How to Find eCommerce Niche for Profits?

The success of a business is not about a redundant budget or support from advanced technology. In contrast, the key is eCommerce niches. Why?

The fact that we are living in a highly competitive world. And finding a narrow but still profitable niche to dominate is not an easy task, especially under the significant growth of eCommerce sales and various online sellers.

Discussing around “eCommerce niche” this post will show you a step-by-step guide on how to find your niche market and how it can empower your business’s growth.

Let’s get started!

Table of contents:

• What is an eCommerce niche?
• Benefits of having a profitable eCommerce niche
• 3 Steps to find an eCommerce niche
  • 1. Find a potential need
    • Have a clear mindset of customers’ central role
    • Get inspiration from unique connections or self-interests
    • Keyword research
    • Competition research
    • Map out all your ideas on paper
  • 2. Specify your ideal eCommerce niche
    • Brainstorm ideal solutions for customers in the niche
    • Expand your options on eCommerce niches
    • Test your idea
  • 3. Learn from eCommerce giants
• Some suggestions of top eCommerce niches
  • Environmentally friendly products
  • Minimalist products
  • Space organizing products
  • Other ideas that fuel your inspiration
• Make your passion into action!

What is an eCommerce niche?

First and foremost, let’s define the term “niche” before diving deeper into why and how to get one for your business.

The eCommerce niche can be understood as a distinct market of shoppers that you can sell a specific product type with a unique differentiator. The more detailed your customer personas are, the more niche your market becomes.

If you still feel confused about “niches,” we will represent it more clearly later in the guide on how to find your “perfect eCommerce niche.”

Benefits of having a profitable eCommerce niche

It might be unfair when comparing a new or regular business to e-Commerce giants like Walmart, eBay, or Amazon in terms of “niches.” The reason is that they both sell a wide variety of products to a large number of customers.

If you want to follow the root of Walmart or Amazon, make sure you start with 2 things:

• An already well-known brand’s name with a high reputation
• Have enormous resources or strong financial support

Or else, the smartest way to get into the game and stand out from various and huge competitors is to find, focus on one niche and develop it.

Focusing on a niche is more like an intelligent strategic business decision for small businesses. This way, you can better serve a particular customer base better than your competitors (both medium-sized sellers to eCommerce giants) who target the larger market.

In a nutshell, starting with one highly sought-after product for a specific niche is beneficial in 3 ways:

• Reduce the inventory and storage costs: You’re only selling a certain amount of product types rather than hundreds of SKUs

• Better increased visibility since fewer competitors: By targeting at one specific niche, you can better focus your marketing efforts more effectively and get more conversions

• Spend fewer resources and more cost-effectiveness: Since you are confined to a niche (specific person and specific need), you have less work to do compared to having a large market

3 Steps to find an eCommerce niche

As it goes, the first step when you want to start a business and, of course, be able to dominate it is to find a niche.

However, it’s definitely a big mistake when choosing an oversaturated market. A niche like that only leads to an uphill battle from the start.

To help you not throw money out of the window and waste your time on a niche that falls away after launching, let’s move to the first stage: Find a need and start with a problem.

1. Find a potential need

Have a clear mindset of customers’ central role

There are 2 central ideas of modern marketing for any business’s success:

• Customers perceptions

• Customers expectations

The combination of these 2 is the decisive factor for the formation of the value proposition. Thus, necessary for a business to thrive. So whatever niche you’re about to jump in, make sure that your business ideas serve and satisfy a particular want or need of customers.

In other words, customers only need a thing that can truly work and solve their current problems. Put yourself in a regular customer, your impression of a business only gets worse if there are differences between the promoted and real ones.

Get inspiration from unique connections or self-interests

The easiest way to seek an ideal niche is to consider yourself as a customer. No one can better understand you than you yourself.

So why don’t you start from what you’re genuinely passionate about and knowledgeable about. By thinking like a buyer, you can identify valuable pain points and connect with other customers in your market. It’s a natural starting point for potential eCommerce niches.

If you have a personal interest or hobby, ask yourself:

• What products can you benefit from?

