How Do You Find The Right Niche In Which To Start An E-Commerce Business?
It is natural when thinking about starting an online e-commerce business to see a website you like the look of and say to yourself "I'd like one like that". The site may be very attractive, well set out with a host of colourful photographs of attractive products for sale. The key questions to ask yourself before you get carried away and ringing up a web designer are as follows. Is there a demand for those products? Is the demand growing? How strong is the competition? What market trends are likely to affect demand? In a word it amounts to research. However few of us are trained market researchers and because of this it is tempting to skip this vital step. Happily you do not have to be competent to a high level in order to undertake some very quick and useful research to gain a clear indication as to whether or not there is sufficient demand for your product.
Firstly take a look at the paid adverts on search engines. What are other businesses advertising in your favoured sector? For example If they are wedding supply companies, what type of products are they actually featuring in their adverts? Look at it from this point of view. If a company is consistently paying for click throughs to their site, there is obviously a demand for that product or group of products. It is also important to find out just how much that advertiser is actually paying each time someone clicks through to their website. You can find this out in a number of ways, but initially by using Google's free AdWords tool. If you go to the reporting and tools section and click on traffic estimator you can start to see how much companies are paying for key words or phrases in your chosen area of interest. This will give you a very good indication of the demand for that type of product.
The next place to look for information is on Amazon. Start by looking at the book section. As an example, if your chosen area is weddings, type that phrase in and see what appears in the searches. How many books have been published on that topic? Where do those books rank in Amazon's league table in terms of popularity? A very important indicator is how many books have been recently published about weddings? If there have been a number of recent publications about weddings or about a topic such as wedding showers which is growing in popularity in both the U.S. And the U.K this may refine your ideas in terms of the type of e-commerce business you should be looking at.
Another very good place to look for indicators as to the popularity of your chosen area is the magazine counters at your local retailer. Launching a magazine requires a lot of investment and you can be assured that the publishing company has spent a lot of time and money researching the viability of the enterprise. If you see a number of new magazines being published for your area of interest that will give you a fairly good indication that there is a good and growing demand.
Using these simple free methods will give you an indication as to whether or not there is a demand for the products you have seen on the beautiful looking website and if not, perhaps it is time to consider an alternative.
Peter Robson has over 30 years experience in business and with his business partner Debbie Crossley runs a company helping people set up and run niched e-commerce businesses. for more information go to http://www.yournichebusiness.co.uk/
Category Article business, ECommerce, Niche, Right, Start, Which
