How to Find Product Niches in E-Commerce?
When it comes to eCommerce, it is the procedure of selling your products online. It is the phenomenon of the purchase and sale of goods or services with respect to electric channels such as the internet. eCommerce has grown rapidly with the increased availability of internet access and it has evolved over the years. For many, one of the biggest hurdles is how to get started and a lot of that has to do with actually coming up with an idea for a business.
To come up with a good eCommerce niche product that you can have a higher success rate in, it is important that you put the time into researching it. Without a low competition and high traffic niche product ideas, it is easy to be drowned by competition and you need to invest more time and money to brand and differentiate yourself from the rest. Hence, it is extremely necessary to come up with the right eCommerce niche market. Whether it is a dropshipping product, selling through Amazon FBA through Amazon SEO or creating your own niche eCommerce store and promoting to potential customers via social media or SEO, we are going to explore what are the ways to find the right niche in e-Commerce.
Using an Excel Sheet to Make a List
We are going to use an excel sheet to assess the different niche opportunities in E-Commerce. These are the columns we need:
Keywords – Niche Ideas
In the Keywords column, you will be entering any product or niche ideas you have.
Google Keyword Planner Search Volume
In this column, we will be inputting the search volume for the keyword.
Google Keyword Planner Competition
This will be the competition level for Adwords on the keyword. Adwords competition does not always translate into SEO competition, but it can be a good indicator.
Google SERP Competition
This will be where we manually assess the SERP competition. There will be a few indicators that I will go through later in this article.
Niche Score
And finally, this is the score we assign to the keyword and decide if it is a good niche to work on.
Keyword Research and Niche Ideas
To start looking for keyword and profitable niche ideas, head over to Amazon.com. Start looking through their whole Department list and down into their subcategories, and sub, sub-categories for their best seller list. Be sure to look through into all the categories as possible, as often there are subcategories that people are looking for, but there are just not enough sellers for that product.
Jot down all the products or categories of products that you think you would be interested to sell and interesting ideas.
These are popular products that already have high demand and you just need to pick out the less competitive ones in the Amazon niche.
Keyword Volume Research – Google Keyword Planner
Keyword search volume refers to the volume or the number of searches for a specific keyword in a given time frame. This basically helps the marketers get a general idea of the competitiveness of the search words and their overall volume. This helps marketers to focus on the words that are more relevant, less competition so that it is easier to rank as well as highly searched for to attract more traffic into the website. However, which keywords to be targeted first would depend on the individual’s business goals. To look for keyword volume, we use Google Keyword Planner which is a part of the Adwords interface to conduct keyword research. It is the most useful tool that helps us retrieve data from Google on keyword search volume.
Now, enter the niche ideas or keywords you have listed down into the keyword planner, and then enter the keyword search volume into your excel list, followed by the competition. Competition refers to the Adwords competition, businesses who are all bidding for the keywords on Adwords. It is an indicator but not the ultimate deciding factor.
Google SERP Competition
Every business has its own competitors and it is extremely essential to understand their own strengths and weaknesses. Some businesses are great at getting customers offline, but many of them do not. In order to achieve success, it is important that you identify them and understand how to gauge their effectiveness online.
Read also: Choosing the Right E-Commerce Business for Your Lifestyle
To start checking on the SERP competition, do a Google search for the keywords. From the results, look at the competition. If you see top news sites such as Forbes, entrepreneur.com, inc.com, businessinsider.com, wikihow.com, webmd.com, cosmopolitan.com, medicalnewstoday.com, as well as big brand sites such as Nike or Adidas, big banking corporations, these are huge competitors for SERP rankings and it will be extremely difficult to beat them in SERP rankings with the necessary resources. Look through the search results and see where the highest rank you can be in for the keyword is just after these websites. If you can be at the top few results for country-wide search results, this will be a good niche for you to target.
How Good are these Sites?
There is also one other factor to take into account in starting a niche eCommerce store. Look up the website of the competitors that are not the sites I have mentioned above. They should be small businesses. Check the competitor’s website and analyze how well it is doing. What products and services are they offering, is there something they do not offer that you can? Also, check whether the website is simply designed or it is cluttered? Does it provide the information you are looking for easily or not? All these variables will help to give you a clearer picture of whether it is a niche idea you could win in. The most important question to ask yourself is, can you build a better website than them with better content and marketing? If the answer is yes, this is a good indicator for a niche to work on.
Decide the level of competition and enter it into your excel sheet.
Short Listing the Choices
Look through the list that you have, and sort them by the Niche Score. Look at the top 5 choices and decide which interests you the most. Next, look up the products within that niche, and ask yourself if you can find suppliers for the products. Lastly, do your calculations including shipping fees and payment gateways fees to make sure you are making a healthy profit margin. I also tend to gear towards evergreen niche as you get to make long term passive money online. With the products you have shortlisted, pick them and start creating your product marketing strategy to promote them.
