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Just like in physical commerce, the online market is constantly witnessing the arrival of new players, all aiming for a long-term position to make their business profitable. Competition is fierce regardless of the industry, making it crucial to find the right product to sell.
However, targeting the customer base has become increasingly challenging because e-consumers have changed their attitudes for a while. They have decided to be more involved in their choices and are no longer content to be passive.
The vastness of the market, its highly competitive nature, and the complexity of online shoppers’ needs present only one significant challenge. You must undoubtedly position yourself in a specific market and find the right niche product to make it profitable and ensure the best possible positioning.
How do you find the ideal product or discover a profitable niche? On which niche market should you focus to ensure a profitable e-commerce venture and succeed in selling your product effectively? What type of niche product yields the most long-term returns? How can you ensure the right selection? Here are all the answers to help you find your niche more effectively!
Understand what a niche market is.
A niche market, as the name suggests, differs from a global market due to the specificity of the targeted audience and their needs. A global market caters to a broader customer base and tends to address a wider range of needs across multiple market niches (often with little likelihood of profitability).
This entails providing a comprehensive and broader range of products compared to a niche market, which remains rather specific and more precisely targeted. Venturing into this type of market without proper preparation could lead to competition from e-commerce giants such as Amazon, Alibaba, or Aliexpress.
Keep in mind that even if you manage to sell your products at a significantly lower price than what these platforms offer, e-consumers are more likely to place their orders with them. This is because these platforms have specific business policies and a robust network of carriers to ensure a higher quality and more reliable delivery service compared to many other e-commerce retailers.
This allows them to reduce shipping costs for the delivery of certain products based on their respective amounts. Amazon’s platform even offers an FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon) service to ensure efficient product availability to customers and, especially, better handling of after-sales services. Apart from the Amazon FBA system, this platform also offers affiliate programs, allowing e-sellers to have dedicated marketplaces where they can freely sell their products.
If you truly intend to carve out a niche, you must specialize, employ a more refined niche strategy, and find the right niche product to monetize. When it comes to setting up your online store, you don’t necessarily need to manage inventory if you adopt the dropshipping technique.
Using services like Shopify can relieve you of the hassles associated with website design. With ease, you can quickly have an operational online store by choosing to go with this solution.
So, how should you go about succeeding in selling online? First and foremost, you’ll need to create a well-defined target audience segmentation within the global market where your niche market resides.
For example, if we consider a market for selling men’s shoes, you can choose to segment your customer base by selling construction worker shoes.
You can see that the same market, in this case, the men’s shoe market, is an integral part of the global market. The difference lies in the fact that you will focus solely on one or more specific niches.
In this example, you will concentrate your efforts solely on selling specific types of shoes designed to meet the needs of workers on construction sites. It’s clear that all types of products sold on the market can be segmented for complete specialization.
It’s entirely up to you to identify the niche product that would make it easier for you to stand out and monetize your e-commerce business compared to others. If you’re having trouble finding segments or a new niche, here are some criteria you can rely on to help you identify the right niche product:
- Price: This key product indicator determines the amount online shoppers are willing to pay for your niche product based on their respective budgets (is it high, affordable, or low-priced?).
- Sociodemographic Data: You can segment your customers based on their gender, age, income level, profession, and more.
- Range of Products to Offer (or Target): You can offer entry-level, mid-range, or high-end products, or even decide to sell artisanal products.
- Consumer Psychology: You can select your niche product based on the consumption attitudes of your e-prospects, the values they share, their interests, or even their hobbies.
- Geographic Location: This criterion influences the choice of the niche product you plan to offer, taking into account the geographic proximity or distance of your customers to your city, municipality, or region.
By deciding to position yourself in a specific niche, you will target a market segment better than e-commerce businesses that position themselves in the global market to sell their products. To ensure a profitable online business, the real question now is how to identify the best niche product to market.
How to successfully identify a profitable and viable niche product?
Regardless of the stage you are at when it comes to selling a product online, you will need to have a strong understanding of the market you intend to segment. This requires a thorough competitive analysis coupled with a more in-depth market study.
Before thinking about identifying the niche product to monetize and creating your product listings, you will first need to segment the profile of e-consumers you want to target. Your niche market will thus be a subset of the global market and will primarily be the focus of your initial study or preliminary competitive analysis.
This will then allow you to have a more accurate understanding of which product characteristics precisely meet the expectations of the target customers you plan to focus on. Several parameters should be taken into account to find the perfect product:
- The price range in which you intend to market the niche product.
- The quality of manufacturing or, more precisely, the product’s design reliability.
- Your positioning in relation to your competitors.
