General Store vs Niche Store

If you are thinking about diving into the dropshipping world, but wandering between a general store and a niche store, hope this article will help you in your decision making.  

Though there are many dropshipping gurus and specialists on Youtube and other channels teaching about the theory of opening a general store first, testing the products with it then setting up the niche store with the winning products. They may succeed with this method and it pays off their efforts very well. But honestly, after searching in depth among many forums, websites as well as my own experience, I will vote for working on the niche store directly. Here are a few reasons why niche store is the better choice: 

1). Easier to win customer's trust

After attracting potential customers to your site, all you want is having them buy your products, which relies greatly on how well do you convince the visitors that you are a specialist in the product filed they are looking for and your products worth their trust. However, can you imagine what the visitors will think when they browse your site for iphone cases but find the baby pacifiers on the hot-sale section? How likely will they buy the iphone cases? This could be why your ads bring you visitors, but no sales.

2). Easier to market and target the right audiences

We all know the old saying - "You can't please everyone." Same for the business, when you target for every customer, you will not have any customer. 

Most dropshippers will use Facebook ads for marketing their products and brand. And usually a fan page is required before creating the Facebook ads campaign. However, it would be really troublesome to advertise a general store that selling all kinds of products, since you have to create many different fan pages, in order to target and attract the specific customers. And the name of the fan pages may not be the same as the store name, which will confuse the visitors and not being effective in branding.

3). More efficient for blogging 

Blog is an efficient and effective way in supporting and branding the products. It's quite a popular strategy in providing value-added content with blogs for the potential customers and attract them to your site, then get them take out their credit cards. And such method works well with a niche store that sales products in a well-defined field. You can create an educational content, at the end of the post, you can introduce your products to the readers, and let them know that they can actually get it from your store...

4). More effective in increasing SEO ranking in search engine 

Most likely a niche store is named with the same keywords as its domain name, which increases the chances of the store being searched and exposed. Besides, the blogs content of a niche store are more likely to contain the keywords of the store title, which helps to add more links to the store. And the number of the links a page receives is an important factor for Google to determine the page ranking. 

Conclusion

To be a winner in the dropshipping world and be effective with your time and money, start with the niche store. Do necessary researches and home work first, be familiar with the niche industry that you plan to dive into. 

Right direction, comprehensive planning and hard working increase the chance of being successful.