+ RSSHow to do Market Research for an E-commerce Website
Market research is the most important step in starting your business and has several steps in itself. There are a TON of ways to go about doing market research so I'll just go through a quick process using some free tools. This will help determine whether or not people are buying and if there's enough room (competition wise) for you to make some money in the next month of two.
Dont underestimate the importance of market research. If you do and skip on by then you can say goodbye to having any amount of control over your sales and future profits.
Here are my 3 steps for revealing profitable niches to set up an online business in.
1. Get a supplier in a Niche of your interest 2. Find Keywords 3. Research your competition
Find a supplier in your niche
A niche is like a subcategory of a larger topic. Take Computers for example. Computers is a huge topic that will have tons of competition and large authoritative websites. We're not trying to become a computer superstore. It would be very hard to be profitable or to even find a supplier for a new business that would be trying to sell everything computers. So instead we dive deeper. What are some sub categories of computers?
To find a supplier I use Wholesalecentral.com. On the front page they give you a lot of different categories to choose from so It's very easy to navigate and find what you're looking for. Go ahead and choose one you're interested in and start narrowing down to a small, focuses niche. Once you've decided on a niche we'll start using the the Keyword selector tool.
www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html
I found a company that supplies scrapbooking supplies. my next step is to do some keyword research in that niche to see if its going to be profitable or not and if theres little enough competition for me to jump in the game. We're looking for 1000-100,000 searches per month for our initial keyword.
It looks like the number of searches for scrapbooking is roughly 16,000 per month which is great. That means 16,000 unique people are actively looking for things related to scrapbooking. However after typing scrapbooking into Google's search engine it shows that there are 36,000,000 competing pages which way too high for us. were looking for 5 million or less. The keyword tool gave me a few more suggestions though, one of which is scrapbooking ideas. Scrapbooking ideas has 1040 searches per month so lets go see how many competing pages that phrase has.
It shows 455,000 competing pages which is well below the 5 million page upper limit. Perfect! Now I have a niche that I can flesh out that has good potential for ranking well in the search engines and getting some sales soon.
Be sure to remember the parameters: 1000 - 100,000 searches per month and less than 5 million competing pages.
Now its your turn. Find 5-10 niches that fit within those parameters and start contacting the suppliers to discuss drop shipping options. Good Luck!