- The brand image you plan to convey and transmit.
- The marketing strategy you intend to develop and implement.
A good choice of a niche product gives you a competitive edge because you are focusing on a specific and often less competitive market. By doing so, you will maximize your chances of monetizing your e-commerce, not by trying to sell as many products as possible, but by targeting a well-defined and promising market.
Although there are virtually no rules to determine which niche product is more profitable to market compared to others, you can follow several good approaches:
Take advantage of Google’s search tool
Leverage Google’s search tool. The simplest and quickest way to find profitable niche ideas for e-commerce is to conduct online research. To do this, you must first look into the main products sold by other e-commerce retailers and those that generate the most sales.
However, you should not rely too much on this because high-value added products that are profitable for other e-sellers may not all be profitable for your e-commerce. Also, if you tackle a too generic or highly competitive market, you will have a lot of difficulty setting yourself apart. Moreover, you can easily get lost because the online market is relatively vast.
Instead, it’s better to filter your searches, focusing only on product categories whose sales could easily allow you to express your expertise. Everything must take into account your field of activity or specialization.
Upon entering a query in Google’s search bar, you will need to specify it to identify the product that sells best online. Thus, instead of simply typing a 100% organic product, you can start with a simple query like “cruelty-free blush.”
From the first page of results, you will see various approaches used by competitors to name or, more precisely, to specify this type of niche product. It could be vegan makeup, cruelty-free organic makeup, 100% natural plant-based makeup, and so on.
You can go even further by consulting specialized review and testing blogs in the field of natural cosmetics. You can identify recurring aspects that many users raise.
You can even use this information to develop a new offering based on your expertise. An offering centered around a specific niche product, more targeted, less competitive, potentially profitable, and closely related to your domain name.
Keep an eye on Google search suggestions
Many times, you have undoubtedly noticed, within the first two or three letters of your query, that suggestions appear on the search bar. This happens regardless of the device you’re using, whether it’s a computer, smartphone, or tablet.
These Google search suggestions are, in fact, the most frequently entered keywords related to your query. You can use and leverage them to find the best niche product to profit from in your online business.
Since Google only provides you with partial access to these suggestions, you can use tools like “Keyword Tool” or its equivalents. This will make it easier for you to identify the best niche sector to position yourself in.
Deepen your research using recurring queries
To further optimize your search for the best niche product to feature on your online store, you can use keyword planners. Tools like Google AdWords function in a similar way to traditional keyword suggestion generators.
The only difference is that they are more effective in identifying the best niche positioning for dropshipping. To access Google’s main keyword and keyword planner, you need to have an Ads account and a valid Gmail address, and registration is free.
Convenient and easy to use, this tool provides a clear and precise overview of your target audience’s needs in relation to the niche market you plan to enter. You can even use it as an excellent way to boost your PageRank and identify the best products in the market to feature on your e-commerce site.
Make sure to test the most promising keywords and long-tail expressions before creating each product listing and venturing into selling a specific niche product! Also, consider testing your niche products, as some may be more profitable than others, whether they face low or high competition.
Adopt the “mind map” technique to find the best niche product
One of the best approaches you can take to find the perfect niche product idea is to use the mind mapping technique. The advantage of this technique lies in its ability to provide a clear and precise overview of all the possibilities that can help you discover the ideal niche product.
Since a mind map mimics the way the brain works, it serves as an ideal tool to quickly identify the niche product to sell on your e-commerce site. To make this task easier, you can use tools like MapsofMind or Text2MindMap. This will save you a lot of time.
Alternatively, you can simply use a large sheet of paper or a board to create your mind map. In this case, you would place your core niche idea at the center of your diagram and associate it with all the profitable product ideas and related concepts, directly or indirectly.
This way, you’ll obtain a clear, structured, coherent, and relevant overview of the niche product to choose.
Integrate into passionate online communities
Internet users who share the same goals, interests, and passions often form an online community. You can become a part of these communities to identify profitable niches for your e-commerce. These niches are easily identifiable through:
- The most popular hashtags posted on Instagram or Twitter.
- Positive reactions on Facebook.
- Links and content that generate the most shares.
- Comments and discussions that receive the most engagement.
How can you make sure you have chosen the right niche product rather than another?
Now that you have a more or less clear idea of the niche product to sell in your online store, make sure that your target audience is interested in it! To be certain, you must absolutely test your potential niche product.
If you’re unsure how to proceed, I recommend first building your audience. To do this, you can, for example, initiate Kickstarter campaigns that generate excitement for products in the launch phase, which means products that have not yet been made available on the market.
