Dose economics is defined as the true cost of a supplement expressed per serving and per day of supply at the dose stated on its own label. To research competitors in supplements and wellness, start there rather than with positioning, because pack price is nearly meaningless when pack sizes and strengths vary independently and two products at one shelf price can differ several times over on cost per day. Around 70% of carts are abandoned across retail, with unexpected cost among the recurring causes [Baymard Institute, 2025]. This guide sets out five research passes, what each one is for, and how to turn the output into published facts and tests.
- Run five separate passes instead of one sweep of competitor websites.
- Calculate cost per serving and days of supply before reading any positioning.
- Score the evidence stack, because evidence varies where claims cannot.
- Buy one subscription per competitor and record what is disclosed when.
- Read review-claim leakage to map the positioning a rival is reaching for.
- Compare marketplace and own-site review sets to estimate channel mix.
- Convert every finding into a published fact or a test, or discard it.
Omniconvert has measured how commercial pages present evidence across the CROBenchmark dataset of 7,000+ websites in 15+ industries, against 248+ audit criteria, over 13 years in eCommerce [CROBenchmark Report 2026, Omniconvert]. Supplements stands out for how much of the deciding information is left as arithmetic, which is precisely what makes a structured competitor pass productive here: the work your rivals have not done is visible from outside.
Why five passes beat one sweep when you research competitors in supplements
The usual version of this work is a spreadsheet with a row per competitor and twenty columns of impressions. It takes a fortnight, it reads well once, and nothing changes, because no column maps to a decision anybody was about to make.
Five narrow passes avoid that. Each asks one question across every competitor, which keeps the comparison sharp and the output short, and it lets you stop after two if the first two have answered what you needed.
The cross-category framework behind this is the DTC competitor research stack.
Pass one: dose economics
Take the pack price, the serving count and the label dose, and produce two numbers per product: cost per serving and days the pack lasts. Do it for eight competing products and the field reorders, often dramatically, because strength and pack size move independently of price in this category.
What you learn is not only who is cheap. You learn who is relying on the comparison being hard. A brand whose cost per day is poor and whose label dose is buried in an image has made a choice, and it is a choice you can take apart by publishing the arithmetic they left out.
Record it as four cells per product rather than as prose, and the pattern across a category is usually clear after about eight.
The trap in this pass is doing the arithmetic for rivals and not for yourself. Teams build the comparison, discover that two competitors are worse value per day, and publish a page saying so, while their own product pages still show only a pack price and a serving count. The claim is then unverifiable on the very page a shopper lands on, and the comparison reads as marketing rather than as arithmetic anyone could repeat.
Pass two: the evidence stack
| Pass | The question it answers | Effort |
|---|---|---|
| Dose economics | Who is actually cheaper per day | One hour |
| Evidence stack | Who expects to be checked | Half a day |
| Subscription architecture | How they hold a customer | One purchase each |
| Review-claim leakage | What they wish they could say | Two hours |
| Channel mix | Where their business really runs | One hour |
| Ranking all five | What to publish and what to test | One afternoon |
Score the second pass on a simple ladder: a dated document a shopper can open, an undated document, a named standard with no document, an unlinked badge, nothing. Most categories distribute across all five rungs, and the rung a brand sits on predicts how it behaves under scrutiny better than its tone of voice does.
Pass three: subscription architecture
Supplements is a subscription category, so the subscription is the product. The questions worth recording are specific: is the interval derived from the dose or offered as a single default, when is the renewal price disclosed relative to the first charge, how many steps to pause, and whether pausing is offered before cancelling.
A rival whose default interval does not match any realistic consumption rate is leaking customers on a schedule, and that is a gap you can take by doing the arithmetic they did not. Unexpected cost has been among the leading reasons shoppers abandon purchases for as long as Baymard Institute has measured it, and a renewal whose timing a customer cannot predict is the same failure stretched over months.
Pass four: review-claim leakage
This pass is nearly free and almost nobody runs it. Read thirty recent reviews per competitor and note which outcome claims the brand has left standing on its own product pages. Those are the claims it would make if it could, which tells you its intended positioning more honestly than its homepage.
