Learning from Your Rivals’ Q4 Successes (and Failures)

By AJ Saunders, Founder at Audacious Commerce 

As an ecommerce brand owner, you likely spent a lot of time thinking about your own successes and failures. But do you stop to consider what you can learn from your rivals? They just might provide you with the lessons you need to grow your business.

Many retailers rely on a strong Q4 to see them through the slower winter months before customers start ramping up their spending. January is typically a better time for contemplation on what worked or didn’t for you and your rivals in the last few months, and to build an action plan for the coming year.

The school of life is always open, and it’s cheaper to learn from others’ mistakes than our own. So let’s explore what we can learn from our rivals’ Q4 successes and failures.

Why Q4 Competitor Analysis is Critical for Future Growth

Building a strategy for the next year must be based on real-world data, not solely on feelings. Part of the data you should collect is on competitors, as you can’t create a robust strategy or better market positioning without fully understanding the wider market you operate within.

Strategy is the art and science of imagining an outcome in a situation that doesn’t yet exist and asking yourself, ‘What needs to be true for us to reach these goals?’ Doing strategic work isn’t simple and requires you to draw multiple, disparate strands of knowledge into a comprehensive plan.

When analysing our main competitors, it’s worth asking what resources, opportunities, and constraints they faced in Q4. How did they use these to grow market share? Did their customer acquisition costs (CAC) increase? How did their brand perception shift over Q4 and the year?

Next, we should consider how the wider market has changed, including:

• Have we seen a shift in consumer sentiment? 

• What trends are we noticing about buying behaviours? 

• Did the regulatory environment change during this period? How did these changes impact our business? Do we notice any changes in our competitors? 

• What changes are we forecasting over the next few months? 

While markets are constantly evolving, try to observe the subtle, nuanced changes that indicate new trends forming. Consider how you can leverage these insights for your next 12-month strategy plan.

Observing Our Competitor’s Q4 Successes

Before we dive into our competitors, it’s worth remembering to stay objective and gather insights. Don’t see this task as an exercise of highlighting your weaknesses, just one that will give you the inspiration to improve.

Performance Data

You might not have access to their profit and loss statement (P&L), but you can use tools that’ll help you estimate website traffic and what mediums/sources drove those visitors.

You can learn a lot about a business from its website’s customer journey. Are they using bundles? Offering upsells or cross-sells on the checkout page? Is the checkout flow simple or complex? Do they offer 48 different delivery options?

Even if you spent a few hours looking at your top 3 competitors, you probably could gather enough insights to drive 10% or 20% growth over the next 12 months with a handful of tweaks to your internal processes and systems.

Marketing Prowess

You’ll want to analyse your competitors’ Q4 campaigns. One of them might channel their efforts into BFCM, while another waits for the Christmas period to unveil their best deals. You might notice that one of your competitors uses different offers for BFCM, pre-Christmas, and January, with customers ending up confused.

Using internal data and some extrapolation, you should be able to work out what marketing each competitor invested in and how the spend was split between the different channels.

It’s also worth considering what messaging resonated with their audience. Did they use a single message across the different channels, or was it a unique message for each campaign?  Can you dissect the copy and visuals to gather further insights?

Operational Excellence and Customer Experience

It’s always worth reading reviews of your competitors to see how they handled peak demand and customers who feel they came up short. The trick here is not to just read them, but to take action on what you learn.

If your competitors are struggling to deliver items around the Christmas peak due to a lack of courier options, can you use that insight to beef up your logistics plans and testing? Yes, you can!

Are they taking days to reply to reviews or comments on socials? This could be a sign that their current resources are stretched or not allocated efficiently. You might be able to improve your results by tightening up your KPIs, processes, and improving your customer retention efforts.

What Can We Learn From Their Missteps?

We can learn from both the positives and negatives. So, it’s worth looking for red flags, such as supply chain issues that result in popular products being unavailable or high website traffic that takes it offline for hours, which means the brand has to issue a public apology.

Reddit is a place I often go to research the sentiment around my clients and their competitors, as users speak in an unfiltered and blunt way. Such forums are great for gathering true customer feedback that can’t be altered or removed.

You can also learn a lot from the discounts your competitors roll out. If they are choosing to use a store-wide discount for BFCM, they might not have a firm grasp on their unit economics and could be losing money on most orders. These strategic blunders can be easy to spot and simple for you to avoid.

It’s always good to watch your competitor after a busy sales period. Look for examples of heavy discounts, as this could be an overstocking problem that can only be cured by giving items away.

You can analyse their Meta ads library and see which paid campaigns did well or had a poor ROI based on your knowledge and experience.

Using These Insights in Your 2026 Strategy

Gathering insights from your competitors shouldn’t just be a Q4 activity; you should be using tools like  SimilarWeb, Ahrefs, and Sprout Social’s social listening tool to constantly monitor your market. You should also subscribe to competitor newsletters, monitor their social media, and make test purchases.

It’s likely your competitors are doing the same research. However, they might not be putting what they learn into practice or waiting to apply what they’ve learned until it’s too late and the market has moved on. Use the data you gathered to benchmark your performance and look for weaknesses you can exploit.

Your Q1 might be slow, and rather than letting everyone coast, continue to build momentum by applying what you learned in Q4. Part of building a better business is better planning. This includes pre-empting challenges, improving your inventory management, and refining promotional calendars.

Sustainable growth comes from a culture of continuous learning, inter-team sharing, and analysis. It’s never a one-time activity.

Be Proactive and Curious to Create a Competitive Edge

Staying on top of your competitors is yet another task for the already stretched team. However, if you reframe it as an essential part of your growth strategy, you’ll prioritise competitor research.

You can position your brand for sustained growth in 2026 by being agile and informed. And that starts with basic competitor analysis and some strategic thinking each day. Don’t allow the market to move without adapting alongside it.