How to choose a niche for your ecommerce store
A large number of newly built eCommerce stores never receive a single order.
Not even a request. throughout its existence.
Why is that? Is it so difficult to build a web store? Is it no longer enough to put OSCommerce and load few products? No, it’s not.
As building online stores became easier and cheaper, many hobbyists started doing it and saturated the market with low quality and unfocused drop shipping stores with high prices. This is the number one recipe for failure.
How can you avoid it? It’s not simple, but let’s start with some basic steps. First, put some money and effort into your web store – get a professional design, not a free template. Don’t use the free open source shopping cart, they don’t look good. If you can’t afford to get a custom web store for yourself, at least buy quality pre-built software that will look stylish and meet your needs.
So find a niche. Spend more on this step, because a web store without a niche is a loser. Choosing a bad niche will also kill your business. So how do you choose a niche for your eCommerce drop shipping store? Here are the steps:
1. See what people are searching for. Don’t build a store that sells purple jackets before first checking to see if people are really looking for purple jackets. There are many options for researching this: for starters, you can use Keyword Tracker or the free Google AdWords tool to see if the keywords in your niche are being searched for. You need to see at least a few thousand monthly searches to consider the niche big enough. On the other hand, if there are millions of searches for the keyword, there is probably too much competition.
If we continue with our purple jackets example, we’ll see that there are between 5,000 and 6,000 monthly searches, which makes the niche good enough.
2. Consult the competition. Search for the keyword phrase (with quotes) in a search engine: do you get millions or just a few thousand? Check the websites. Are they good, do they look staid, do they lack important features, are they priced too high, or do they have too little product variety? Asking these questions will help you understand what your strengths are and how you can get your share of the market.
3. Check the sources of your products. If you don’t have a specific product provider and you don’t make the products yourself, you’ll need to find a provider for your eCommerce store. So it’s time to research potential wholesale or drop-shipping providers, to verify their prices, the quality of their products, their customer service, refund policies, and whether they’ll be willing to work with you. Without good suppliers you cannot enter the market.
4. Test the niche. This is a bonus tip that you’ll hardly see anywhere else, but it’s working great and I always do with my projects. Before investing in the web store, start a small blog and write a few articles on the subject. Do some basic SEO and build some links so you can get some traffic. Then see if there are people who come and read the articles (use some traffic statistics software for that). Try even getting them to sign up for a newsletter. Don’t worry, all this work will not be in vain. Once you start your web store, you will use the blog to attract interested users! You can also email those who subscribed to the newsletter and let them know that you have opened the store. Of course, this way of testing may cost you some efforts and time, especially if you find out that the niche is not good, but that is much cheaper than building an expensive web store and not getting any sales at the time!
When you choose the niche and do all the work above, think about how your store can be different, if not better, than the competition. Try to be the king in your little niche and it will pay you sweet rewards for years to come.