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November 17, 2025
Content Manager, Bizrate Insights
Updated 11/25: The following blog is adapted from Bizrate Insights’ past library of white papers and guides that we’ve made publicly available. Enjoy!
A SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis is a framework used to evaluate the factors that impact a company’s potential for success. Think of it as a decision-making tool your team can use to analyze your position in the market relative to your competitors. Knowing your strategic position will offer insight into where to invest your time and resources to best leverage your existing or potential competitive advantage.
A SWOT analysis can be used for many initiatives such as creating a product roadmap, planning an integrated marketing campaign, or even conducting a complete overhaul of your business. This tool should be used in the beginning stages of planning to help align your stakeholders before creating a strategy or taking action.
In a SWOT analysis, everything that impacts your business can be bucketed into one of four categories: strength, weakness, opportunity, or threat. Since there are myriad factors that impact your business, a SWOT analysis encourages you to analyze your competitive position using simple constraints.
The first step is to bucket factors as either internal or external.
A SWOT analysis also classifies the internal and external factors as either helpful or harmful. As you can imagine, helpful elements are classified as your strengths and opportunities, while harmful are weaknesses and threats. Thinking of each impacting factor in these buckets will help you keep your analysis focused.
| Helpful | Harmful | |
| Internal | Strengths | Weaknesses |
| External | Opportunities | Threats |
As you can see above, the chart is meant to help your team drill down and then easily view your top priorities before establishing a strategy.
A business in any industry can use this strategic tool, but our guide is targeted at ecommerce businesses. We’re going to share four steps to help you conduct an efficient SWOT analysis with your stakeholders, including how to prepare your team to use the SWOT methodology, sample areas to explore for each quadrant, and prompts to use when filling out your framework.
Decide whether you want to conduct your SWOT analysis as a brainstorm with your entire team or if you want key stakeholders to decide on your initial factors. Then have your larger group drill into specifics, narrow down, and prioritize those elements as a group.
Depending on the size of your team, both options have their pros and cons, but establishing the process at the forefront of this exercise will ensure your time is spent efficiently.
Once you decide how to conduct your SWOT analysis, gather the following internal data to help evaluate different areas of your business.
For this section, your website performance is strictly focused on traffic and engagement metrics. Other facets surrounding your web presence such as share of voice and UX will come in later sections.
Social commerce saw exponential growth in 2020 with all of the top social media platforms integrating shopping into their apps. According to a Bizrate Insights/eMarketer survey conducted in June 2020, 18% of respondents have made a purchase on Facebook, 11% on Instagram, and 3% on Pinterest, respectively.
Before you invest in a social commerce initiative, assess your current social media performance and ensure your existing audience and traffic will provide a sufficient ROI.
Organic traffic is a valuable driver of qualified traffic and a quick means of assessing your brand’s web presence, share of voice, and the efficiency of your content marketing. Perform an audit to pull the following information:
This section will depend on the level of insights at your disposal. A few of the most important metrics to measure customer satisfaction are:
Bizrate Insights Tip: If you aren’t able to answer many of the bullets above, this is a good time to think about investing in a voice of customer tool like Bizrate Insights. The Bizrate Insights suite of survey solutions can target customers at specific stages of the buying journey to identify where your business is succeeding and where you are losing potential buyers.
The VitalSigns Portal aggregates data and comments from all verticals in real-time so that you can monitor customer experience, schedule regular reporting exports, and respond in real-time to customer comments.
This section is probably the one your team monitors closely. Depending on the goal of your SWOT analysis, you can be as high-level or as granular as necessary for this section, but at the minimum prepare the following metrics to share with your team.
Since competitor research is a huge part of the opportunities and threats categories in your analysis, dedicate time to identifying both your top competitors and industry benchmarks that you can measure your business against.
If you leverage Bizrate Insights, you are able to compare your customer satisfaction metrics to several cohorts of competitors within VitalSigns:
Once you create a report using these benchmarks you can monitor your performance and compare it to others within your industry on a regular basis.
For your SWOT analysis, begin by naming your top competitors and identifying where they excel and where you surpass them. To help guide your team in this, use the questions in the following section to start to narrow down your specific strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats as well as those of your major competitors.
Whether team members are filling out a SWOT chart ahead of time to discuss or you are holding a team-wide brainstorm, equip them with context to make the most of their time and yours.
The following facets of ecommerce business can fit into any one of the SWOT categories, depending on the business. It’s important to remember that a single factor can be both a strength and a weakness for the same company, depending on the strategy pursued. For example, high-end fashion is developing a robust resale market, particularly in accessories. This is both a threat and an opportunity, and the way a retailer chooses to respond to this market reality could be either a strength or a weakness. There are few absolutes.
After gathering your data and preparing your team, schedule a collaborative session to identify your top priorities for each SWOT quadrant. The questions provided in each section below will help focus your discussion and ensure productive conversations during your working session.
When team members disagree—such as marketing viewing your web design as a strength while your designer sees it as a weakness—use these targeted questions to uncover the specific reasoning behind each perspective and reach data-driven conclusions.
In addition to thoughtful planning and efficient collaboration, there are a few general tips that will help your team make the most of a SWOT analysis.
Regardless of how granular or high-level your goal, the SWOT analysis framework is a valuable step in aligning your team around your strategy. Open the blank SWOT analysis template you received in your download folder with this guide to print or directly edit the PDF. Use the steps we provided to prepare your team, gather critical data, and conduct an efficient SWOT analysis for ecommerce.
If reading this guide has left you with more questions than answers, it may be time to discuss how Bizrate Insights can deliver the voice of customer insights you need. With verbatim feedback from your customers you can pinpoint where your business needs to improve, further invest, or pivot—all using reliable data from your valued customers.
To learn more about Bizrate Insights solutions, request a demo below.
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