Once you have decided to start an online store, the hardest part comes when you have to figure out the best eCommerce products to sell.

What is the best niche that you can go into, that people will actually take out their credit card and immediately buy your product?

In the past year since I started my own eCommerce store and taking courses to learn all about ecom, I realised that the wrong way to do it is to sit down and brainstorm endlessly about the winning product.

The right way however was to sell a product that was already selling. In other words, never reinvent the wheel. This is one of the lessons that I wrote about in my recent article 10 Marketing Lessons I Learnt In My First Year Of Affiliate Marketing.

You see someone has already done the research for you. Someone has already tested the product and have proven that it sells.

So when you have those three criteria – the product is researched, the product is tested and the product is proven to sell – it becomes easy for you as the observer to simply source the same product, set up your own website and begin marketing the product.

So where do you actually go to find these proven products? Keep reading.

What You Will Learn

• How to choose your niche
• How to use Amazon to find winning products
• How to use Ebay to find winning products
• How to use Google to find winning products
• How to use Facebook to find winning products
• Where to source your products
• How To Choose Your Niche

The mistake that eCom store beginners make when starting an online store, is they become passionate about one product, build a store around that idea then start marketing it.

What happens next is they find out that the market is not receptive of their idea. No one buys their product so essentially they wasted a lot of time setting up a store that is not responding well.

With any business idea, it is a pitfall to allow your personal perception and preference to influence your decision.

Just like with blogging, it is a bad idea to blog about yourself, your dog or your cat. No one really cares about that.

Rather you should blog about things that your audience wants to read.

The same goes for eCommerce. You should sell things that people want to buy and you can do that by looking at the data and letting the data guide you to help you understand what your audience wants.

My advice therefore is to stop thinking about a specific niche for a moment. Find four to eight great products and split test them all. Then use the data that you get from your test and focus on selling that one product or several products that go well with your winner. That is how you create a niche store.

The thing about marketing a product, is that you never know how it is going to perform. So rather than spending all your resources on one idea in the beginning, take the time to work with many different ideas, then simply run with the one that has started making you money.

This is the exact formula that I used to create a successful Shopify store in one month where I was able to generate over $7000 in sales.

So in summary, when doing eCommerce, start with a general store selling just about anything, then once you have a product that is selling well, niche down the store and start selling products around that one thing.

How To Use Amazon To Find Winning Products

Why start with Amazon?

Well it is becoming a household name and most people go there to buy just about anything that they want, that they cannot get in your traditional brick and mortar stores.

To start understanding a product’s selling potential, there are two things that I would look at. The customer reviews and the best selling rank.

Starting with the best selling rank, Amazon gives you several products in different niches that you can work with.

Looking at the pet niche I see that one of the best selling products is a training pad. When I look closely at the product I see that it is the number one selling product in pet supplies compared to other products.

Amazon’s best selling rank is an indication of the number of units sold compared to other products in a given time frame.

Therefore using this data you can find a list of products that are in a high demand and popularity. Next to the BSR you will also see the top 100 list. Browse that list for other ideas.

If you go back to the Best Sellers home page and look to the left, Amazon gives you a list of sub categories which breaks down your main niche into sub niches.

So in this case the pet niche is broken down into different animals. This tells me that people interested in pets are interested in things primarily for their dogs, cats, fishes, birds, horses, etc.

Maybe you might want to get a few products from each sub niche and test each product against each other.

Let’s go a little further. If you click on each sub category, you get other sub sub categories.

Going through the list and repeating the steps outlined above to identify the best sellers, you can get an idea for those products that are popular and selling well by looking at the BSR and customer reviews.

How To Use Ebay To Find Winning Products

If people are not buying products on Amazon, they’re getting it on Ebay.

The internet also has tools that you can use to determine whether a product you want to sell, is popular on this platform.

Chances are, if you have used Amazon and have established that there is demand there and the same product is in demand on Ebay, then you can set up your own online store and sell the product easily.

What this does is eliminate the seller fees associated with Amazon and Ebay.

To find popular products, I like using a website called Watch Count. Watch Count tells me the most popular items on Ebay by the number of watchers in real time.

Using the same example above, I typed in dog training pad and found that on average there were 494 watchers of this product.

This suggests to me that the product is in good demand.

If we go directly to Ebay and search for the same product you can see the past sales of the product. Sales in the tens or hundreds are good, but if you get a product in the thousands or tens of thousands it is even better.

Let’s take a closer look at the product on Ebay.

When I click on the product with the highest number sold, there is a bit more data that Ebay gives to me. I can see how many were sold in an hour. The higher the number the better.

It would be even better if Ebay reported on the number of items sold per day to get an idea of how popular it was on a day by day basis.

Once you have found a potential product that you feel will have a high selling success you don’t want to stop there.

