Competitive Analysis - A case study on ticket market places

What is competitive analysis?
Competitive analysis is the trade of analyzing your business, products, features and various other metrics against your competitors. This is a continuous task done for the entire product lifecycle essentially to understand the competitive landscape and to position your products better in the market. To perform an effective research, you need a pretty good understanding about your own product before you can research about your competitors.

Competitive analysis is also useful for new products that you are considering to build in the future. By researching about the competitive offering of similar products, you tend to get a better rationale on all or some of the below points

1) What is the problem being solved and what is the value proposition for the customer and the organization
2) What types of target customer segments are you looking at vs your competitors
3) What is the market size estimation for the product? What could be the fiscal opportunity based on a calculated market penetration
4) How big and great you want to build your product on a competitor relative scale
5) What are the minimum viable product (MVP) features you want to include during launch
6) What are the existing issues in competitor offerings based on customer feedback and the data gathered from social channels
And there are much more that you can do by researching your competitors. By doing this research, you will also be able to conclude on product differentiation, meaning, how you would like your product to differentiate against your competitors in terms of various dimensions like target segment, value, features and investment


Types of competitors
There are different types of competitors for any kind of business. They are categorized based on the type of offering and the customer segment they serve. Categorizing them helps you to clearly understand the level of intersection that you have with your competitors and understand future threats if any.

     a) Direct competitors
     These are competitors who are solving the same problem for the same set of customers that you are solving for

     b) Indirect competitors
     These are competitors that are solving the same problem in a different way. Their customer segment intersects with yours or it could be a subset or a superset of yours entirely.

     c) Potential competitors
     These are competitors who address your type of customers as well but they are solving a different problem for them. However, these competitors pose the threat of becoming your direct or indirect competitor at any point in the future.

Know the pluses and minuses of your competitors
While doing a competitor research, it is important to understand the positives and negatives of competitors and their products. This helps to comprehend on the strengths, weaknesses and the next set of moves from the competitors. It is also good to research about the leaders in the competitor organizations so that you get a better picture of their experience and insights which might potentially translate into future vision.

Knowing precisely about the plans of your competitors in current and next few years is valuable. It is also good to compare yourself with your competitors on dimensions like GMV, revenue, size of user base, brand name, public opinion, design and user experience, prices, agility and intellectuality of engineering team etc.

Feature table
Feature table is a simple but powerful in assisting to perform competitive analysis using all the above said dimensions. It is also useful to list and plan out the features you want to build out by knowing clearly who is offering what. Feature table is nothing but a matrix of a bunch of items in the Y axis and a bunch of competitors in the X axis. Based on the feature in consideration, you have to say Yes or No for every competitor based on whether they are offering. It is important to keep the feature description concise and take a note of pluses and minuses of the competitor with respect to the feature.

Case Study on ticket market places
I have done a case study of the event ticketing market landscape by comparing my organization - StubHub - against our competitors. Instead of focusing on all the zillion aspects, I wanted to limit the research to only a core set of features or products that is available for the users in the web experience. Also the below research focuses only on the buyer segment and not the seller segment of the market. It does not focus on the user experience or design but rather focuses on the product features that are available for the users. However, it is imperative to consider all the business and product dimensions for an exhaustive research.

