What are niche products?

Hi Guys!
All sellers are after that niche product that they can sell and get rich from. Salehoo seems to have the members sell only a few variety of items at a time.

What is wrong with selling a wide range of products? Bedding, Airsoft, electronics, kitchenware, apparel,...and on and on.


It works for Walmart. Why not a small reseller?

Thanks.

Dale

P.S. I am looking at a dropship format.

It's an excellent point you make Dale, variety and range can be a very effective way of generating sales. The issue you have on a site like eBay is of course listing expense, sellers using a large stock profile would certainly be best to be looking at a shop layout on eBay, and then use select listings to try and drag traffic back into their store.

I tend to think that this large stock profile strategy is the best option these days, the more rods in the water, the more chances there are of catching a fish or two. Anyone considering it should of course stick to the usual, make sure you're still competitive on all the products and make sure you're aware of the listing expense you are bound by, those for me are the two most important factors when considering a large scale marketing strategy.

This kind of feeds back into the idea of using an eBay as little more than a sales funnel for your own site. You can fill your own site to the rim with stock at no extra expense of course, then use eBay type sites to do some of your marketing, listing very popular items you have at killer prices.

Develop an email list, a newsletter, things of that nature that keep you in contact with a customer, then you can drive them to your own site. I think that's the real value is eBay these days, not so much a great platform for making money, but there is no better marketing tool available!

There is nothing wrong in selling various types of products all at once but niche items are a whole different thing, it is always a good idea to focus on a niche and let it grow. You will need to start with one particular niche and market it til you reach your target or you could cross market various related products. For example your main niche is women's clothing, you could offer - dresses, pants, shirts/blouses, bags and accessories. Although you are selling various items your store still has that niche focused feel to it :)

Hope this helps!

Hi

I agree with that strategy of offering many different types of products, look at the biggest sellers on Ebay and that is what they do, this works in online stores and has been a strategy of brick and mortar stores for many years, some items may be offered at minimal profit margins with the hope the purchaser will also buy other products at greater profit margins at the same time. I myself sell mainly electronics from my Ebay store but also have other products such as pet, garden, kitchen, pool ect products as well, as pointed out a buyer may look at a particular item in your store then see product x which they did not know that they wanted one until they saw it. in your store

Hi, I am new to Salehoo and selling online and I am in the process of deciding what to sell. This discussion is perfect timing. I have not found one item, but four items/family of items that I would like to sell. However, they're completely different, so I'm struggling with how do you sell/market that. Do I have to have four different stores? I'm afraid if I bunch them together it'll look junky.

Once one gets past the selling limits eBay and Paypal have in place, volume is definitely a way to go.

Don't forget about loss leaders and niche products to drive traffic and a well set up add on page.

I think on eBay and other marketplaces, it's OK to sell a range of items. However, if you want to sell on your own website (which I believe is what most sellers should work there way up to doing if they are serious about building a long term business), you should focus on a particular product market.

There are a couple of reasons for this but the main one is search engine optimization. If you sell everything, how will people find you? No one is going to run a Google search for "Bob's Emporium of Everything You Want!" or even something more generic like "one stop shop".

However, if you sell a specific range of items such as children's sportswear, you'll get more traffic from the search engines.

In general, I'm a huge believer in branding and I think a good brand sells products and allows the brand owner to charge more for those products too. It's hugely difficult to create a brand that represents a range of products (yes, WalMart do it, but let's not pretend we have the capacity to compete with WalMart!).

However, again, if you have a specific product range, you can build a brand and a following for those products.

If you do want to sell a range of products because you know they all sell well, you could always create different websites or eBay stores for each of these markets.

I've got a new niches under my belt but I would never merge them all together because it would look totally unprofessional if I did.

I hope this helps :)