Why starting niche shop instead of general store? The Powerful of Niche

I am always amazed at the number of people who call us looking for products to sell without giving any thought on how they will compete against other companies in the market place. 

Adding to my amazement is how many of these folks end up selling items (i.e. home electronics) I could find at any major retailer, or I could find on thousands of other websites and auctions at a cheaper price. How are they getting customers to buy from them? How are they staying in business?

Sadly, many of them are going bust. However, I do find some of them thriving and doing well. So, what are they doing? That’s what this article is about. This chapter is about finding your online retail niche.

What is general store?

General store is an online marketplace that is like an offline retail chain or department store. The lone distinction is that an online dropshipping store typically doesn’t sell food and refreshments.

A super wide range of consumer goods, from socks to light bulbs, can be found in a general shop: these store owners assume that an enormous number of items is a winning strategy because a passerby site visitor ‘is guaranteed’ to get interested in something and place an order.

Advantages

The item decision is colossal 

With a general store obviously you can add anything to your product offering. With this beyond tech solution you will get anything to your general store absolutely really fast. This is really helpful.

No examination is carefully vital 

Actually, to start a successful business of any kind, you need to conduct at least a basic research to understand the market trends, the product offers, and the customers’ preferences.

But, when you start a general store, you don’t always see the need to learn anything about the market: you just fill your store with any products that got your attention, and wait for the purchases.

The circle of potential purchasers is truly wide 

If you sell lots of various products, you definitely can expect different people to come to your store and make purchases from you. You are not working with a tiny customer segment. You are basically dealing with the whole world instead, because dropshipping business has no geographic boundaries.

Disadvantages

Rivalry is excessively extreme 

Who is your competitor when you’re selling everything at once? Most likely, you will have dozens of indirect competitors whose product offer is partly similar to yours, and a couple of direct competitors -i.e. Amazon and eBay- that are nearly impossible to compete with (at least at the beginning stage).

What’s about your unique competitive advantage? You won’t be able to set super low prices (otherwise, your whole business will have no point), and it will be really difficult for you to compete with the online retail giants by the number of products in your store. How will you stand out, then?

Item related undertakings are overpowering 

If we’re talking about a large-scale store with a diverse range of products, it certainly needs a LOT of items -hundreds of them probably- otherwise it will look really weird to the customers.

It’s not an option to leave them unedited, meaning your site will be filled with non-unique content that is damaging for SEO, plus, the store visitors will quickly understand that they can find the identical products on AliExpress for much lower prices.

Yet, you can import the desired items from AliExpress in seconds and set prices for them automatically in a couple of clicks, but can you imagine how long does it take you to edit all these product pages?

It's almost difficult to rank high for the picked keywords 

It will only be logical to optimize this store for really broad keywords like ‘online shopping’ or ‘buy online’, and you can imagine how many well-established eCommerce sites are already using these keywords?

Simply speaking, with such a generic keyword, your store won’t be shown high enough on the search engine results page, which is why Internet users won’t stumble upon it often enough.

Again, this is a competition-related question. If the product range of an online store doesn’t have a narrowly defined specifics, it is extremely hard for the owner to turn it into a SEO-friendly site.

A legitimate promoting strategy is truly difficult to construct

If you can’t compete by cost or by item range and if you can’t make it to the first page of Google with the power of SEO,the lone thing you can do to produce sales is to promote your store all over the Internet.

But what exactly will you promote if you have hundreds of products in your store?where will you post your advertisements if you don’t have the foggiest idea what platforms and websites your target audience uses? What types of messages will you use for each of the marketing channels if you have no idea what’s relevant and important to your buyers?

Essentially, you will either be going with random guesses, or taking no promotional actions at all, and you can’t expect these measures to really be moneymaking strategies.

You don't have the foggiest idea to focus on

As a newcomer, you obviously are uncertain about the most important things to do at the beginning of your dropshipping journey, but with a general store, it’s possible to get even more confused.

Having no previous experience in this business area, it’s easy to get overwhelmed with the unstructured and segmentary data within your store.

Understanding your Online Niche!

Well, I am always amazed at the number of people who call us looking for products to sell without giving any thought on how they will compete against other companies in the market place. Adding to my amazement is how many of these folks end up selling items (i.e. home electronics) I could find at any major retailer, or I could find on thousands of other websites and auctions at a cheaper price. How are they getting customers to buy from them? How are they staying in business? 