• Your existing pain points of a problem related to the niche you’re in?

• Things that you would love to have as a buyer or enthusiast (of a specific field) that can solve your current problem?

Keyword research

After listing some potential ideas, you can validate them via Internet research. In other words, do keyword research. In fact, the Internet is a valuable resource to find out

The viability of your ideas (the need): Whether people are searching for the types of products you intend to sell

• The latest trends: In case you have no idea of which niche to join, then research of people’s interest through the Internet will be a perfect starting point

• The digital age has transformed the search habits of modern people as well as the way they’re shopping over the Internet. In the cutting edge of technology, data is the key that empowers marketing effectiveness.

You can look up what people are searching for effortlessly by using tools such as SEMRush, Google Trends, Ahrefs, and many more. There are lots of tool options available (both free and paid) to do this task.

4 resources to conduct researches on consumers’ interest:

• Major search engines: Typically Google - the most popular search engine with nearly 5 billion searches processed per day

• Popular social media platforms: Such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc

• Peruse forums: For instance, Quora

• Different product reviews of influencers in the niche

Read more:

• Best Dropshipping Product Research Tools
• Best Trending Products to Sell

Competition research

Apart from investigating the level of customers’ interest in your niche, checking whether it’s an over-populated market is your next course of action.

The ultimate purpose of getting a niche is to have as few competitors (who are selling similar things like you) as possible. Of course, it’s nearly impossible for you to find a unique niche with no competition, and you’re the leader.

The presence of competitors in your niche is actually not a bad thing. Sometimes, it might be a sign of you finding a profitable niche. There are 2 things you can get from competitor analysis:

• The competition in your wanted market is high or low. Whether there is a presence of unsatisfied need in that niche?

• If yes, what products or services can you offer while others don’t. Whether the solution given to the target market is new and different compared to the ones of existing competitors?

Furthermore, by identifying your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, you can plan and implement proper strategies that empower your competitive advantages.

Read more: Top 18 Best Competitor Analysis Tools

Map out all your ideas on paper

When you have a particular visualization of a niche that you can jump into, organize them all in a mind map. This way, you can better visualize your thoughts, expand on ideas, and make complicated things more straightforward.

You can start with a general market and narrow it down to different fields. For instance, you can divide a body care product category into 3 groups: soap, scrub, and lotion. Each can be broken down even smaller to your needs.

You can either draw your mind map on paper or use some free online tools such as Coggle, SimpleMind, Text2MindMap, etc.

All in all, based on the data collected from potential market research, you must get for yourself a certain amount of options for your eCommerce niches with viable products to sell. Then, determine the potential and profitability of each option via 4 questions:

• Whether there is any space for your business in that niche market?
• What’s the unsatisfied need of your target market?
• Can you offer a solution fitting that needs?
• Is that solution profitable?

Read more: 6 Steps to Do Market Research Properly

2. Specify your ideal eCommerce niche

Brainstorm ideal solutions for customers in the niche

After a process of researching and consideration, you might pick for yourself 1 or 2 most optimal selections, time to make them more detailed as well as evaluate the possibility of each option.

Basically, for each selection, you can answer yourself basic questions like:

• Who are you targeting?
• The personas of your target market?
• What are their pain points? And what’s your solution for their current situation?
• What competitors in your considered niche help customers?
• The problems with your competitors’ solutions (their missing points that customers are not satisfied with)?
• Can things you offer satisfying that unsatisfied needs and overcome other competitors?
• Whether your solution is possible for practical implementation based on your resources and assets?

The final question will focus on how distribution and fulfillment in relation to your product sources. A great niche becomes useless when you can’t ship or deliver the products without making any profit.

Through the answers to these questions, you can determine your final eCommerce niche and your offered solutions (products or services) as well.

