When you are considering opening an online business, one of the first things you will want to do is scope out your competition. Google your competitors and check out their websites, pricing and do they offer anything special such as incentives for people to purchase from that particular store like a discount or coupon?

Do not outright copy your competitors, instead learn from them. You can clearly see in the page rankings who is getting the web traffic and who is not. You can visit several competitor's websites and get a good idea of pricing to stay competitive without hurting everyone's market share. Another good place to look for your competition is at Yahoo.com. Yahoo is a directory that is compiled by human editors and doesn't rely solely on the text indexing of robotic spiders as a search engine would. You will generally find slightly different results between the search returns at Google and Yahoo.

Find a niche market your competitors may not be addressing. Is there any type of consumer that is getting left out in the cold? If you see a way to address the needs of a certain section of the buying community, develop it and use it. If you want to know which if your competitors get the most web traffic, you can check that through Alexa. It's a free add-on to your browser tool bar and can tell you what the ranking and traffic is for any given website.

Pick your 10 top competitors and really scrutinize their websites. See what they are doing right and when it is time to build your website, improve on their short-comings and you will reap the benefits of doing your research before you go into business.