either using [a tool incorrectly]. Very amateurish to say the least.

So we know we can wipe the floor with these guys – they say they are the cheapest on [marketplace] , well in this case you get what you pay for! As soon as I get our new [something] back we’re on there!

Just thought I’d share that with you. Just toying with the idea of leaving feedback now.

Sometimes you hit gold like this, where competitors have no sense of standards and quality processes in place. Do you think that they’ll now be investigating this marketplace further? I think so.

A quick note around the feedback either formal feedback on the marketplaces or personally to them is that I’d not suggest you do this and refrain from leaving any, especially if it’s going to be negative. Also, I frankly see no reason except for a high-ground-moral-reason to tell them if you can get over that. I’d keep quiet and let them fail in peace.

When was the last time you bought from a competitor?
You can learn so much from buying items from not only competitors, but also companies in other areas. It only takes a few minutes, the cost can be exceptionally low, however, the insights can be enlightening.

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