It is also a risk map. A brand that leaves strong health claims unmanaged in its reviews is carrying exposure, and a brand that moderates them carefully is telling you it has had legal advice. Either way you have learned something about how they will respond to pressure.
Pass five: channel mix
Review sets are the one volume signal published for free. A brand with a large, recent marketplace review set and a thin, stale own-site set is running a marketplace business, and it will compete on price and availability rather than on brand. One with the reverse profile is defending margin and will compete on evidence and subscription.
That distinction changes what you should do next more than any other finding in the five passes, because it tells you which battle you are actually in. Avoid quoting any exact store or seller count from these listings: they move constantly, and the pattern is the finding rather than the number.
Shopify's merchant guidance has pushed complete, consistent product data across sales channels for years [Shopify, 2026], and a channel-mix finding is the commercial reason why: a brand selling through two channels with two different sets of stated facts is competing against its own listings. The vocabulary for publishing your own comparable facts, once you know which ones matter, is documented at schema.org's product type.
AliveCor used Omniconvert to run a structured A/B testing programme and achieved +21% conversion rate, +5% revenue per visitor, and 94% statistical relevance across their experiments. [Omniconvert, AliveCor case study] That is a conversion testing result rather than a competitor research result, and the transferable part is the output discipline: turn a finding into one measured change rather than into a slide.
What to do this week
- Run dose economics across eight products. Cost per serving and days of supply, yours and seven rivals'. One hour, and it sorts the field immediately.
- Score the evidence ladder for six competitors. Five rungs, one answer each. Then check honestly which rung you are on.
- Buy one subscription from your strongest rival. Record every disclosure and its timing, then turn the two sharpest findings into one published fact and one test.
Once you know where you stand, the free leaderboard entry is the quickest way to see your own six-dimension score against real competitors in your category and country, including the AI Visibility and Agentic Commerce dimensions that most competitive tools do not measure at all. Downstream of that, Omniconvert Commander (formerly Nexus) is an AI for eCommerce growth engine that unifies commerce data, prioritises experiments by True Profit, and generates campaigns and creative you approve before they go live. The vertical companions are how to research competitors in skincare, which sorts on the claim ladder instead, and how to research competitors in fashion.
Worth reading alongside this is research competitors in home & garden.
Frequently asked questions
How do you research competitors in supplements and wellness?
In five passes rather than one sweep: dose economics, the evidence stack, subscription architecture, review-claim leakage and channel mix. Each answers a different commercial question, and dose economics comes first because it is the only pass that makes two products genuinely comparable and it frequently reverses who looks expensive.
What is dose economics?
The real cost of a product per serving and per day of supply at the dose printed on its own label. Pack price is close to meaningless in this category because pack sizes and strengths vary independently, so two products at the same shelf price can differ several times over on the only number a buyer should care about.
Why study the evidence stack rather than the claims?
Because claims are constrained by law and therefore look similar across the category, while evidence is discretionary and varies enormously. Whether a competitor publishes a dated test document or only an unlinked badge tells you what they are prepared to be checked on, which is a sharper signal than their wording.
What does review-claim leakage tell us?
It maps the claims a competitor wishes it could make. Where a brand leaves customer reviews describing outcomes the page carefully avoids, that is the positioning it is reaching for, and it also marks its compliance exposure. Reading it is free competitive intelligence and a warning at the same time.
How do we estimate a competitor's channel mix?
By comparing review volume and recency across their marketplace listings and their own site. A brand with thousands of recent marketplace reviews and a sparse, stale own-site review set is running a marketplace business with a brand website attached, and it will respond to competition very differently from a direct-first brand.
How do we turn five passes into something actionable?
Convert each pass into either a fact you should publish or a test you should run, and discard anything that becomes neither. Two published facts and one test per research round is a realistic output, and it is considerably more than most competitor projects produce from a month of work.
One hour of arithmetic first
Run dose economics before anything else, because it takes an hour and it changes the question. Cost per serving and days of supply across your product and seven rivals will usually tell you that the brand you thought was undercutting you is more expensive per day, or that you are the expensive one and have been explaining it with positioning.
Then hold yourself to a short output: two facts you should publish and one test you should run. Competitor research that produces a document produces nothing. Competitor research that produces three items on a backlog has already paid for itself.