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Industries - Fashion & Apparel
Competitor monitoring for fashion and apparel brands
Fashion competes on timing as much as on price: when the sale opens, how deep the markdown goes, which new styles land this week and which sizes run out. Here is how that competition works, with sources, and what to watch about your competitors.
Updated
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How fashion & apparel brands compete
Discounting is deep, and it peaks in the holiday season
In the US, online apparel spending from November 1 to December 31, 2025 was $49.0 billion, up 7.4% year on year, and apparel discounts peaked at 25.1% off listed price, against 23.2% the year before, according to Adobe's 2025 holiday season results.
Shoppers wait for those discounts. The UK Office for National Statistics reported in its October 2025 retail sales bulletin for Great Britain that clothing store sales volumes fell after a September peak, with retailers saying consumers held back in preparation for Black Friday discounts.
Markdowns follow the season and cost margin
Fashion stock loses value as the season turns, so end-of-season markdowns come in steps: a first cut, a deeper cut for what is left, then removal from the range. A competitor's markdown steps tell you where it over-bought and which of your products now compete with a clearance price.
The margin cost shows up in companies' own filings: NIKE reported in its fiscal 2025 annual report that gross margin fell 190 basis points, primarily due to higher discounts, changes in channel mix and higher inventory obsolescence reserves.
Newness never stops
Launch cadence varies enormously between fashion brands. At the fast end, retail analytics firm Edited reported in 2021, as covered by Retail Dive, that 70% of Shein's assortment was less than three months old, compared with 53% at Zara and 40% at H&M; those are 2021 figures, and Edited's original post is no longer online. Whatever your own pace, a competitor's launch cadence decides how often its range looks new to the same shoppers you are trying to reach.
Demand is social, returns are high and competition is cross-border
Social. In the 2025 US holiday season, social media's share of online revenue was 4.6%, up from 3.3% the year before, and affiliates and partners, which include influencers, accounted for 20.4% (Adobe, all categories).
Returns. The NRF and Happy Returns, a UPS company that handles returns, estimated that 19.3% of US online sales would be returned in 2025, across all retail (NRF), so a competitor's returns window is part of its offer.
Cross-border. Around 4.6 billion low-value consignments, worth €150 or less, entered the EU in 2024, according to the European Commission: your competitors include stores shipping in from other markets.
What to monitor about your competitors
Markdown steps and sale timing
When each competitor's season sale opens, how deep each step goes and when it deepens, compared with the same season last year.
New arrivals by category
How many new products each competitor adds per week, in which categories, and when a new category appears.
Sizes and stock
Which best sellers run out in the common sizes, and for how long: a competitor's stockout is your window.
Promotions across channels
Members-only early access, coupon codes, free-shipping weekends, homepage banners and emails, each with a start date.
Ads and social
Which products and offers competitors push in ads, and how their social following moves.
Markets and delivery
New shipping countries and currencies, delivery promises and returns terms.
How RivalSweeper helps
What the product does today, as listed on our product facts page. It reports and alerts; it does not reprice your products.
- Checks each competitor site every day: a newly added competitor gets its first data within 24 hours, and a change is known within 48 hours. Daily monitoring, not real-time.
- Records catalog changes (new, removed and updated products, and new categories) for up to 10,000 products per competitor on Basic and 20,000 on Pro.
- Keeps each product's price, discount and dated price history, so a markdown step shows as a dated change, and tracks stock status on supported websites.
- Tracks promotions and coupon codes, homepage banners and marketing messages, and the email newsletters competitors send their subscribers, and when.
- Tracks Meta ads, including ads that land on broken, sold-out or ended-offer pages, Google ads activity (Search, Shopping and YouTube), and social channels and follower counts.
- Tracks multi-market stores per market and currency, with their shipping countries, currencies and languages, and converts price comparisons across stores to your currency.
- No script, plugin or store integration: you add competitor domains and RivalSweeper reads their public websites, whatever platform they run on.
Frequently asked questions
What should a fashion brand monitor about its competitors?
Sale timing and markdown depth, new arrivals by category, stock in the common sizes, promotions across emails, banners, codes and ads, and delivery and returns terms. Each matters most as a dated change compared with the competitor's own last season.
How deep do fashion discounts go in the holiday season?
Adobe reported that US online apparel discounts peaked at 25.1% off listed price in the 2025 holiday season (November 1 to December 31), against 23.2% the year before. Individual brands vary widely around that figure.
Can RivalSweeper tell a markdown from a temporary sale?
It keeps a dated price history for each product, checked daily. A price that drops and comes back was a promotion; one that stays down or drops again is a markdown. The history shows which is which.
Sources
- Adobe: 2025 holiday shopping season results (January 7, 2026)
- ONS: Retail sales, Great Britain, October 2025 (November 21, 2025)
- NIKE, Inc. Form 10-K, fiscal year ended May 31, 2025
- Retail Dive: How Shein makes fast fashion look slow (July 23, 2021)
- NRF: Consumers expected to return nearly $850 billion in merchandise in 2025 (October 15, 2025)
- European Commission: Tackling challenges of e-commerce imports (February 5, 2025)
Company figures are what each company reports about itself in its own filing. Examples on linked glossary pages are hypothetical.
See your fashion & apparel competitors in one place
Add a competitor and get its first data within 24 hours, then every change from each daily check.
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