Please note, however, that you are not necessarily obligated to bring this sale to fruition, no matter how promising it may be. The goal is simply to launch a concept before realizing your online business project, in order to generate more leads.
To do this, you need to launch marketing campaigns via social media with the aim of boosting your e-commerce SEO, qualifying your traffic, and then being able to redirect it to the home pages of your respective websites where users can sign up. You can easily achieve this by adopting a good Inbound marketing strategy.
Once that’s done, move immediately to the testing phase, starting with offering them one product at a time. Don’t hesitate to reach out to your customers for their feedback, and, most importantly, to understand their respective expectations regarding the niche product you plan to launch soon!
Over time, you can start selling your products in small batches and gradually develop your offerings based on the feedback and experiences of your potential customers. In parallel with this approach, you can continue to maintain ongoing competitive monitoring to stay informed about all the current trends and identify the best niche for your business. This is especially relevant to your industry or the type of niche product you plan to sell. To help streamline your search for trends related to the best niche product to choose, I suggest using tools like Google Trends or Facebook Insight.
You can even leverage both tools by combining them to turn your niche product into a powerful growth lever to boost your online sales. To stay updated on all the latest dropshipping product trends, set up Google alerts!
Regularly follow discussions on various social media platforms, not just on Facebook, to discover the best-performing products. Now that you’ve figured out the right methods for finding profitable products, it’s time for you to explore which type of niche product is most likely to bring you online success.
Read also: 7 Obscure Freelance Niches: Earn Substantial Income
Which niche product should you choose to sell better?
Even if you already have some trendy product ideas in mind, it’s always a good idea to maximize your chances of finding more profitable niches for your dropshipping or e-commerce business. To help you with that, I’ve provided a list of niche product suggestions below.
1. Eco-responsible, recyclable and biodegradable products
In the era we live in, preserving the ecosystem is a common concern. According to a recent survey by Nielsen, as many as 48% of consumers say they are inclined to change their consumption habits and purchase products with a low ecological impact to protect the planet.
As a result, more and more consumers want to turn to eco-friendly, biodegradable, and recyclable products to reduce their environmental footprint.
You can direct your research in this direction to better meet these needs by starting with Google searches on keywords such as “reconditioned items,” “organic cosmetics,” “recyclable products,” “scout tents made from plant fibers,” etc.
2. Pet accessories and equipment
The pet industry alone accounted for no less than 4.5 billion euros in 2018. To this day, this market continues to grow. There are various opportunities to develop a niche within this lucrative market.
To do so, you should focus on specific types of pets (e.g., snakes, iguanas, guinea pigs, rats, chimpanzees…) and their respective lifestyles. Based on these two elements, you can establish a product range suitable for monetizing your website. As an example of niche products you can sell, I can mention:
- Connected surveillance cameras to allow pet owners to keep an eye on their pets from anywhere, using any connected device.
- GPS trackers for pets.
- Customized mugs with photos of their pets, and more.
3. Accessories dedicated to the world of video games
With over 2.3 billion active gamers worldwide (across all gaming platforms) and a revenue of over 135 billion euros in 2019, the video game market is experiencing tremendous growth. You can dedicate a niche store to selling products and accessories for gamers who play on PC and Mac.
You can offer product lines such as gaming chairs, headsets, microphones for live streaming on platforms like YouTube or for commenting on competitions, and more. You can even:
- Choose a specific market niche based on one or more of the most popular or trending video games.
- Sell customizable stickers for gaming consoles.
- Provide keychains or promotional items featuring the logos of gamers’ favorite game publishers, and so on.
4. Products and accessories dedicated to freelancers
More and more people are choosing to work from home or remotely for several reasons:
- Flexible working hours
- Freedom to organize work
- Increased autonomy
- Savings on commuting expenses
- Desire to break free from traditional employment
- The potential to earn money online, and more.
With the growing number of remote workers and freelancers, freelancing represents a niche market with significant potential. Depending on the target clientele you want to reach, you can develop specific niche products or make it a niche business on its own. Some product ideas for freelancers include:
- High-performance and cost-effective headsets for remote call center agents.
- Quiet ergonomic membrane keyboards for online writers and software developers.
- Ergonomic chairs designed for extended hours of computer work.
- Stress-relief balls and gadgets.
- Customizable motivational mugs and cups for proactive freelancers.
- Three-button mice designed for 3D computer graphics modelers.
- Graphic tablets to boost the productivity of freelance graphic designers.
- Specialized headphones and earbuds for audio transcribers.
- Protective cases and covers for MacBook, laptops, and netbooks.
- Storage peripherals for handling large files: USB drives, external hard drives, micro SD memory cards, and more.
