You just opened a store, but you don’t know how to get things going? Choosing between a winning product and a niche can be confusing. Read on to find out which one is better for your business.
On our blog, you can read a lot of articles about how to start a Shopify store, how to do marketing right, how to find your niche, and so on. Well, here’s another article that will teach you about online stores and help you get started with e-commerce.
It’s not as easy as Gurus and other Shopify entrepreneurs say to sell things online and quit your 9-to-5 job. It won’t happen overnight that you make six figures. To steal customers from your competitors (not literally, of course…), you have to be persistent, come up with new ideas, and be ahead of them. But what do you do? First, you need a theme or market for your online store. This will make it easier to run and market. But there are two ways of doing things that seem to be at odds with each other today: having a winning product or a great niche. Both have many problems and, of course, many good points. Let’s look at why one is better than the other so you can decide which one is best for you.
A great product
What, exactly, makes a product a winner? Is it something that just came out? Is it something new and different? No, not always. The best products are the ones that help customers solve a problem. These are things that the buyer can use to make a problem, illness, pain, discomfort, a situation, an object, or a feeling better, less painful, easier to deal with, end, heal, improve, or upgrade. No matter how long this item has been on the market or how big or small it is, it doesn’t matter. The most important thing is that your target market shouldn’t be able to buy other or similar products that would affect their lives in the same way. This is the main reason why winning product stores fail if they don’t do proper market research. How would you know if people really do need that thing? How would you know if it really makes the buyer feel the way you want it to? Don’t lose sight of this principle, because it can hurt your business goals.
You should ask more than just your friends and family if they need that item. They already know what your hopes and dreams are. Your mom would certainly buy something from your store. Find out as much as you can. Make a questionnaire, send it around, and then look at the answers. Although you shouldn’t ask about the future. Always ask questions about the past. For example, how many times have you bought a face mask for more than $50? When did you last buy a pair of high-end sandals? How did you feel before you took that tea to help you lose weight? Did you like how it turned out? etc. When people look into the future, they are more likely to be way too hopeful.
What made the winning product strategy work?
Why do online stores use this method to make more money? How can you become a billionaire by selling just one product? Great question, but it looks like this is how many entrepreneurs have been successful. Shopify says that many store owners who sold only one item made millions of dollars. Here, you can read about their lives. Experts at winning product stores say that testing your chosen products is the key to this strategy. Make an ad for the product that will catch people’s attention, run it on Facebook and Instagram, and see how well it sells. If not, you should look for another one. Basically, you keep doing this until you find a product that can make you a lot of money quickly. Once you do, you can build your store and marketing around that one item. That’s all there is to it.
But it’s a fair question to ask: what happens when the items are sold out and out of date? You should have made a lot of money from your last successful product, so your marketing budget should be bigger. You have to start over until the next great market-driven product comes along. Many people make jokes about this topic by posting on social media about products that don’t make sense. However, there are some products that are very creative and could be a good idea for your store:
Niche
Just what is a niche? It’s a gap in the supply of goods or services, even though there’s a big need for a product that can fill the gap. It’s basically a market segment where people need a solution to a problem, but there isn’t one yet or it’s too expensive for them. You should see this as a chance and either find a supplier or make your own products to fill this huge hole in the market. It’s not just one product, like the winning product, but a type of product or service that isn’t available or isn’t well-developed in a certain area and has little competition.
To find and define this opportunity, you need to do a lot of market research, just like you did for the winning product. The people who support the niche strategy say that it is true that finding a niche is harder than finding a winner product, but that you don’t have to change your whole business plan when a new competitor comes along. You don’t have to start over from scratch because all you need is a creative facelift for your marketing campaign.
How do you do well?
Have you heard the latest rumor about drop shipping, which is that it is too crowded and hard to get into? Well, if you go into e-commerce with the goal of making a lot of money quickly and you want to build your store and make your first sales before your Shopify trial ends so you don’t have to pay a subscription fee, buddy, you will have a hard time. You have to put money into your store, take care of it, come up with ideas, and put them into action, just to name a few tasks that don’t just appear out of nowhere. Read our other article to find out how to keep your store from closing because of bad advice from so-called gurus and virtual assistants.
All things considered, we can say that it doesn’t matter which way you go because the amount of money you make doesn’t change. You can vote for the winning product or the niche strategy, but in the end, it all comes down to good marketing. You can’t have a successful store if you don’t tell people about it. You need to be on social media and make useful content for your audience to teach and convince them how your offers can help them. Don’t forget that to succeed, you have to give them something of value. You can also find an article about how to avoid serious marketing mistakes that hurt your store’s profits instead of making it a big hit.
Test, test, test, but that’s not all. Run different campaigns for each product, but make sure to keep track of when and how you changed the settings so you can see positive and negative spikes in your statistics. Stop and decide on the winning product or niche when your return on investment (ROI) is high and people are buying from you.