Sadly, many of them are going bust. However, I do find some of them thriving and doing well. So, what are they doing? That’s what this 'guide' is about. This article is about finding your online retail niche.

What is a niche?

The dictionary defines a niche as being a recess in a wall or structure. It is basically something different than the rest of its own world. Imagine a sidewalk made of red bricks. Within the sidewalk there is only one yellow brick. Which brick will catch your attention first? 

Usually, it will be the yellow brick as it clearly sticks out from the rest. The other red bricks cannot hold your attention span as long as the yellow brick because there are so many of them giving off the same appearance – a plain red brick. The yellow brick is still a plain brick. It resides in the same sidewalk as the other bricks. It is made of the same material as the other bricks. It is laid in the same pattern as the other bricks. Yet, it is winning all of our attention. 

Why? It has a different color. It is yellow. Being yellow is the yellow brick’s niche. What if the yellow brick represented your business and the red bricks represented other competing businesses? Would that be an advantage? Absolutely! 

Customers would see you stand out from the rest of the crowd. They could easily see the difference between you and the other businesses. From an opportunity standpoint, this puts you in the driver’s seat.

The Power of Niche!

There is a story I would like to share with you about a friend of mine getting her business into a niche. 

Jenny was interested in selling some online travel accessories on her new website. She called me up one day about getting a wholesale supplier of electronic thermal travel mugs. These are the mugs you can plug into a car cigarette lighter, and it keeps the coffee warm. 

She had decided to sell these mugs without giving it too much thought on how to market them on a website. She had the mugs on the website for about four months without any sales. She had seen the same exact mugs being sold at one of the major retailers for a cheaper price than her advertised list price.

As a result, she considered getting rid of the product off of her site since it was hard to beat the price of the major retailer. She received an email about a week later from a company in Europe interested in buying the mugs for a promotional campaign they were going to do. They wanted 125,000 mugs! Jennifer was very excited to say the least. 

Upon further email exchanges, she learned the mugs would not be needed for another nine months. This would give Jennifer plenty of time to make the arrangements and work through the terms of payment and delivery with them. After a few more email exchanges they requested to have their company logo printed on the side.

This was something Jennifer did not want to pursue as it really complicated matters. Then another email came with the real bomb. The customer had indicated they had checked with three other online stores and could get the mugs for close to a dollar. Although she was working with an actual wholesale warehouse import distributor in the U.S., her cost was not low enough. Jennifer’s cost was about fifty cents higher due to shipping and packaging from the wholesale supplier. 

The mugs were manufactured in China. The China factory would not do the printing. The deal was starting to look less attractive as the competition was going to beat her on pricing. She needed to differentiate herself from the others. She asked the buyer if the price they had been quoted from other companies included logo printing. In turn, they said no one was offering the printing, and the quotes were for mugs without printing. 

The buyer said they did not want to mess with having them printed. They wanted to buy them already printed. Jennifer had now discovered a niche in the electronic thermal mug industry. No one was offering electronic thermal mugs with company logos. 

She checked around on the price of printing the mugs and repackaging. It added another dollar twenty five to the cost. Since no competitor was willing to do the printing, she would be the only quote with fully printed mugs. 

She now had more than just the price of a mug on her quote. She now had the cost of the mug, ink, print configuration, adhesive, artwork, inspection, packaging, labor, and shipping for her quote. She could distribute the cost of the mug into each one of those items to make the deal look further attractive, and she did! She would make her money on printing. 

The buyer said they were budgeted to pay no more than seven dollars per mug. She had the cost quote of the mugs around six dollars and fifty cents. That included several dollars profit per mug (for 125,000 mugs, you do the profit math!). She told the buyer, “If you buy the mugs from my company with the printed logo, the price of the mugs will be about twenty cents.” The buyer (now fixated on price) freaked out on the price of the mugs being four times lower than anyone else. 

No one was going to come close to that price for mugs. Since Jennifer offered logo printing on electronic thermal mugs, she had become the yellow brick in the sidewalk. That is the true power of a niche business.

Where and How to find your best Niche?

First of all, without demand, it doesn't matter how best your niche is, if nobody wants your product, you'll have a hard time making any money! As the old saying goes, it's much easier to fill existing demand than to try to create it.

Fortunately, a number of online tools allow you to measure demand for a product or market. The most well-known and popular is the Google Keyword Tool.

The best way to measure demand for an item online is to see how many people are searching for it using a search engine like Google. Fortunately, Google makes this search volume publicly available via its keyword tool. Simply type in a word or phrase, and the tool tells you how many people are searching for it every month.

