How To Find The Best Products To Sell Online – The Ultimate Step By Step Guide
More than half the battle of starting a successful online store involves finding the right products to sell online. And as a result, I receive between 4-5 emails per day from readers asking me for niche ideas.
I am sooo ready to start my own online business but I have no idea what to sell. Can you just give me 2 or 3 good niches and I’ll do all the work from there.
Steve, I enjoyed reading your 6 step program and I was wondering if you have some good ideas that you would like to pursue but don’t have the time.
Sure, you might get lucky and come up with a great product idea this way. But if you’re anything like me, creative ideas don’t fall from the sky very often if ever at all.
In fact when I try to think of niches on my own, I often end up wasting my time on common place goods that are way too saturated or brilliant ideas that have zero demand.
Here’s the thing. You can’t take a completely random approach to the niche finding process or else you’ll end up brainstorming FOREVER.
So today, I’m going to teach you a methodical approach to finding the best, most profitable products to sell online.
These are real methods that I use every single day that are based on real life sales data and a specialized set of tools to help me out.
As I show you my process, the important thing to realize is that you can’t let your experiences or personal preferences bias your thinking otherwise you’ll get stuck on a dead end business idea.
In my experience, the best way to break out of a creative funk is by relying on computers and data because they are 100% impartial.
Editor’s Note: The material in this post is just a small fraction of what I teach in myFREE 6 day mini course. If you are interested in starting your own ecommerce business, then sign up below!
Also if you’re curious about what I sell online, you can click here to check out my little online shop.
Product Guidelines
When it comes to selling physical goods online, I always like to start with a certain set of guidelines during the product selection process.
Because selling online is completely different than selling in a brick and mortar store, you want to choose products to sell that are conducive to online purchases and appeal to the typical online buyer.
Here are some of my “must have” product guidelines when choosing what to sell.
- The product should not be fragile and easy to ship – Because we are going to be shipping products through the mail, you can avoid most headaches if you choose a product to sell that won’t break during shipment.
- The product should not take up much physical space – Certain ecommerce business models require carrying inventory so it’s in your best interests to choose something small to sell and preferably an item that fits in a shoebox.
- The product’s inherent value should be ambiguous – For example, I would never sell electronics because there is a set value for your goods that everyone is aware of. On the contrary, keepsakes and informational goods are much harder to place a price tag on.
- The product should be timeless – Once again, I would never sell electronics because they lose value the longer they stay on the shelves
- Avoid seasonal goods – In general, you don’t want to choose products that are only purchased during a specific time of year. For example, I would tend to avoid selling Halloween costumes.
- Sell goods that sell from $15-200 – This is the sweet spot for pricing for online purchases.
The following product guidelines are “nice to have” when choosing what to sell so you might want to ask yourself the following questions…
- Have you chosen a niche with related products you can expand into? – While we primarily sell handkerchiefs in our store, we’ve branded our shop as a linens store so we can easily expand to other markets.
- Do your products lend itself to customers ordering more than one? – When we sell handkerchiefs to a bride, we rarely sell 1. Instead a typical bride will buy at least 4 and sometimes as many as 10.
- Can your products be personalized? – The margins for personalized products are always going to be higher than regular products. So if you can offer customized goods, you can charge more for them.
- Are your products consumable? – What’s nice about consumables is that your repeat customer rate will be high. As a result, your sales will tend to be more stable.
- Does your niche have a fan base? – I like to choose products that have dedicated blogs or fan pages because you have an instant set of customers to market to.
- Do your products lend itself to content creation? – When you own your own shop, search engine optimization will be an excellent source of traffic to your store. As a result, the more content you can put out, the more likely you will rank.
- Do your products have lots of accessories? – Many online stores make most of their margins on the accessories they sell. So it’s in your best interests to offer goods that are conducive to upsells and cross sells.
After you’ve reviewed these guidelines, it’s time to start the brainstorming process!
Below are the tools and platforms I use to find profitable products to sell that meet these criteria.
Brainstorm Products To Sell Using Amazon Sales Data
Amazon is slowly becoming the defacto standard for online shopping in the United States with the greatest ecommerce marketshare of any individual company.
As a result, sales data derived from Amazon is a great representation of overall demand. In fact, more and more people are going straight to Amazon for ALL of their online shopping needs while bypassing Google and smaller online boutiques altogether.
Now at first glance, it’s not obvious that you can derive actual sales numbers from Amazon but I’ll show you how below.
Did you know that every item sold on Amazon is assigned a BSR or best sellers rank?
This number is used by Amazon to rank how well a product is selling compared to others within the same category.
Here’s an example of a BSR rating for silicon baking mats on Amazon.
So what does the BSR tell you about a particular product? Based on the BSR, you can make an educated guess on how many units are sold per day.
Here’s a BSR to sales chart provided by my buddy Greg Mercer if you want to do your own Amazon sales analysis.
Using the silicone baking mat example above, a BSR of 7228 corresponds to about 10 sales per day.
In a nutshell, you can browse Amazon for product ideas and know roughly how well a product is selling by looking at the BSR. And through some persistence and hard work, you can probably find a profitable niche to pursue.
Now using the method above to gauge demand works fine but it’s extremely tediouswhich is why I like to use a tool called Jungle Scout to help with the research.
Jungle Scout greatly speeds up the process by nicely collating all of the products on Amazon into a nice table for consumption. In addition, it can also point out specific products on Amazon that match your criteria.
For example, I can have Jungle Scout return me all products under the Kitchen & Dining category that make at least $5000/month with less than 100 reviews. This is extremely powerful!
Below is a 5 minute video demo on how I use Jungle Scout to do product research. If you want to follow along with the video step by step, then download a free trial of the tool.
Click Here To Try The Jungle Scout Webapp For Free And Follow The Tutorial
0 comments:
Post a Comment