Niche Research: How to Find the Most Profitable Niche for Your Online Store

Do you know there are over 12 million eCommerce websites and online stores as of now? The tough bit is that this number is increasing every day as big companies and newbies are exploring this domain. The best way to overcome this growing competition in the online marketplace is by catering to a specific niche.

Therefore, you must start by performing niche research that can easily help your store stand out from the crowd. Here are some expert tips to help you get things running!

Why Develop a Niche for Your Store

Before we learn how to do niche research for your online store, let’s cover some basics. Ideally, a niche can be anything specific that you can cater to your audience’s needs, location, gender, lifestyle, age, spending habits, or any specific market. These are some of the benefits of developing a niche for your eCommerce business.

Identifying Trends

You can easily identify some of the trending and in-demand products in the market. This will drastically reduce your cost in customer acquisition and brand awareness.

Targeting Specific Audience

Let’s be honest – you can’t target millions of people who use the web at once. With niche development, you can specify your audience based on tons of parameters like age, location, requirements, and so on.

Less Competition

Since there is so much competition out there, niche marketing can help you overcome this hurdle. That’s why it is recommended to select a niche that already has less competition in the market.

Can Easily Stand Out

Subsequently, you can come up with a distinctive tone for your online store that is easier to maintain across different platforms. As a result, it will help you stand out from the crowd of millions of other online stores.

How to Identify a Niche: Follow this Checklist

While niche marketing can help you attract a specific set of customers, you need to do some research in advance. Before you try any readily available tools, make sure you follow this checklist for niche research.

Minimal Competition

At first, you need to look for a domain that has minimal or no competition at all. Not only will this give you a first/second-mover advantage, but you can also avoid losing your customers to others.

Market Demand

Apart from having minimum competition, the product should also have high demand in the market. To do niche research on in-demand products, you can readily use tons of analytics tools (like Google Trends).

Vital Solution

Furthermore, the product you are trying to sell should solve an evident problem that your customers face. This will automatically let your product create its unique space in the industry.

High Profits

Also, you need to take care of logistics and other charges while calculating your profit margins. Try to maximize your profit margin so that you can expand your business.

Satisfying

Most importantly, the niche that you are picking should be satisfying to you professionally and personally. I always recommend avoiding a niche that is unethical or not related to your ideas.

How to Perform Niche Research: 6 Proven Tips

Great! After following the above checklist, you can easily have a basic idea about your niche. Here are some of these tried and tested ways to do niche research for identifying profitable products.

Dig up Ideas from Google

Needless to say, Google is one of the best places to do niche research of all kinds. To start with, you can head to Google and enter various keywords that are related to your niche. In this way, you can get to know about the market trends related to the selected domain and check other competitors too.

As you would scroll through various results on Google, you can also check some popular questions that are asked by users. This will let you identify the burning points of your prospective leads, and you can come up with better products to solve their issues.

Search for Ideas on Google Trends

Besides Google Search, you can also take the assistance of Google Trends to know what’s in and what’s not. Ideally, there can be two kinds of niches to focus on – steady and trending.

The results of a study niche remain constant throughout and it can be chosen for long-term marketing plans. On the other hand, trending niches are only popular for a specific duration. For example, Christmas sweaters are only popular during the festive season and have low demands otherwise.

If you want, you can just head to Google Trends and enter keywords to study their popularity over a specific duration. There is also a provision to compare multiple keywords to handpick just the perfect niche for your store.

Perform Keyword Analysis

This has to be one of the best ways to do niche research and obtain some in-depth insights regarding any topic. To do this, you can simply handpick a few relevant keywords related to your domain. Now, you can use any reliable tool like Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, Moz, Keyword Planner, and so on.

All you need to do is visit any reliable keyword analytics tool and enter the keywords of your choice. Most of these tools work the same way and will present the number of search queries posted for the entered keywords. You can also check other related keywords, biding costs, and various parameters that will help you do niche-specific research.

Explore eCommerce Platforms

According to experts, one of the best places to do niche research is by visiting popular eCommerce platforms like Amazon, AliExpress, Etsy, eBay, and so on. While these massive eCommerce platforms can have thousands of brands listed in one place, they also have dedicated sectors and stores.

You can simply browse numerous categories and sub-categories to filter a specific niche of your choices. Furthermore, if you are planning to come up with a dropshipping store, then you can also explore a tool like AliExpress Dropshipping Center. It is a user-friendly online solution that presents dedicated resources to find the right products to sell in dropshipping stores.

Seek Inspiration from Social Media

Needless to say, social media can be one of the best places to do niche research. From the “Store” section on Facebook to Twitter Trends, there are so many places on social media to discover new and trending niches.

You can also explore the social media platform that is commonly used by your target customers. For instance, if your target customers are millennial women, then Pinterest would be an ideal place to do some research. You can also host surveys and polls on these popular platforms to directly hear from your target audience about the products they are interested in.

Competitor Analysis

Lastly, you can also identify a couple of relevant competitors who are already active in your domain. You can do some research to check their star products, marketing strategy, and what makes their customer unhappy. Try to identify the pain points of your competitor’s customers so that you can solve them with better products and services.

There are tons of freely available tools out there (like Similarweb) to help you analyze any online store and check its competitors.

50+ Niche Ideas for Your eCommerce Platform

When it comes to niche research and marketing, the sky is the limit. While the above-listed tips will help you identify a niche, you can also explore the following suggestions.

Do More with Your Online Store with DSers

Finding a niche for your store is only the first step. You can later head to DSers to explore all kinds of products related to your niche and integrate it with your eCommerce platform.

• Easy to use: DSers is the official AliExpress dropshipping solution that you can easily integrate with the platform of your choice (like Shopify, WooCommerce, or Wix).
• Find the right product: On DSers, you can explore thousands of products that are listed by hundreds of suppliers – making it an ideal place to do niche research.
• Supplier Optimizer: If you are running out of time, then just use the supplier optimize features of DSers. This will let you instantly pick the most-suitable supplier for any product.
• Tons of features: DSers offers several advanced features to manage your online store. Some of these options are bulk purchasing, automatic tracking of orders, dynamic pricing, variant mapping, stock management, and so much more.

It’s Your Turn Now!

So, what are you waiting for? After reading this in-depth guide, you can easily get started with niche research. Just make sure you follow the above-mentioned checklist to narrow your ideas first. After that, you can use the shared tools and tips to identify a profitable niche for your online store.

Though, you can also head to DSers to find the right products to sell for your niche, manage your store, and do so much more – all in one place.