How to Validate Your Niche for High Ticket Dropshipping Success

Hey guys, Trevor here with eCommerce Paradise, and today I want to talk to you about how to validate your niche for high ticket dropshipping, make sure it's going to work, and make sure that it's going to be profitable. If you're first time watching one of my videos, definitely get my free niches list and mini course at ecommerceparadise.com slash niches. Alright, so when it comes to niche research and niche validation, what I usually say is number one, it's got to be profitable.

So you got to look at three main things. First is competition. So you got to make sure there's some competitors out there already selling and doing it in the way that it's profitable these days. So what I usually start with, I search online. I try to find stores that are selling those products that are niche stores. By niche, what I mean is that they have the target keyword in the domain name or something similar to it.

But it can't be a broad store. It can't be a big box store. It's got to be a niche online store. Second thing I look at is if that niche store has a physical presence or not. If they do have a physical presence, then some of the brands are probably only going to sell to you if you also have a physical presence. So keep that in mind. It's better probably to start by finding online niche competitors that do not have a physical presence or online only.

It's easy to find that. Just go to the website. Usually in the footer, they'll say if they have a showroom or something like that.

If they don't, go to the About Us page or contact page, find their address, search it on Google and see if it's like a house or maybe a virtual address or something like that. And if that's the case, then you can extract all the brands that they're selling on the website, the names of the brands, because those are going to be your potential future suppliers.

And that's the second point I want to get to. Supply. There's got to be enough supply to make a niche high-ticket dropshipping store profitable enough for a full-time income. And usually full-time income is $5,000 to $10,000 a month. So you're looking hopefully $50,000 to $100,000 in sales per month. And in order to get there, usually the conversion rate is 0.5% to 1% on these stores. So you're going to have to at least get 100 to 200 clicks a day from the ad

spend and all that. And so there's got to be enough traffic, enough different suppliers and products to drive that much traffic so that you can get those amounts of sales, okay? And what I usually look at is at least 20 to 30 suppliers.

So if I find a niche store, it's only got like five suppliers on it, it's probably not big enough for a full-time income. Now, if I want to have multiple stores and I have a store with a couple of suppliers, maybe I can just decide that I want that to be a side store and really kill it with that niche. And maybe even start my own brand, that kind of thing. That works, especially if you find a niche where it's potentially something you're very passionate about.

Okay. But I would definitely focus on profit first. And so number one, there's got to be competitors already. Ideally, at least three to five, maybe five to 10 competitors. Not too many. If there's like 30 to 50, maybe more competitors, it's very difficult to compete because a lot of them are going to be driving the prices down. However, that doesn't mean you can't compete. It just means that you're going to have to be used more hard sales tactics to win in that niche.

Like offering really deep discounts, really good follow-up marketing, and really good content, getting lots of reviews from your customers, that kind of thing. It's gonna take more work. The hardest niches to compete in though are just keep this in mind, are niches where they're being sold in big-box stores or on the big-box store websites.

Now it doesn't mean if you find a niche that big-box stores are selling that there aren't, excuse me, suppliers and products that are not on those big-box stores. That's definitely usually the case is that you'll be able to find suppliers and products that are not on the big box stores. So keep that in mind, that's always a possibility. But number one, competitors.

Number two, suppliers. Number three, you want to make sure there's enough demand. And the way you do that, it's pretty simple. You just look at the keyword search volume. So use a tool like KW Finder. I use that tool for doing keyword research, and it's really easy to use. You can get a free trial at ecommerceparadise.com slash KW Finder. And also, you can find the rest of my resources at ecommerceparadise.com slash resources. But KW Finder is a really cool tool, and it's really easy to use.

It'll tell you the monthly search volume of any particular keyword, and the keyword you want to start with is usually the category keyword, specifically the main category. So a main category example, like let's just say treadmills, because I'm walking on one right now, would be a treadmill. And then there'd be different types of treadmills under that, like subcategories, like ellipticals and maybe bigger treadmills, more commercial style and less expensive treadmills, that kind of thing.

