How to Find Products to Sell Online

15 min read

The retail world has witnessed a dramatic rise in bankruptcy over the years. The COVID-19 pandemic compounded the situation further. But this pattern has an upside: a steady shift to ecommerce. More traditional retailers have been forced to move online due to lower startup costs and more flexibility. On the other hand, this means that the search landscape is getting more competitive by the day.

The result? It is becoming increasingly difficult to start a business online. Except, of course, you know your way around! This article is all about how to find products to sell online to optimize your chances of selling successfully. Amid the tremendous consumers’ expectation of quick shipping and immediate gratification and the oversaturation of many product markets with a wide variety of options- how can you penetrate and thrive regardless?

Your ability to choose the right product, and choose the product right will impact everything about your ecommerce business whether it is logos, branding, web design, order fulfillment, and even the unboxing experience.

How You Can Sell Products Online

If we tried to think of a good idea, we wouldn’t have been able to think of a good idea. You just have to find a solution for a problem in your own life. Brian Chesky, Co-founder of Airbnb

One proven way to achieve success in ecommerce is to begin the right product. These days, it is easy to find the perfect platform to conduct ecommerce transactions, and this is where Ecwid comes in with its amazingly customizable ecommerce solutions to help you foster great success in the online selling game.

It is, however, equally important that your product is capable of solving a particular problem for your target audience. In other words, it has to be unique, within a specific niche, satisfy a desire, and have a remarkable branding potential.

Currently, the online landscape reflects fierce competition, saturated product markets, and demand for convenience by consumers more than ever. Thus, before anything, and even aside from the design of an online store which you relish so much, choosing the products to sell comes first. Meanwhile, the decision of the product to sell online is in itself a strategy. This is because the product you choose to sell will have an impact on other business decisions including brand name, marketing, website design, shipping and fulfillment, and loyalty programs, among others.

Each of these components is requisite to an online strategy, but they do not matter too much without a fascinatingly great product.

What Products Can You Sell Online?

Irrespective of the industry you are in, you can sell only two types of products online, vis-a-vis, commoditized products and niche products.

Commoditized products refer to essential, popular, and high-demand goods or services. They could be physical or digital. They are products everybody needs. It might interest you to know that these products constitute the majority of online sales, and you can think of them in the line of anything you can buy at Amazon or Walmart with a big, popular brand behind it.

Niche products, on the other hand, refer to goods or services for a specific customer base and within a particular product category. Oftentimes, niche products are unique, handmade, and one-of-a-kind, which makes them some of the most sought-after items on the online landscape. They are made in small batch runs according to customers’ demand.

Meanwhile, there is no crime in combining commoditized products and niche products for an increased profit margin. If you decide to offer only commoditized items, particularly those popular ones sold on the likes of Amazon and Walmart, it may be difficult to break through the market and thrive.

Large online retailers buy in large quantities, which is tantamount to more profitable products. As a startup, you may not be able to compete immediately and this explains why you should offer a combination of the two to your customers including an offer of on-brand experience to ensure that you achieve success with your online shop.

List of products you can sell online

According to Shopify, some of the trending products you can consider selling online are:

Toys
Cutters
Bras
GPS navigation systems
Office chairs
Motor vehicle parts
Projector
Shoes
Decorative bottles
Drills
Pens and pencils
Kitchen towels
Tablet computers, and others

How To Find Products To Sell Online

Step 1: Carry out market research

The first thing you want to do is to narrow down your choices. How do you do that? Choose an industry and identify the products you wish to sell. Your interest could be in technology, food, health, fashion, and fitness. Whatever it is, there are always products for you to sell in any industry.

You can determine the specific product and be certain of the problem you intend to solve. Now that you have the problem and the product, begin your market research. To do that, use platforms like Google, social media channels, and Quora to gather the necessary resources. When you dig a little and realize your product is a perfect fit for the consumers, dig deeper by sending an online survey to your potential customers.

The purpose of doing that is to learn the nature of solutions they seek and understand their personas much better. You can then take it a step further by asking some respondents to have a profound understanding through their answers.

Even if you get negative responses, keep at it as this could help you articulate the thing you want and consequently inspire an entirely new product line.

Recognize a pain point or problem about the market

Most niche products can resolve a problem or challenge facing most potential customers. Having that at the forefront helps you to identify the real consumers. One excellent way to recognize a problem is to take feedback from consumers via social media platforms.

You want to ensure you have a consistent customer base that is commensurate to the value offered by your niche. You can also make use of some up-skilled tools to identify a lucrative niche. These tools are easy to use and are suitable for making realistic projections.

