Niche Perfume Competitive Report：Understand Competition & Predict Sales In China
Updated: Oct 22, 2021
2020 was a tough year and it has been incredibly difficult for many people.
But we survived. We endured the challenges, and some of us even discovered newfound opportunities.
A friend of mine quitted her job last year and she decided to do something new. She is now developing her own brand by leveraging her resources with OEM factories.
Another friend, who lives in Europe, is facing challenges in his own business due to the prolonged pandemic. He then started selling products to China through cross-border e-commerce.
Any new business is risky and there is no guarantee of success, especially when you jump into it completely clueless.
Before you decide to make your own product or sell it to a new market, what questions should you ask yourself before deciding whether to go?
How is the market competition?
How many can I sell?
How much initial capital is needed?
To answer these questions, you may need to hire a professional consulting firm to conduct a comprehensive study. At the beginning of a new business, not all entrepreneurs can afford it.
Are there other options that can help you do your assessment in a more cost effective way?
E-commerce is open and real-time. A more direct approach is to analyze the benchmark competing products in Tmall stores. However, it is not possible to access the backend system of your competitors so we need to use some data mining tools to get the data.
Let's use an example of a niche fragrance brand to illustrate how desk research can help make market entry decisions.
The analysis in this article only comes from the open source data of Tmall flagship stores and official websites, and does not involve any internal information.
Understanding Market Competition
How is the market competition in my category?
How is the sales performance of the key players?
First, we need to identify a list of brands to use as a benchmark.
We determine the list of brands, either by filtering the SKUs with the highest sales in a particular target market, or by selecting products that are similar to your brand positioning, features, and pricing structure.
For niche fragrance, we pick 10 brands to study and find that only four have opened Tmall flagship stores.
Tmall official overseas flagship stores: Penhaligon’s and Acca Kappa
Tmall official flagship stores: JoMalone and Diptyque
JoMalone has the most SKUs and the highest sales, with 44 SKUs generating 11 million RMB sales in the past 30 days.
Penhaligon's ranked the second with 35 SKUs and 4.35 million sales. Acca Kappa and Diptyque are far behind in both the SKU quantity and sales.