So there's all different subcategory treadmills, variant categories. Treadmills, that kind of thing. If you just type the keyword treadmill in Decatur Viewfinder, you'll find a lot of different types of keywords that treadmill is attached to. Those are known as long tail keywords. But for the main category, you want to have at least maybe 50 to 100,000 searches every month in the US or wherever you're just trying to do your business.

If there's not, then you're not going to be able to start a site around just that one main category.

You're going to have to make it a broader site. And usually what I do anyways, is I make mid-niche stores, what I call them. They're kind of like broad sites, but not super broad. They have like maybe three to five categories, main categories, they don't go too much further beyond that though. Because once you try to do that, and then you store, marketing becomes really difficult. Ad account management becomes quite difficult.

And the sweet spot with these stores is like three to five main categories and 20 to 30 suppliers. If you go beyond that, things start to scale, kind of get out of control. OK, so, yeah, definitely look at keyword search volume. Try to make sure that all the categories combined that you have at least 100,000 searches per month. 200,000 is better. 300,000 is better, too. But if you're looking at a category that's like really, really niche, like let's talk about watch winders, for instance.

They're probably not going to add that much search volume. so you've got to add some other things to that. So what are the things that people that have watch winders might be interested in? Well these same types of people might be interested in safes, they might be interested in cigar humidors, they might be interested in other things where they have like a luxury lifestyle and it's at home that kind of stuff. So you can combine multiple categories into one but they've got to be around

the same target customer. That's kind of the main thing. Okay so you wouldn't put like a hot tub on the same website you're selling a watch winder. It doesn't really make sense right? So on big broad stores like Walmart, of course they can do that, but you're not Walmart and you don't have Walmart's budget. So you're probably not going to be able to do what Walmart does. So you've got to start niche. But if you go too specific, you might be holding yourself back a little bit.

So maybe consider the target customer you're reaching out to. Try to find branding that works in the sense of that and then build from there.

However, if it is your first store, I would just recommend selling one main category because there's going to be plenty of suppliers, subcategories, things to work through, especially if you're doing it all on your own. It's going to take a lot less work and you can really focus a lot more if you just start a main category website as your first one.

And then once you've gotten your feet wet, you understand SEO, ad management, email marketing, all this stuff, then you can take the next step and do a mid-niche store and scale a bit more. Don't expect too much from a single category site. I would say 20 to 30,000 up to 50,000 a month is pretty good as far as scalability. But for a mid-niche store, you can scale that quite a bit higher. 100, 200, 300,000 a month or more.

During the pandemic, I had a mid-niche store that had like five to 10 made categories or something like that. Maybe it was like five or six.

But it scaled up to 500,000 a month. Summer of 2021. Had a great exit from that business as well. So I've had a lot of experience with scaling. and I also understand kind of some of the pitfalls of scaling as well. But the main thing is is that your niche is a good niche if it meets these three main things, filters. So again, competition, supply, and demand. So just make sure that it meets those filters and I think you'll be fine and

you can launch your store. You can go and see if you can figure it out. Now if you want a full course that's a broken down for you, over-the-shoulder filming of me actually doing the work and showing my own team how to do it. I made it public and I made it available for you guys for a very affordable price. It's at ecommerceparadise.com slash masterclass called my high ticket dropshipping masterclass. It's where I teach entrepreneurs like you how to build, scale and sell a high

ticket dropshipping business. So go check it out. If you're interested in getting more of the work done for you, I also have a program for you as well. It's called the turnkey done for you service. So go check it out at ecommerceparadise.com slash turnkey, where we actually, my team does all the work for you. We build, we launch your website, and then you just take it over and run it from there. Thanks so much, guys. I hope you enjoyed this video. Make sure you subscribe

and share it with your friends. I'll see you out there in the next one.