One of the most effective ways to develop a product wanted by people is to make sure it can solve a pain point. There is a wide range of names in the market to solve a pain point.

Through interviews and other means, you can determine the frustration of your customers. You will also be able to expand or adjust accordingly. The idea of knowing their common frustrations is to help you figure out the next line of action.

Know how to use keyword tools perfectly

A search engine is a smart tool. Adorned to produce creative algorithms that match search queries through analysis using well-used key phrases to yield the appropriate results, these keyword tools are distinctive and can be very helpful in coming up with the right niche.

Google Trends, for example, can show the interest of your customers harvested through a particular keyword over time. You are probably wondering how this works! To compete on the fierce ecommerce battleground, you must show that you have immense prowess by relating with data-driven insights.

And that’s what you get with Google Trends, as it helps you identify niche products with less competition.

Step 2: Explore innovative/novel inspirations

You now have a few product strategies at your disposal. By constantly seeking new and innovative inspirations, you can be sure not to go wrong with the perfect product for your ecommerce store. You have to continue exploring what you have a passion for and see if they are in demand by customers online.

Brainstorm ideas

When brainstorming ideas, you also have to consider and reflect on the problems in your life as the seller. And the interesting part is that the product or service does not have to be huge, expensive, or complicated. There are many ideas that you can simplify and yet they are exceptionally effective.

Also, product opportunities can exist in many other areas including a new market unexplored by your competitors, improved product features, and unique product marketing. Consistently digging to identify ideas will help you discover how a product or service can be of value to your customers.

Involve passion

Moreover, there is no substitute for passion in this case. Passionate seems like a buzzword, but it exudes tremendous value. Bear in mind that starting a business goes beyond the glitz and glam show in the movies. In reality, it takes long hours of work, some rocky terrain, and an amount of sacrifice.

Nevertheless, passion will help you go through the hard times. It will also enhance your ability to craft a brand message that relays to people in a meaningful, engaging, and unique way.

Step 3: Search for products with incredible branding potential

The next thing is to create a rock-solid brand message to take your stand in the ecommerce space. By creating an identifiable brand with long-lasting memory, you must put in the research time and have understood your target audience to a large extent.

In your efforts to build loyalty on the identity of your target audience, you want to answer questions like how your target audience prefers to be addressed, your approach to positioning your product, and how you will design your website such that it will communicate your brand and appeal to your prospective customers.

Your ability to leverage your product to create purpose and a ready-to-buy community is a vital element of your online store’s growth. In other words, if there are no products and brands your customers can identify with or relate to, you will be running the business on an empty tank.

Step 4: Search for products capable of fulfilling guilty pleasures

Although this sounds a bit trickish, it works. Here, the passion comes into play again. A product is “successful” if it caters to the customer’s vices or passions.

Shoppers are likely to spend more money on their vices (or guilty pleasures) and develop profound loyalty to brands that know how to meet their obsessions.

Make sure the products are the type that can offer a real treat. Consequently, customers can feel great about their indulgence all the time.

Your product has to represent in that sense, regardless of whether it is a small luxury or a high-end type. A niche product that can satisfy your customer’s guilty pleasures culminates in an excellent branding potential.

Step 5: Identify business opportunities everywhere

There are business opportunities everywhere. Your duty as an entrepreneur is to push your imagination. Do your part as a citizen of the global space and pay attention to society’s behaviors. Find out if there are norms you have to break and opportunities that can improve the lives of your fellow humans.

Also, you can consider if the products are capable of gaining impressively quick acquisition, among other things. The bottom line is that one of the prerequisites of success is to keep up to date with the things going on in the world to identify where the online business opportunities reside.

Final Thoughts

One of the biggest challenges you can have as an aspiring entrepreneur is finding products to sell online. Of course, you want such products to be trending and profitable. You also want it to be within a niche in a market capable of meeting the audience’s desire.

We have covered the entirety of everything you need to know concerning selling products online and how you can achieve success. It is time to launch into the deep and leverage the vast number of golden opportunities embedded in the ecommerce world.

With this guide, you have the most profitable and practical ways to identify the kind of products you can sell in your online store. Even more interesting is that you are not alone in this journey, as you have the full support of Ecwid in the way you conduct your ecommerce businesses and solutions.

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Sep 14, 2021

About the author

Max has been working in the ecommerce industry for the last six years helping brands to establish and level-up content marketing and SEO. Despite that, he has experience with entrepreneurship. He is a fiction writer in his free time.