If you’re an active FBA seller, you’re going to want to watch what your competitors are doing.

For instance, if they’re running a big discount offer, you need to know about it. That’s something that could affect your sales significantly. If they’re suddenly splurging on pay per click ads, you’ll want to know about that too.

So you’ll want to bookmark their product pages for a start. You’ll probably want to automate some of your task; most good FBA software has the ability to track products and Amazon sales ranks. You may find that some competitors always run the same kind of deals, for instance doing one Lightning Deal a month, or always offering the same level of discount when they have a promotion.

Make a note of when they ran a major promotion and see whether it took a chunk out of your sales on Amazon. If that particular competitor is taking sales away from other people, but not from you, then you don’t need to try to match their promotional price.

If you do want to counter their promotions, then do it with a rebate or a coupon, rather than by cutting your product price. That makes it easy to restate your base price later.

Never do the same thing that they’re doing. Find another way to counter their price cuts. For instance, if they are using coupons, you should look at the value gap, then think of different ways to fill it. You could use a multipack or a bundle promotion to make their single-item promotion look less exciting, for instance.

You might also respond by stressing non-price factors. For instance, if your competitor’s shampoo isn’t hypoallergenic, then when they’re having a promotion, make sure your marketing, web banner, infographics, and so on stress that your shampoo won’t set off people’s allergies.

Go a little further and look at what keywords your competitors are targeting, too. Do you have more, or different, keywords? How do they rank against you? Do they have keywords you haven’t thought of? You can always try to out-think them by going a step further towards ‘long tail’ keywords. If they have ‘allergy free shampoo’ you could have ‘allergy free natural shampoo’ or ‘organic allergy free shampoo’, and so on.

Use Google Alerts (which is free) to monitor what your competitors are doing and what kind of reviews and publicity they’re getting. It can be a good idea to track your own brand too; if you’re getting bad press you want to know about it, and if you’re getting good press, you’ll want to find a way to leverage it.

Remember also to keep an eye on whether new competitors are entering the sector, or old ones are quitting. This isn’t something that you’ll need to act on in the short term, but if you see a lot of competitors quitting the sector, it usually means it’s not profitable enough for them. If you’re the sector leader by a long way and you have keen prices and a great supplier, you might just happen to ‘own’ the market, in which case this is good news. You may even be able to put your price up a bit as there’s less competition for customers’ dollars. But if you’re one of twenty competitors all around the same size and the product isn’t super-profitable for you, it could mean you’ll need to think hard about your business viability in the long term. It would certainly suggest you shouldn’t match rivals’ discounts or coupon offers, as they may only be discounting to sell off their remaining stock. From your point of view, the sooner they’re gone, the better!