Ecommerce Success

The advent of systems like Shopify and WooCommerce makes it easier than ever to set up an online store without vast programming knowledge or money, and with the prevalence of drop shipping companies that have affordable prices, e-commerce is booming like never before.

E-commerce is one of the only systems you can use to make money online that is truly long-lasting and sustainable, and, in a profitable niche, can keep making you money for many years to come.

There are ordinary people with no business background, no advanced education, and no huge starting bank account balances who are making millions selling everyday items.

Choosing a Profitable Niche

You can create the coolest, best looking, most exciting online store ever created, and fail miserably if you don’t choose a profitable niche. Niche selection is so important that it can make or break your success.

A good niche should:

• Have a moderate to large audience
• Have low to moderate competition
• Have buyers who are passionate about the niche
• Have products that are priced high enough to be profitable

You want to make sure there are enough people who are interested in the niche to support a good number of sales, but you don’t want the niche to be so saturated that it’s difficult to make a profit.

You want a market in which the buyers are passionate or have a real need for the product. It’s going to be difficult to make good money selling ordinary products unless you have a very unique selling point, such as a drastically lower price, or some sort of value-added selling point. You want to sell products which people will be excited to buy, and that they will keep coming back for.

You want to make sure you have products that can be priced high enough to make you a good product without pricing you out of the market. You probably won’t make a lot of money selling products priced under a dollar, because you won’t be able to build a large enough market quickly enough, but a product priced at ten dollars or more would probably be enough to justify the opening of a store. Of course, some people have made fortunes with very inexpensive products, but it takes more volume than a beginner could likely manage.

A good starting point for niche research is to simply make a list of your hobbies, interests, areas of knowledge and needs. The more you know about a particular subject when you open the store, the easier it will be for you to source products people would want to buy and to find the right marketing channels to reach your core audience.

Once you have a list of at least 10-20 topics, you can begin to research them in earnest. You want to find out how many people might be interested in each potential niche, how many products are available that you could sell, and how much of a profit margin would be possible.

There are many different ways to do this, but one of the most popular ways is to check Amazon. Start by searching for individual products you might buy in a particular niche. For example, if you want to research the golf niche, search for things like golf clubs and golf balls and find out the bestseller rank for each product. This will give you a general idea of how well each product sells.

You want to be able to find at least a few products selling well enough to be in the top 10,000 in their main category, and being in the top 1,000 would be even better.

Here is an example from a live Amazon listing for a particular brand of gold balls: