Uncovering Profitable Niches: A Guide to E-commerce Market Research

Hey guys, Trevor here with the e-commerce paradise podcast. Today I want to talk about how to do market research to find niches that are going to work for you.

So let's get into it. So the first way that I do market research is to start with brainstorming. And it's really easy to get niche ideas brainstorming nowadays. All you need is AI. ChatGPT will give you a great list of high ticket products. Just type in there to ChatGPT, hey, give me a list of products over a thousand bucks. And it'll just give you tons of great ideas. and then you can start from there.

So with high-ticket dropshipping, usually the best way for companies to market and the places where people buy is through marketplace portals. So Amazon, all that, marketplaces and stuff like that, yes, people buy from those places. But with expensive products, people are usually looking for specialty retailers because these expensive products oftentimes are very specialized products. They're very unique products.

So when you buy from a general retailer, you're not going to usually get the specialized knowledge that it takes sometimes to operate these products and to use the products. And when you have a problem with it, you're not really going to get any good support either.

So that's why with expensive products, a lot of times people go to the brick and mortar stores, the retail storefronts, to actually buy them because then they get service and support. And with that comes oftentimes in some of these niches where the suppliers will only work with dealers that have physical brick and mortar storefronts, and they're just not going to let dealers sell their products without one just because they need that.

Now, that doesn't go to say that in a certain niche where all the suppliers are going to be like that but there are some times where like only the suppliers do just because they're so specialized so when it comes to niche research you should definitely consider that when it comes to competition it's not always a good thing to have a little only a little bit of competition like people are always looking for low competition niches you

know whether when you're doing market research you only sit one or two competitors or maybe no competitors at all that's a great thing right Not necessarily. It usually means that there's some really hard barrier to get over and if you can actually be successful in that niche. It usually has something to do with specialized knowledge, which will then result in you having a storefront where you provide service or specialized connections

in the industry, that kind of thing. So just keep that in mind. Usually, when you're just getting started out, it's always good to look at niches with plenty of competition. That means it's pretty easy to get into, pretty easy to break into. All right, so the first way to research is actually just go to Google Shopping. Google Shopping is one of the main places that people go to find specialty stores that sell expensive products. So go to Google Shopping and type in a product category idea.

So let's just say espresso machines, coffee machines, coffee makers, that kind of stuff. Espresso machines can range in price between $1,000, $500, $1,000, all the way up to $5,000 or $10,000 for these big coffee shop commercial espresso machines. Home especial machines are usually in like the $500 to $1,500 range. Sometimes more expensive too. And, you know, it's not a bad niche to sell in. You can definitely get supplier accounts and they'll drop ship for you.

There's a few intricacies about these products and they are a bit complicated, especially the specialized ones. So people are definitely looking for specialized retailers for the more expensive ones. For the less expensive ones, of course, they're not so complicated usually. They're very simple. So people can buy them on Amazon and Walmart.

So you'll find a lot more competition, in the lower price tiers of special machines, whereas in the higher price tiers, there's less competition in general because they're more specialized and they require more training to use and all that stuff and service as well.

There's a whole industry of companies that offer service for espresso machines. I was in a skate shop cafe in Tacoma, Washington last summer visiting my friend. And while I was there, he got a call from a service company offering service for his espresso machine. And he said, well, no, no, thank you. I hung up. But he was telling me that they call him like every couple of weeks to offer the service where he doesn't think he probably needs it for like six months.

And we were kind of laughing about that, you know, typical sales stuff. But yeah, that's just one of the things, an interesting thing about that industry. But so the way you go about it is you look up espresso machines and then you try to find niche stores. So try to find specialty stores that specialize in that niche. And the way you identify a niche store is if they have the word espresso machine or coffee or coffee machine in the domain name,

in the branding of the online store. So that's going to be how you can tell it. So look for those types of niche stores first and foremost. Sometimes they get kind of quirky with their names and stuff like that, which is fine too. But when you pull up the stores, you want to identify which ones are Shopify stores and which ones aren't. And it's really easy to do that. If you go to any of the product categories, the URL structure is going to be slash collections slash.

That is the Shopify URL structure of a category page. And then for product pages, it's slash products slash.

So for other types of websites oftentimes the category isn't going to have slash collection slash it's going to say slash whatever the category is and for some types of stores it's not going to be products slash it's going to be product slash things like that or just slash and then the product name so just know you can usually tell the difference between like a Shopify store or a WooCommerce store or a BigCommerce or Volusion store just by the URL structure of it so Shopify is always going

to be collection slash and one of the great ways to extract best-selling products and brands from any Shopify store is just going to the URL of slash collections slash all. And then once you get there, sort it by best-selling. And then you'll see from top to bottom, if it's an older store, which of the products are the best-sellers. And it'll be best-sellers by quantity, not by price amount sold, as far as price goes, but for the quantity of sold.

So sometimes these stores will sell a lot more of these lower-priced products, like accessories or add-ons or something. So you kind of want to look past those, but you can still get a great idea of the top-selling brands. And then that's going to give you a great idea on what brands you should reach out to.

But in general when you find a Shopify store the next step is to go and see if they have some sort of physical retail storefront or not so go to their contact page or the footer of their website it should be pretty clear every online store I've ever seen that has a physical storefront is going to say something about their showroom or visit us here that kind of thing and have a map to their showroom because

they really want to show it off so it's pretty easy to find if they have a physical storefront. And if it's not clear you just take whatever address that you can find of the website, put it into Google and look at Google Maps and then you see what it is. Usually it's going to be like a warehouse.

Well, if it's a warehouse where they don't want customers to come but they stock the products, then on Google Maps you see a sign of their actual brand name on the warehouse, then that's going to tell you that a lot of the brands are probably going to be name brand products and they're probably going to be stocking them and those suppliers might not drop ship for you.

They might only drop ship for stores or they might even have to import to their warehouse before they can reship it, that kind of stuff. But if you see on Google Maps that it's like a UPS mailbox or it's a residential address like an apartment or a house or it's some other kind of virtual office address, then yeah, that's definitely probably going to be a company that is online only. And then all those brands that they have are most likely dropshipping for them.

So you can extract all of those brands. And I have a great tool that you can check out and sign up for it. It's a monthly membership fee. It's a niche research tool where whenever you find one of these Shopify stores, you can easily extract every single vendor that store has. Go check it out. It's at ecommerceparadise.com slash niche research. So when you go to that URL, you'll see the link, the landing page for that niche research tool. You can pay for it, and then you'll get access to it.

And it's going to give you access to every single vendor on that Shopify store, every single collection on that Shopify store, every single blog post on that Shopify store. And then you can download it into a spreadsheet, and you'll have a ton of data instantly. So it's super useful and definitely check that out ecommerceparadise.com slash niche research.

So yeah once you have that list then you're kind of off to the races you have a store that you know you can model after you have a store that has tons of suppliers and the next thing after that though is kind of research further and do deeper niche research you can figure out like whether that store has a ton of history or not just by going into something like the archive archive.org with a wayback machine

and you can see in the past and then also something like SEMrush or an SEO tool of some sort. It can tell you how old the store is, how many links it has, who's linking to that site, that kind of thing, what kind of keywords they're ranking for. There are other niche research tools as well that'll tell you something about that store. I think there's one called Koala Apps that offers a niche market research tool. I forget.

I'll have to look it up again. But yeah, those kinds of things are really useful.

And if you can figure out if a store is older than it then you'll know like for sure like that store's got a ton of sales history this is a great one to model after so you can look at their product pages and get an idea like what are their offers what kind of content do they produce so on and so forth obviously stores that are around longer are going to have a lot more of everything so it's gonna be tough to compete but you can just get ideas and extract and make something really really

good on your own and the first step to competing is by creating a demo store you're going to have to create a website before you can get suppliers. So just keep that in mind. I'm going to make a separate podcast episode right now about demo stores and how to make one. It's really simple and easy, actually. You just want to make yourself look professional and you want to have generic products. That's the main thing.

Professionalism, generic products. And then I would say probably at least more than half of the suppliers on the list will sign up with you right away. And then maybe like a quarter of them will be very difficult to sign up with. And another quarter will be, you have to talk to them for a while and kind of get a back and forth before they'll approve you, okay? There's different tiers of suppliers. There's like super hard to get ones that usually are the best sellers.

There's medium hard to get ones that are medium sellers. And then there's the rest of them that they don't sell as often, but they're easier to get. And sometimes bestsellers are easy to get, but their margins are lower. Or sometimes the highest margin suppliers are really easy to get, but they don't sell that often. There's all sorts of different things you'll encounter in different niches. So just keep that in mind.

But that's really basically the blueprint for getting started with this stuff, is do the research, find a niche that's got plenty of competition, figure out exactly what the best-selling brands are, get an idea of exactly how you should set up your website, get a demo store going on Shopify, and you can do that easily with a Shopify free trial that I have offered and it gives you a dollar per month for the first three months as well.

That's a special offer for eCommerce Paradise community listeners and you can get that at eCommerceParadise.com slash Shopify. So get that going. Get a demo store built, super easy and simple and quick and definitely check that podcast episode for that one. And yeah, and then you can call suppliers and I have a whole thing I'm putting together with the supplier directory, supplier call script and all that.

So hopefully that's ready very soon it'll be at ecommerceparadise.com so you can check that out hopefully it's ready soon and the call script and everything like that is also in my masterclass so you can go just get access to everything right away at ecommerceparadise.com but basically when you call suppliers it's super easy and simple all you have to do is say hey I have this website, growing and expanding I saw some demand for your products customers are asking

about you I want to sell them on my website are you accepting new dealers and they'll say yes or no, you know, and they'll probably ask you some questions, that kind of thing. If they don't answer the phone, you can email them and kind of go back and forth and then go from there. The email is pretty much the same thing. But the idea is when you're reaching out, just keep things simple and focus on building rapport with people, okay?

Just make friends, ask them, you know, about themselves, where they're from and all that stuff. You know, make friends, okay? Be a personable person, don't just be cold. And usually most suppliers will be very friendly. I mean, they're looking for the business and the help too with marketing and ad spend and all that stuff. So don't be afraid to jump in and get your feet wet and have some fun with it.

So yeah, if you have any questions, definitely feel free to reach out to me directly, trevorateecommerceparadise.com. And also, if you're looking for private coaching, you can get an hour of coaching with me for $97. It's at ecommerceparadise.com slash coaching. Thanks for listening, guys, and I'll talk to you in the next episode. Take care.