Newbie needs help!

I have been researching endlessly the past few weeks about what niche to adopt. I know that it's essentially a trial and error game, but I would really appreciate any input! I am open to everything from pens to generators.

You're pretty much right when you say it can be trail and error to develop a niche. Some just happen to stumble across them by mistake and it takes others many, many hours trying, and there is of course absolutely no guarantee of success at all, no matter how much work you put in.

My own personal opinion, and there will be plenty of those that will disagree, but with the popularity of research tools such as Terapeak, and the massive influx of people wanting to get into the market, it makes it almost impossible to maintain a niche market for very long at all.

If you are selling a product that others have the ability to find, they'll be looking for it as soon as their research identifies the under supplied market that all your hard work has discovered, and there goes the niche.

I call it Tow Trucking or Plowing the Field, and there's nothing wrong with that. We're all in business to make money and we should all be using any tool available to us to achieve it!

I look at areas such as hand made products, something very unique as niche type products now, something that you have an inside line on, but not something the other 200,000 can get easy access to.

I've always been a fan of second hand, especially on eBay. You can find all sorts of things are garage sales (yard sales), and pay very little for them, even less if you can talk a good deal, and there you have a chance of having products for sale that others can't, or aren't even interesting in competing with as it requires them to actually leave the PC for a few hours and use their legs.

So many seem to get into this mind set that just because they are selling online, they have to source online, and then they all wonder why it's so hard to find a product to sell with any sort of margin left. If you're a gold fish in a bowl with 10,000 others (it's a very large bowl), and there are only 3000 fish flakes available, then your chances of getting one of those flakes are great!

The good news is we're not gold fish, we even have legs, and sometimes they can be of advantage in this game lol

Hi faroucheinc,

Although fudjj makes some excellent points, it doesn't mean that you can't find profitable products to sell online. It's simply a matter of supply vs. demand, finding products for which there's an excellent amount of demand but not too much supply yet.

And if you're thinking of selling on eBay, believe it or not, there are still MANY products like that on eBay. The first step is to avoid the high-profile categories like electronics, computers, cell phones, video game systems, and cameras. And I would also steer clear of low-price point products like CDs, DVDs, video games, and books. But that still leaves you with 28 main eBay categories left!!

If you do want to sell on eBay, my suggestion would be to visit pulse.ebay.com to research the items on the Most Popular Searches list. The first list that comes up is for the entire eBay site, and these are the products to IGNORE at all costs, since they're already too competitive and overly saturated. But once you start narrowing down the list by category and 2 sub-category levels, you'll start finding some excellent gems that have been overlooked by many other sellers.

The next step is to subscribe to and utilize an eBay market research tool like Terapeak, and research all of the terms you found on the Pulse page. Any of the products that have a high sell-through rate (over 50%) and/or high average selling price (in comparison to your cost) will be the most promising products to sell.

Remember that part of the beauty of eBay is that you can sell anything and everything all at once -- you don't have to limit yourself to one or even two niches. For instance, in the past year, I've sold everything from power tools to CDs, clothing, printer ink, handbags, dog collars, sweeper vacuums, eBay coaching services, and Dora the Explorer TV/DVD combos! And all very successfully, I might add.

THE KEY IS GOOD, THOROUGH RESEARCH. That will tell you everything you need to know.

I hope that helps!!