S.No	Features	Ticketmaster	Stubhub	Vivid Seats	LiveNation/TicketsNow/TicketWeb	SeatGeek
1	Ability to enter promotional codes in event page and see discounted ticket prices	Yes	No	No	No	No
2	Show American express points in event page	Yes	No	No	No	No
3	Mix both primary and resale tickets in event page listings	Yes	Yes but for few handful events (76ers)	No	No	No
4	3D collector tickets featuring 3D graphics of personalities that acts as both ticket and collectible	Yes	No	No	No	No
5	Ability to add merchandise items to the order - wand, sword, wrist bands, Lanyards, customized tickets, drink tickets,   etc	Yes	No	No	No	No
6	Ability to add Parking Pass along with ticket	No	Yes	No	No	No
7	Select delivery - fast or slow and accordingly charge delivery fee	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	No
8	Let users to Guest checkout and purchase tickets	No	No	Yes - Allows first time buyers to purchase tickets and set the password for their account post transaction	No	No
9	Allow buyers to use Amex points for purchasing tickets	Yes	No	No	Yes	No
10	Promote official payment method AMEX and give back rewards or points for customers for the transactions made using AMEX	Yes	No	No	No	No
11	Support more less common payment methods - Amex express checkout, Diners club, master pass etc	Yes	No	No	No	No
12	Provide ability for Buyers to insure their tickets for an additional amount - for eg: Ticketmaster partners with Allianz Insurance company so that buyers can have their ticket cost reimbursed in case they could not go for the event	Yes - Allianz Insurance	No	Yes - Allianz Insurance	Yes - Allianz Insurance	No
13	Show Preferred seller listings in event page listings - Preferred sellers are longstanding partners with the ticket marketplace that provide exceptional inventory and service	No	No	Yes	No	No
14	Run promotions for the current occasion in home page. For eg. Valentine promotion in home page (2 for 1 tickets)  takes the users to different event selector page to choose events that are elgibile for valentine promotion	Yes	No	No	Yes	No
15	Flex pack tickets - tickets for some of the events are sold for a discounted price in ticket deals page, only a bunch of events are eligible for flex pack tickets	Yes	No	Yes - Vivid Value $ for buying packaged tickets	No	No
16	VIP packages - The VIP package includes a premium seat, special souvenir gift and exclusive access to theater characters Sports Packages - Tickets with sports merchandise and pregame perks Theater Packages and family packages Some packages include discounts if a bunch of tickets are purchased	Yes	No	Yes	No	No
17	Are Tickets secured for customers for a limited time with a counter running in the page	Yes	No	No	Yes	No
18	Provide more information to fans and build your brands expertiese and credibility - For example blog about price trends, demand of current events, about the most famous artists and their forthcoming events, share news and experiences of fans. Search engines love new content and rank such sites much better	Yes (Ticketmaster Insider)	No	Yes - Fandemonium vivid blog	Yes (Ticketmaster Insider)	Yes - SeatGeek Event News
19	Corporate Ticket Program - takes care of tickets, hotel packages and other hospitality programs	No	No	Yes	No	No
20	Affiliate Program to drive traffic from partner sites to marketplace. Partner earns commission on transactions and payments are distributed on a monthly basis	No	No	Yes	Yes	No
21	Lists all the on sale events in home page	Yes	Yes - not all on sale events but some rotate in the banner	Yes	Yes	No
22	Youtube Channel that hosts fan experience of events - captures fan reactions and experiences	Yes	Yes - but not very active	Yes - Fandemonium vivid blog	Yes	No
23	Price stats and guidance - drop or up for an event overall. Notify customers by email to keep them informed how an event market looks like	Yes	Yes - using price assistant	No	Yes	No
24	Single Order Lookup to get order details without asking buyers to login	No	No	Yes - uses order id and order email to lookup order details	No	No
25	Sell a set of tickets from selected sections through deal aggregator sites - groupon, livingsocial, facebook etc	Yes	No	No	No	Yes
26	Newsletter for fans about events in their city	No	No	No	Yes	No
27	Presales done leveraging partnership with payment providers, fan clubs etc	Yes	On sale is available but not presale	No	Yes	No
28	Connected Services - Import favorite artists from FB, Spotify, Pandora into web my account	Yes	Yes -  can scan mobiles itunes, can  import friends and their favorites from FB	No	Yes	Yes
29	Gift cards - eGift and Plastic Gift cards	Yes	Yes	Yes - Promo codes only	Yes	Yes - Promo codes only
30	Top Concerts, Top Sports & Top theater tickets	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Yes