How to Choose Products and a Niche for Your Shopify Store or on eBay and Dropshipping

Wondering how to choose products and a niche for your Spotify store? What should you sell and what products and items will get you sales in a crowded marketplace? And what products can you sell by dropshipping?

Below you can find some tips on how to evaluate and choose the best products for selling on Shopify, on your own store.

1. Combining Your Interests and What Can Make Money

Passion and Niche

If you have read our recent post on how to market your Shopify shop for free, you will appreciate that a great way to build traffic to your Shopify store is via content creation.

In other words, you will want to ensure that whatever you are selling, you have at least some level of interest and passion in it, because marketing it otherwise will become a huge bore and you will soon lose interest.

So start thinking about what hobbies and interests you have and ask yourself, what could you enjoy spending time writing about and researching?

If you have absolutely no interest in yoga for example, are you really likely to succeed selling yoga equipment?

Maybe, but it is far easier to be excited every day selling something that relates to your own interests.

Earning Potential

Even with a list of your hobbies, and passions, it is not good to set up a Shopify store based on those interests alone, if they are not likely to make money!

As shown in the diagram above, the sweet spot is where your interests also combine with a niche and products that can make you a decent income.

So what products can potentially offer good earning potential?

2. Earning Potential and What Niches Help to Drive Shopify Sales

To get started, I would recommend considering the following:

Hobby Products

One thing that people tend to spend a high proportion of money on is hobby-related products.

When someone has a hobby, be it cycling, model railways, surfing, photography, or gardening, people tend to be willing to spend to buy specific products that relate to their hobby.

A cyclist might want a specific type of high-end bike, a photographer might desire a specific model of camera, a surfer wants a specific make and model of a surfboard.

When it comes to hobby-related purchases, people are often willing to spend what they need to in order to buy a specific product that they want.

So picking products to sell that match a specific hobby can offer you great potential in terms of sales.

Repeat Business Products

Selling items that are likely to attract repeat orders is certainly a way to build a profitable Shopify business.

Keep customers happy and get repeat orders and you save on the marketing costs of trying to attract new customers all of the time.

Think about what products people need to buy often.

Good Earners Can Also Be

• Business products, as you can get large orders, e.g. business cards
• Items priced in the USD$40 to $200 (about £30 to £170) = price range, especially as items in this range tend to be fairly straigh-forward to ship and can produce enough profit to make the effort worthwhile.
• Items with a minimum advertise pricing, meaning products that competitors do not sell at rock bottom prices. This would take away your proft margin.
• Products that provide many ways for them to be marketed. If there are multiple ways to promote a product then it is more sellable.
• Think also about what add-on accessories can be attached to this product for upselling?
• Consider also selling a product that is hard to find locally, hence the customer will look to buy it online, such as via your Shopify store!
• Smaller is also often better. It means that a product is easier and cheaper to ship.

3. Brainstorming and Researching Products and Items to Sell on Shopify

There are some excellent resources online that you can use for free online to research trends and what products are worth considering.

i) Google Trends

One of the first tools I like to use for researching product ideas is Google Trends.

Google Trends is totally free and, as one of the main search engines worldwide, they have massive amounts of data and this makes the trends data well worth using.

Let’s imagine that you are in the health and fitness sector. You might type in the word ‘yoga mat’ to see what the trend is for this term.

You will also choose a:

• Location – so you can search by a country or worldwide. Worldwide can be a great option but if you only sell in the U.S. market or only in the UK market, then you might as well select by country.
• Timeframe – Personally I quite like to see the trend over the last 12 months and then over the last 5 years.
• Sector (if you wish) – the results sometimes vary if you select sector but you can try with and without this selected for a particular sector.

With a search of the term ‘yoga mats’ you can see a sharp trend when the Covid virus lockdowns started in 2020, as people considered fitness at home.

This trend though through 2021 tapered off.

Once you start entering terms, you will begin to see certain items that have been trending in the last one or two years.

One such item, as you can see in the graphic below, is a trend for ‘ergonomic chairs’.

As workplace wellness and wellbeing have come into people’s consciousness more, the sales of ergonomic chairs have increased.

This certainly looks like a product worth further investigation if you are interested in dropshipping workplace and office equipment.

ii) Using Google Auto Suggest

Another totally free way to do product analysis is to use Google Auto-Suggest.

If you are wondering what auto-suggest is, it is simply the automatic suggestions that you will see as soon as you begin typing a term into a Google search.

As you can see in the image below, for example, as I began to type in the word ergonomic, as soon as I had typed in ‘ergon’, Google began to list suggested terms that I might want to search by.

These terms that Google suggests are based on the masses of data that they have from the millions of searches that take place on Google search every day.

You might want to take one of the auto-suggestions then drill down even deeper by typing that term into Google and seeing what further auto-suggestions Google gives you.

This is a brilliant way to find product ideas in your niche, that you might otherwise have not considered.

ii) Answer the Public

Another option is Answerthepublic.com and even though you can only do a couple of searches a day for free, they provide some fantastic graphics and word diagrams based on your keywords.

On searching for the term ergonomic it gives suggestions that I would never have considered before, that might be possible products for selling on Shopify, including:

• ergonomic backpack
• ergonomic bike grips
• ergonomic foot rest
• ergonomic ironing board
• ergonomic pillow
• ergonomic rocking chair

You might have to spend a little time on the research but answerthepublic.com is definitely worth including in your analysis for products to sell on Spotify.

iv) Look on Online Stores

Another free and easy option for finding great products to sell on Shopify or eBay is to search online stores.

You might, for example, want to check the ‘New and Interesting Finds‘ section on Amazon. This section offers an insight that provides some great product ideas.

Likewise, you might want to also look at eBay and their ‘Trending‘ products.

The equivalent on Alibaba is to look at the ‘What’s new’ page here and on their page for ‘Next Seasons Products‘.

v) Pinterest Searches

Pinterest is a search engine and is an excellent free and easy way to check for product ideas.

You might have read my previous post on doing keyword research where I talk you through how to use Pinterest for keyword research.

In Pinterest, to find products to sell on Shopify there are a few things you can do:

• Start typing in terms and use the Pinterest auto-suggest to see what terms they recommend based on their search data (much like Google auto suggest)
• Pinterest is predominantly an image search engine so enter a term of a product or product area you are interested in, and then crawl through the images they show, as you will get some great product ideas.

If I type in ‘fashion bags’, you will see a visual representation that gives you product ideas.

4. Oberlo

Oberlo is a platform designed by Shopify that connects you as the seller with Dropshippers.

So it is worth signing up for Oberlo and then seeing what products can be very easily and automatically added directly to your Shopify store.

One tip also on Oberlo is to try and find a supplier that offers ePackage shipping.