Read more: How to Improve Your Business via Customer Data

Expand your options on eCommerce niches

Typically, 5 primary factors can be used to specify a niche, including:

• Price range: Define your solution (marketed products or services) stays in the luxury, premium, or affordable category
• Demographics: Who your solution target to; their detailed personas such as gender, age, income level, and so forth
• Psychographics: Their concern and interests that can be used for defining their pain points as well as other marketing activities in the future
• Geographics: Where your target market focuses on. It can be a specific country, city, or area
• Level of product quality: What quality of your product or service to offer customers; either it’s premium, handmade, or economical

These criteria will put a general idea of your wanted niche in a clarified path.

Test your idea

Now, you are equipped with enough information to choose the right niche, and the last step is to test and put your idea into practice before the actual launch.

You can try creating a simple web or just a landing page for pre-sales of the products you are developing or about to sell. Then, drive traffic to this page using:

• Paid advertising (to get instant results)
• SEO tactics (via an optimized content system targeting your niche)

By testing in a short period of time, you can define if there is anything wrong with your current idea. Might it come from the selected niche, unsuitable target audience, ineffective content, or inappropriate price?

3. Learn from eCommerce giants

Apparently, the landscape of online shopping is dominated by a handful of eCommerce giants. You might not be strange to some popular name like Amazon, eBay, Walmart, or Alibaba. Not an exaggeration to say that they are winners of the global eCommerce game.

Though it seems impossible to join this kind of elite group (almost insurmountable), you can still get few hints from the ways they operate, target customers, and sell products.

Some suggestions of top eCommerce niches

Based on today’s most search trend, some ideal niches worth your time and effort investing in.

Despite the dominance of big brands, it’s still possible to find a profitable eCommerce niche within the following recommendation list.

You Want to Find Trending Products to Sell? you can try:

• 1. Sell The Trend: Easily navigate an Enormous database of products that are being sold on High Traffic Drop Shipping stores today.
• BigSpy is a great tool that allows you auto hunt all Facebook.ads people tracking in a minute.
• Jungle Scout: the best Amazon product research tool on the market.

Environmentally friendly products

Apparently, we see an increase in the complexity of modern consumers’ needs. Business’s products have to not only overcome customers’ critical problems (its core functionality) but even meet their expectations of added value.

And environmentally friendly criteria is one of that “added value” you can try to get competitive advantages and differentiate from the crowd since people are more environmentally conscious.

This trend has been proven by the popularity of items like:

• Natural products
• Reusable products
• Plastic-free products

For instance, WooBamboo with bamboo toothbrushes - one famous brand that offers products focusing on environmental protection.

Minimalist products

Surprisingly, products with minimalist designs (such as clothes, jewelry, lab created diamond engagement rings, watches) have grown slowly over the past few years.

This trend hopes up when a large number of consumers show their interest in the minimalist lifestyle. This opens a great opportunity for eCommerce sellers.

You can consider jumping on the minimalist bandwagon for fashion, homeware or jewelry instead of chasing the latest trends.

A brand that is famous in this field you just heard about is Muji, outstanding with the minimalist and timeless designs on most of their products.

Space organizing products

Organization helpers are things lots of people feel interested in but are usually overlooked by eCommerce sellers.

These products target at satisfying the essential needs of users rather than generating impulse buy. You definitely (at least one time) search for things like wall shelves, DIY simple shelving, pegboards, or storage units of all sizes and shapes.

They are used to make your workspace or home to be cleaner and better organized. People always care about products that can reduce their workload and improve the living spaces.

Open Space - a home organization brand offering fantastic organization helpers (stylish and useful at the same time) such as underbed storage bins, wire baskets, entryway racks and so many more.

Other ideas that fuel your inspiration

Here are some other ideas for today’s high-demand eCommerce niches you can consider:

• Men’s cosmetics and skincare products
• Nutrition and wellness
• Home exercise equipment
• Smart home devices
• Organic or natural pet care products

Make your passion into action!

No one wants to jump into a market flooded with competition. However, it’s not impossible for you to go ahead as a niche leader before the copycat brands hop on.

Just bear in mind that no matter which path you choose to go, the purpose of niche marketing doesn’t change. That’s finding a small and or even unexplored market in which you can be the dominant, a game-changer.

Higher-risk investment goes with higher returns. Make sure you’re prepared enough to hit the ground running.