If you want to establish a successful and profitable e-commerce store, one of your main tasks is to find the perfect niche. Finding the right niche is crucial because it also identifies your target audience. When you find the right niche, it will affect every other business decision that you make. Here is a useful guide on how to find a niche for an e-commerce store:
1. Research, research, research
It all starts with research. First, you need to thoroughly research product sub-categories to identify the best e-commerce niches. While doing this, you should not only consider the most trending products – you have to dig deeper. You have to be able to identify a niche that you know something about (i.e., not brand new to you). More importantly, you should be passionate about it and know how to provide value to your customers. The products that you choose should be of high quality, so you have to make thorough research and be very strategic in your choice.
These two strategies can help you with your research:
- Utilize a keyword research tool (Google keyword planner, SEMRush, etc.) and narrow down keywords through filtering options until you find something useful.
- Join or start conversations in social forums such as Quora and Reddit. This can help you understand what people think of the niche and the kind of products that you are interested in.
2. Check out the competition
Before finally deciding on an e-commerce niche, you must check out your competition. If there are already several big sites or brands dominating the space that you are interested in, then you might want to try another niche. It’s best to stay away from over-saturated markets and focus on something that is not overpopulated with too many established online stores. If you still decide to move forward with a market that already has a lot of competition, at least you know what hurdles you will face gaining market share.
3. Create or identify products that solve a problem
When you’re trying to generate ideas for a niche product or service that you can sell online, try to pinpoint a problem and brainstorm ways on how to conveniently and efficiently solve it. You can go back to the list of products that you researched and come up with at least two or three pain points that each product solves. The product or service that you choose doesn’t have to be a huge endeavor. In fact, it can be quite simple yet exceptionally effective.
To achieve maximal customer satisfaction (In cases of disputes, there are some services which can help you find the ideal solution and maintain your reputation, read this Purchase Guard review to learn more about it), you have to really know and understand what your target audience is looking for. You have to know what are their problems and how you can solve them.
As soon as you come up with a list of how a product or service of some kind (or multiple products) solves a common problem or even several problems, you can now start building your very own buyer persona. Your buyer persona is the representation of your ideal customer. Among the various factors that can help you identify your buyer persona are customer demographics, behavior patterns, and motivations.
