How To Find The Right Product Niche?

Finding the right product niche is one of the crucial steps of being successful in the E-commerce business. Here are some tips and suggestions about how to find the right product niche. We will go through the process of generating product list & evaluating the list to get the potential winning products. Hope they will help you!

Generate The Product List

1. Start from yourself. 

Your minds are already filled with many good ideas: products you like, your hobbies, your passions, trends that you think will become popular, etc. List them down, as much as possible, at least 10 products. We will discuss about how to evaluate them and choosing the potential bestselling products later. 

2. Browse other websites.

Spend a great amount of time browsing those existing, well-established E-commerce platforms, observing their best selling products, promoted products and offers. Learn and find out what are the hot selling products that people are already purchasing. They are the winning products. Add them to your list. Below are the links to some of these well-known platforms. Visit them often and make the best out of them! 

• AliExpress Weekly Best Selling Products 
• Amazon Best Sellers 
• Ebay 
• Lazada Top Sellers  

Besides above sites, you could also check out what other shopify stores are selling by Google "site: myshopify.com" + "The niche" (eg. site: myshopify.com, iphone cases). It's an effective way of knowing better about your competitors, feeling like a spy? 😉

Once you get the product list ready, it's time to start evaluating them and choosing the potential products that you want to sale. 

Evaluate The Product List

1. AliExpress Criteria

a). Store Numbers

Type your product name in AliExpress. Based on the numbers of the stores that are selling such product, we evaluate the store number score as below: 

• More than 2,000 stores: 5 Score
• 500-1,999 stores: 4 Score
• 100-500 stores: 3 Score
• 0-100 stores: 2 Score

b). Product Popularity

Get the average order amount from the top 10 stores that are selling such product. Based on the order amount, we evaluate the product popularity score as below: 

• More than 2,000 orders: 5 Score
• 500-1,999 orders: 4 Score
• 100-500 orders: 3 Score
• 0-100 orders: 2 Score

c). Supplier Positive Feedback

Get the average positive feedback from the top 10 stores that are selling such product. The product shall have min. 96% positive feedback. 

d). Product Price

For the beginners, who never have E-commerce / dropshipping experience before, in my opinion, it would be safer to look for products that are less than $5. Generally, cheaper products are more popular and tend to be hot selling products. Besides, such products are capable of "FREE + Just Pay Shipping" campaign method.  

2. Google Trend

Go to Google Trends and type each of your product idea into the search box and look what the trend is. Is the trend increasing or decreasing? Are there any patterns? Do you see any spikes? 

Take "iPhone cases" as example, we will get the following trend: 

Besides looking at the trend, you should also pay attention to the "Interest by region" area. It shows you from which country these key words have been greatly searched, and such information is very useful in the ads targeting stage. 

And you want to avoid seasonal products, such as Christmas decoration, Easter basket, etc. For the seasonal products have shorter life cycle, and it won't help you in making sales. 

3. Target Audience

While you are selecting products, please bear in mind that it shall be easy to find the target audience with such products, whether on Facebook Ads, Google Adwords or others. If the products are too general, cannot fit in any group of people, no matter how great the products seem to be, very unlikely they are going to make effective sales, and on the other hand, your advertising fees might be sky-high. We will discuss about targeting audience in details in other part. 

Above are some tips and suggestions in finding the right niche. Hope they will give you some basic ideas about getting the right products. Though this stage is important, don't spend too much time on it. It only works when other stages are also well-planned and developed. They work together to lead to a successful E-commerce business.