Look at the seller’s other products for more ideas in the same niche.

Are there products with high sales and watch counts? Repeat the above process if you find a product that interests you.

Make sure to carefully scrutinise the product by watching for how many are watched or sold in the last hour or day if the data is there.

If there is no data then it is likely that the products are not best sellers on Ebay so you can move on to the next.

How To Use Google To Find Winning Products 

Sometimes people prefer to use search engines to shop outside of Amazon and Ebay and this is where you can find out whether there is a lot of demand using Google.

You can find this data using the Google Keyword Planner tool and also Google Trends.

Both give you an indication of whether people in high numbers are searching for your product idea, what they are searching for and whether there is high or low competition in the marketplace.

If you have a stellar idea but the data says that no one is really searching for it, then that is not a good idea.

Which is why it is always a good thing to spend some time using this research process to find ideas that are likely to work.

To start you will need the Google Keyword Planner tool. I am interested in finding data on the product idea dog training pad so I type that into the field that says Your Product Or Service.

Based on Google data the product dog training pads got 1000 to ten thousand searches. This tells me that it is a highly searched for item but the competition rate indicates that the keyword dog training pads is highly competitive amongst marketers.

Google Trends also tells me whether this item is of a high interest over a period of time.

How To Use Facebook To Find Winning Products

Conducting Facebook research has always been my go-to way of finding products that people are interested in on Facebook.

Especially since I use Facebook Ads predominantly for eCommerce traffic, it is a good idea to go directly to this platform to see exactly what the marketplace has to say about any particular niche idea or product idea.

What you will be looking for is the number of shares, likes and comments that any product received.

When doing research with this platform, the keywords that you use is related to the words that most sellers use when advertising on Facebook. For example:

Niche/product + grab yours here

Niche/product + free shipping

Niche/product + get yours here

Niche/product + order yours here

Niche/product + order now

Using the above and the product keyword dog training pad I will look for any post that has a high engagement, preferably in the thousands.

So far I have found nothing so I will assume that no marketer has tested this product. That’s not to say that it wouldn’t sell well but I do not want to be the first to try. I prefer to find a product that already works so I know that it has been tried and tested.

Let’s try searching for the dog niche and see what we come up with.

One search gives me a few ideas to work with. It’s not a dog training pad but it would appear that the audience on this platform like playful items like this one.

Or practical items like this one. To help me understand the popularity I look at the engagement.

Before deciding on an idea that has gained a lot of engagement, it is a good idea to take it further and see what kind of engagement the product gets.

Some product ideas may have a high engagement but negative remarks. Others may have high engagement but positive remarks. You want to stick to those that have more positive than negative remarks.

Where To Source Your Products

Once you have decided on the product that you want to test and sell, you now need to find out where to source your product.

There are many suppliers that can probably provide your desired product to you but there are a few things that you need to consider:

Do you want a local or international supplier? This is important when import factors are considered. With international suppliers there is the issue of importing and paying import duties. Of course you can factor this into your price but you must also consider how much the customer is prepared to pay and whether your item is of a high perceived value to mark it up to account for the expenses you have made.

Do you want inexpensive products or are you willing to spend a bit more? To source inexpensive products the best avenue is relying on international providers from countries like China or the Phillipines. If you are sourcing products from the US be prepared to spend a little bit more which may in turn affect the profit margins that you can generate.

Do you want to hold inventory or drop ship? A lot of suppliers both internationally and locally do offer drop shipping services. You need to decide which Ecommerce model you will use and whether the supplier accepts drop shipping, has terms and conditions associated with drop shipping or do not offer it at all.

To find products for your online store you can use online directories like Alibaba or Aliexpress which is a Chinese Wholesale marketplace.

You can also attend wholesale tradeshows which is more personal since you get to meet wholesalers in person and examine their stock.

If you prefer to skip attending these fairs feel free to download my wholesaler’s list where I have compiled over twenty different wholesalers in different niches that you can research and contact.

Whatever method you use be sure to research the vendor as much as possible to avoid any deception especially with online vendors.

Wrapping Up

Before you put pen to paper and embark on creating an online store or buying a web domain, before you even spend a dime, I urge you to spend a day or two doing as much research as possible into the type of products that would sell well.

Take some time reaching out to vendors once you have an idea of what product you would like to sell.

Even before you sign any supplier contract or order in bulk be sure to set up a trial store and test whether your products will sell.

This is important to avoid wasting any money, time and getting frustrated in the process.

If you are really considering starting your own online store, be sure to check out the following related articles to help you get started and be on the right track.

Related Articles:

• The Ultimate Ecommerce Startup Guide
• The 8 Best Ecommerce Training Courses 
• How To Increase Conversions In Your Ecommerce Store 
• 4 Proven Ways To Increase Traffic To Your Online Store 

Cheers