Please keep the following three tips in mind, and you'll be well on your way to getting the most out of the tool:

MATCH TYPE – The tool will let you select broad, phrase or exact match types when it reports search volumes. Unless you have a good reason to do otherwise, you should use the exact match option. This will give you a much more accurate picture of the applicable search volume for the keyword. For a more detailed explanation, see this article on understanding match types.

SEARCH LOCATION – Make sure you look at the difference between local search volume (in your country or a user-defined region) and global search volumes. If you'll be selling primarily in the U.S., you should focus on the local search volumes and ignore the global results, as that's where most of your

customers will be.

LONG-TAIL VARIATIONS – It's easy to fixate on the broad, one- or two-word search terms that get massive amounts of search volume. In reality, it's the longer, more specific and lower volume search queries that will make up most of your traffic from the search engines. These longer, more detailed search terms are commonly referred to as “long-tail” searches.

Keep this in mind when you're looking at potential markets and niches to enter. If a search term has many variations that are actively searched for, that's a good sign that the market is fairly deep with lots of variety and interest. But if search queries and related volume drop off precipitously after the first few high-level words, there's probably less related long-tail traffic.

Google Trends

The keyword tool is great for raw search figures, but for more detailed insights you'll want to use Google Trends. The tool offers you information that the Keyword Tool just doesn't provide, including:

SEARCH VOLUME OVER TIME: Ideally, you want the niche you're entering to be growing and Trends can let you know if this is the case. For any given search query, you can see the growth or decline in search volume over time.

Below is a chart of search volume for the term “smartphone”. As expected,

search volume has risen sharply in the last few years:

TOP AND RISING TERMS: You'll also be able to get a snapshot at the most popular related searches, and which queries have been growing in popularity the fastest. Focusing on these popular and quickly growing terms can be helpful when planning your marketing and SEO efforts. According to the charts below, search queries related to AT&T, Verizon and Samsung seem to be experiencing the most growth in the smart phone market – data which shows up when we analyze the term “smartphone”:

GEOGRAPHICAL CONCENTRATION: Another useful feature is the ability to see where people are searching for a term geographically. This can help you identify where your customer base for a niche is most heavily concentrated. 

For example, if you're selling canoes the charts below can help you determine that the majority of your customers will likely come from the Northern U.S., Alaska and Hawaii. If you were trying to decide between multiple suppliers, this knowledge could help you partner with one closest to the majority of your customers:

SEASONALITY: Understanding the seasonality of a market – that is, if the demand for a product changes dramatically at different points in the year – is crucially important. Because the keyword tool provides data on a monthly basis, you can draw some misleading conclusions if you measure search

volumes during the wrong time of year.

Revisiting our previous example, we can see below that “canoes” are a very seasons search term with demand peaking in the summer months. If you measured demand in the summer expecting that it would be constant throughout the year, you'd grossly overestimate the size of demand:

For any product you're seriously considering, you'll want to spend time understanding the intricacies of the niche's search volume. Using the Google Trend tool to understand search volumes, geographic concentration, high-level search trends and seasonality will offer insights that can help you avoid costly

mistakes and optimize your marketing efforts. I highly recommend you to see this real example too.

Another Special Sources

There are professional firms who specialize in market research. Some of the online news sources like USA Today and MSN have business sections that commonly identify market trends.

Moreover you can simply just use AliDropship to get free niche ideas.

Or you can find your profitable niche by using "Specialized to niche finder service". Find Niche claims its service as the #1 dropshipping niche finder.

FindNiche is a powerful dropshipping tool that people can use to analyze profitable products with the potential for a massive return on investment. As an eCommerce store owner or someone dropshipping on platforms such as Shopify or AliExpress. FindNiche would help you to solve the problem to find a profitable niche.

 

However, I have found the lifestyle sections to be a fabulous source of possible market trends. The lifestyle sections seem to be the first to describe what is really needed in the lives of people. If you can focus on peoples needs, you can find a good niche waiting for you to fill it.

Some of the best niche Web businesses are built around specialty products. Selling specialty products that are hard to buy or can’t be bought anywhere else presents a great online retail opportunity. The online-buying niche is likely to be a greater percentage of the total market. You want to get an online store that will give you the “You can only find it here!” advantage. So where will you find the best product for your profitable niche? What kind of product? What its specialty?

Make sure to complete the 'guide' !!!

- Overview

- How and Where to find the Best profitable Product?