6 Strategies to Find a Niche and a Sales Product
If you want your online store to be successful, you need to be methodical and choose a niche that promises success.
Here are 6 strategies on how to best find a niche and a sales product:
1. Niches with lots of accessories
Companies only earn a lot from expensive sales items in exceptional cases and only generate around 5 to 10 percent of their income with products such as laptops or televisions. On the other hand, they make real money selling accessories.
A margin of 100 to 1,000 percent can easily be added to accessories and customers are much less price-sensitive with such products. They spend weeks comparing TV offers before making a decision. With an HDMI cable, on the other hand, they hardly flinch an eyelid. Although there’s a good chance the business will make almost as much on the cable as it does on selling a flat-panel TV.
If you choose a niche where lots of accessories and clutter can be sold, your earnings will be significantly higher and buyers will be much less price sensitive.
2. Customers with a Passion or Problem
It’s amazing how much money people often spend on hobbies. Mountain bikers turn hundreds of lightweight accessories just to make their bikes weigh a few grams less. Avid anglers invest tens of thousands of dollars in boats and related accessories. And if you can offer a product-related solution to an annoying problem, people will run you down, figuratively.
3. The $50 to $100 range
In my experience, this price range is ideal for the success of an e-commerce company. It’s big enough to generate a decent profit before ordering, yet small enough that – provided you have a high quality informative website – most customers don’t want to speak to anyone in person before buying.
You will be much more efficient if you take most of your orders online instead of spending a lot of time on the phone. For products that cost $200 or more, many customers want personal customer service before they pull out their credit cards.
4. Difficult to find on site
If you need gardening tools, you will likely drive to your local garden center or home improvement store. But what do you do when you need surveillance equipment or magic items? You would probably go shopping online. If you have niche products that are hard to find in most places, you are guaranteed to get good traffic to your website.
But don’t forget to make sure that there is enough demand for your niche product that is hard to come by! That can be a very fine line to walk.
5. Hardly any changes to the product
If you change your product line year after year, it can be very time consuming. However, if you sell a consistent line of products that change little, you could invest in an informative website that you could use for years.
6. Consumables or Disposable Products
Returning customers are essential to any business, and it’s much easier for existing customers who trust you to sell than potential new customers. If your product has to be reordered regularly – and you manage to keep customers happy – you are on the right track to building a lucrative business with recurring sales.
Finding a great product for your online store is only half the battle, however. Even if the niche you picked meets all of the above criteria, it is a poor choice when there is no demand or the competition is huge. In order to make an informed decision, it is extremely important that you familiarize yourself with the demand, competition and vendors for a product.
