Choosing a niche for your store could be one of the most important first steps. Going after the right industry can make or break your store. If you’re just starting out and are stuck, I’m here to help you get unstuck!
Here are three ways to find a niche for your store and choose one:
1: Stick to what you know.
A lot of people have turned their hobbies and interests into businesses. If you know a lot about something, you automatically have an edge over your competitors.
You can skip over a lot of the steps of market research if you just use the research you’ve been doing on your own for years. Also, it’s much easier to sell to a market when you are the kind of person you want to sell to.
Find Your Passion… Make It Happen!
So start to narrow down what you’re interested in… Make a list of your top 5 hobbies and things you like to do. It could be about sports, pets, writing, or fashion, or it could be about something else. You’ll spend a lot of time doing it, and you might even be a member of online groups about it. You’ll always be trying new things and reading the latest reviews.
Being passionate about your store also helps you stick with it and write product descriptions that really speak to people, which will increase your sales. Your audience can be made up of people who are like you in terms of age, gender, level of education, and job.
Passion will help you keep going even if you don’t see results right away.
Tomorrow Will Be a Success
When you make a niche store, you don’t have to worry about finding the best-selling items. Instead, you can focus on the customer. You can stop looking for products and instead look for people to sell to.
When a customer adds more than one item to their cart, a niche store can follow up with them with similar products and upsells. This makes a store that will always have customers, even if the products change.
The problem with this strategy is that it takes longer to build a brand and make your first sale. Customers are more likely to “browse” without buying, so make sure you follow up with them and retarget!
Cut it down.
Not every interest turns into a product. I’d suggest that you compare your list of top 5 interests with this matrix to find the place where your interests and opportunities meet:
Purchases made often
Almost never buy
Passionate \sX
Indifferent
Ask yourself if this is something that a lot of people care about. Are people so passionate that they buy things that go with what they like?
When was the last time you bought something? If this is something you’re interested in. Did you have trouble finding it? Did that make you decide to buy online? If so, I think you might be on to something good.
2: Go where there are chances
In the past, most people started businesses because they wanted to solve a problem that no one else had. When they realized that other people had the same problem, they saw an opening.
Instead of buying from your store because they are passionate about it, many people will buy from you because you solve a problem they have.
Do some research.
People post questions they want answers to on sites like Quora and Reddit, which is a great place to look for ideas. Keep an eye out for people looking for product recommendations or posting reviews.
Give people a way to solve a common problem—this is what many of the best-selling products do… everything from wireless headphones and portable speakers to fruit peelers!
Explore the world.
Dropship Corporation and other dropshipping platforms connect you directly to a huge number of suppliers. There are opportunities in so many products from around the world. You could sell new products that are popular in one country but haven’t been sold in other countries yet.
For example, on Amazon.com, you can look at the best-selling items in any category: https://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/pc/335604011/
Then, go to Amazon sites for other countries, like Amazon.de for Germany, and look at their best-selling items. Since dropshipping has no borders and suppliers ship all over the world, you could look up popular products in one country and compare them to popular products in any other country to find opportunities.
Languages change, but people still want things that solve problems.
The problem with this strategy is that you always have to look for new products, which might not appeal to the same customers who bought from you before. On the other hand, you always have something new.
3: Go with the flow
Now you can finally jump on hot product trends. You might think a market is crowded, but if it’s big enough, that can be a good thing! The easier something is to sell, the more people want it.
Taking a small piece of a much larger market is a winning strategy that is used by many well-known brands. It’s also easier to find your market when there are a lot more people in it.
Products that are already popular are easier to sell just because they are popular.
AliExpress’s Popular searches page is the best place to find a long list of popular searches: https://www.aliexpress.com/popular.html.
On that page, I found ideas for products I didn’t know existed, but which were selling thousands of copies.
Best of luck!
No matter which method you choose, trying a bit of each will give you the best chance of success and make marketing easier.
Try to find products that you or other people are really interested in, that solve a problem or offer a new chance, and that are popular with some part of the population right now. Best of luck!
