Searchbase for e-commerce brands: competitor ads, creators and stockists in one prompt

Quick answer: An e-commerce team spends its research time on three things: what competitors are advertising, which creators are worth a gifting budget, and which retailers or distributors could carry the product. Searchbase turns each of those into a table with a link behind every value. Describe your ideal customer. Searchbase finds them across Europe in one prompt, with the source on every cell. Start on the free plan with 150 credits a month and no card.

What e-commerce teams ask for

The prompts that work name a market, a category and the columns you actually need in the sheet.

• "Brands advertising running shoes on Meta in Germany right now, with the ad copy, the landing page and the date the ad was first seen."
• "Instagram creators in the home fragrance niche in France with 10,000 to 100,000 followers, their handle, follower count and a public contact email."
• "Independent homeware shops in Vienna and Hamburg that stock small European brands, with their website, the brands they list and a wholesale or contact email."
• "TikTok accounts posting skincare routines in Spain with more than 50,000 followers, with the handle, the follower count and whether they link a shop in bio."
• "Every Italian brand selling refillable cleaning products online, with the website, the product categories and the price of their entry product."
• "Companies advertising on Google for garden furniture in the Netherlands, with the advertiser name, the landing page and the categories on that page."

What comes back

For a competitor ad sweep the table is: advertiser name, platform, ad copy or creative reference, landing page URL, first seen date, country, and the advertiser's website and contact route where those are public.

For creator research: handle, platform, follower count, niche or content theme, a public contact email where the creator published one, a linked shop or website, and the market they post from.

For stockist and distributor research: shop or company name, website, city, the brands they already carry, a wholesale contact page, and a generic email.

Every cell carries a chip with the source link, a freshness badge with the collection date, and the extraction method. For ad and creator data this matters more than it sounds. Follower counts move, ads come down, and a number without a date and a link is not evidence. Anything that cannot be verified from a public page stays n/a, so a missing contact email is a fact about that creator, not a gap in the run.

Sources that matter for e-commerce brands

Searchbase reads any public web page, three ad libraries (Meta, Google and TikTok), twelve social platforms, company pages, business directories, press and nine job boards.

The three ad libraries and the twelve social platforms carry almost all the weight in this sector. Ad libraries answer what competitors are spending on, in which market, with what creative, right now. Today teams use Minea or AdSpy for exactly this; the difference here is that the advertiser row arrives with the company data attached, so the creative sits next to the website, the categories and the contact route.

Social platforms are where creator sourcing happens, and where a brand's real presence lives if it sells through Instagram or TikTok rather than a heavily indexed storefront.

Company pages and directories carry stockist and distribution research: the shops that could carry your product publish what they already carry, and that list is the qualification signal.

Press picks up launches, funding and retail expansion. Job boards are the weakest signal here, though a competitor hiring a head of retail in Paris tells you something about where they are heading next.

A worked example

Take the prompt: "Brands advertising running shoes on Meta in Germany right now, with the ad copy, the landing page and the date the ad was first seen."

The agent plans, and shows the plan before running. It decides to query the ad library for the category and market, group the results by advertiser, then read each advertiser's landing page and site to pull the categories and contact details.

It then searches, reads and extracts. A page read costs about 1 credit, a social profile about 3. If you also want a written competitive overview instead of just the table, a Deep Research report costs 20 to 40 credits.

A single category in a single market usually resolves into a few dozen advertisers and a few hundred pages read, so it fits inside a Starter month with room to run it again next month and compare. Rows stream in as they are found, so you see the first advertisers within moments and can narrow the prompt before spending the rest.

What you get is a sheet your performance team can read: who is live, what they are saying, where they are sending traffic, and since when.

From the table to the first message

Creator outreach and stockist outreach are both message-writing problems, and the agent handles the draft. From the rows it writes email and LinkedIn sequences that use what is in the table: the creator's niche and follower band, the shop's existing brand list, the categories on the landing page.

Searchbase drafts, it does not send. Review is mandatory, every message is editable, and launching from the campaign wizard is still being switched on progressively. Today the reliable path is to approve the drafts and export them into whatever you already send from. For creator outreach in particular this is the right order of operations, since the difference between a gifting email that lands and one that gets ignored is usually a single specific line only a human will notice is missing.

Pricing for an e-commerce team

Free renews 150 credits a month with no card and JSON export. Enough for one competitor ad sweep or one creator shortlist, which is also enough to judge whether the columns come back usable.

Starter, €29 a month, gives 1,000 credits and CSV export. This fits a brand that checks competitor ads monthly and builds a creator list each quarter.

Pro, €79 a month, gives 4,000 credits, API access and credit rollover. Take it when ad monitoring becomes a routine rather than a project, and when you want the rows in your own tooling instead of in a download.

Business, €199 a month, gives 12,000 credits and webhooks. This is the plan for a team tracking several categories and markets continuously, where new advertisers should arrive automatically.

Prices are in euros, billed annually, from a European company.

Frequently asked questions

Can I see competitor ads across Meta, Google and TikTok in one table? Yes. All three ad libraries feed the same table, so one row set covers the platforms rather than three separate exports. Today teams use a dedicated ad-spy product for this; here the ad data arrives joined to the company data.

Can I find creators with a real contact email? You can find creators, and the email column fills where the creator has published a contact address publicly, which many do in a bio or on a linked page. Where none exists the cell stays n/a rather than being guessed.

Are follower counts current? Each cell carries a freshness badge with the date it was collected and a link to the profile. Treat the badge as part of the number.

Can I use this to find retailers to stock my product? Yes. Ask for shops in a city or country, the brands they already carry, and a wholesale contact route. The brand list is what makes the row qualified rather than just a shop address.

Does Searchbase send the creator outreach? No. The agent drafts the sequences for the people it found and you approve each message. Sending from the campaign wizard is still rolling out, so the current workflow is review and export.

How much does a monthly competitor sweep cost in credits? About 1 credit per page read and 3 per social profile, so a single category in a single market is typically low hundreds of credits per run.

Prices checked on 2026-09-08 on searchbase.org.