What Do Men Buy Online? Top Categories + What to Sell

That's the answer most people came for. But if you're reading this to decide what to sell, the ranking is only half the story. The biggest category isn't always the best one to build a store around. So we're going to give you the data first, with real sources, then the part nobody else does: which of these categories are worth your money, which ones quietly eat your margin, and how to tell the difference before you order a single unit. (If you want the other side of the coin, here's what women buy online.)

Quick Answer: What Do Men Buy Online the Most?

Men shop online in a handful of high-volume categories led by clothing and shoes, followed by electronics and entertainment. Strong secondary categories include sports and hobby gear, grooming, and groceries. Then come health and pharmacy products, auto parts, home and garden, and jewelry and accessories.

Here's the part to sit with if you're a seller. Apparel has the most buyers, and it's also the most crowded, highest-return, hardest-to-differentiate category on the list. The easier money is often one tier down: grooming, accessories, hobby gear, and select electronics add-ons. More buyers does not mean more profit. We'll show you which is which.

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The Full Ranking: What Men Buy Online

These figures come from a consumer survey run with research agency Nepa across 17 countries and around 17,200 people. They reflect the share of male shoppers who buy in each category online. The order has held steady across surveys; the exact percentage shifts a little by year and region, so treat the ranking as solid and the decimals as a guide.

Source: Global consumer research, Nepa, 2023. Categories with a heavy "buying for someone else" skew, like children's products, are left off this men's-focused view.

How Sure Are These Numbers? (Why We're Showing Our Work)

Honesty first, because a stat-led page that hides its sources doesn't deserve your trust.

The ranking above is about as settled as ecommerce data gets. Different surveys, different years, same order: clothing leads, electronics and entertainment follow, accessories sit at the bottom. The exact percentages wobble depending on who ran the survey and where. For a second reference point, UK government data (the Office for National Statistics, 2020) found 49% of men bought clothing, shoes, or accessories online, 27% bought computers, phones, or accessories, 23% bought consumer electronics like TVs and cameras, and 22% bought sports goods. A 2017 US survey by Loqate landed on the same headline figure: about 49% of men had bought clothing online. The categories sort the same way no matter who's counting.

One caveat worth more than any decimal point: share of buyers is not the same as profit. A category can have the most shoppers and still be a poor place to start, because demand attracts competition, and competition crushes margin. Keep that in mind for everything below.

Category by Category: What's Worth Selling, and What Isn't

1. Clothing and Shoes

This is where the most male shoppers are, and where the most sellers crash. Men's apparel online means sneakers, plain and printed tees, jeans, workwear, hoodies, jackets, and the occasional dress shoe or suit for a wedding or a job interview. Utility leads, style refines it. And the market is enormous: global apparel passed $1.95 trillion and is on track to top $2 trillion, according to Euromonitor.

The demand is real and it repeats. The trap is just as real: returns and sizing. Apparel has the highest return rate on this whole list, and every return is a refund, a restock, and a shipping cost you swallow. So if you sell apparel, you live or die on accurate size charts, real fit photos on real bodies, and a returns process that doesn't punish the buyer for guessing.

The smarter play here is usually a sub-niche, not "men's clothing" broadly. Workwear. Big and tall. Performance and gym wear. Premium basics. You compete on something other than price. For sourcing reference, SaleHoo Market Insights currently pegs printed tees in roughly the $11 to $27 range and men's dress shirts in the $64 to $85 band. That tells you the tee is an impulse, multi-unit, volume play and the shirt is a considered purchase with cross-sell room (ties, belts, shoes). Two different businesses, really.

If apparel is your lane, start narrow: how to source wholesale jeans for profit and how to sell wholesale shoes are good next steps.

2. Electronics

Phone accessories, headphones, chargers, gaming peripherals, smart-home gadgets. The category is gigantic, around $1.03 trillion in global revenue in 2026 per Statista, and men comparison-shop it harder than almost anything, reading specs and reviews before they commit. That's good for you (high intent) and bad for you (they'll notice if your listing is thin).

Order values run higher here, so a single sale is worth more. The catch is support. Electronics generate warranty questions, compatibility questions, and "it stopped working" emails. Sell branded gear and you're also wading into IP and authorized-reseller territory, which is a fast way to get a listing pulled.

For most newer sellers, the sweet spot is accessories, not headline devices. A phone case, a charging stand, a cable organizer: low support burden, easy to ship, healthy margin, and you're not competing with Best Buy on a $900 phone. When you're ready to source the real thing, here's how to find suppliers for wholesale electronics.

3. Entertainment

Games, collectibles, hobby media, gear tied to a fandom. This is passion-buying, and passion buyers spend. They also know more than you do about their niche, so credibility matters. The watch-out is licensing. Anything with a logo, a character, or a franchise attached can be a legal minefield, and "I bought it from a supplier" is not a defense. Stick to unlicensed or properly licensed goods, and you've got a loyal, repeat-spending audience.

4. Sports, Leisure, and Hobbies

Outdoor gear, gym equipment, fishing and cycling kit, hobby tools. Around 30% of male shoppers buy here, and the enthusiast angle is gold. People who are into a thing buy deep, buy often, and trust sellers who clearly know the gear. That's also the bar: you need genuine product knowledge, or your listings read like a spreadsheet. Comparison tables and honest use-case guides convert well in these niches.

5. Grooming and Personal Care

Beard care, skincare, shaving kits, fragrance. Men's grooming stopped being niche years ago. And here's why it's quietly one of the best categories on this list for a seller: it reorders. A guy who likes your beard oil buys it again in six weeks without shopping around.

There's a great old story from Birchbox, the subscription company: when they started selling men's products, their system began flagging orders as fraud because guys were buying six or more of the same item at once. Turned out that wasn't fraud. That was just men stocking up on something they liked. That's the behavior you're selling into.

Bundles work beautifully here (a starter kit converts better than a single SKU), and subscriptions lift lifetime value if you make pause-and-skip easy. The watch-out is compliance: skincare and anything with a health or "results" claim is regulated, and the rules vary by market. Keep claims clean and you've got a repeat-purchase machine.

6. Groceries and Consumables

Roughly a quarter of men buy groceries online, mostly for convenience and subscription delivery. Honest take: this is a strong buyer category and a tough seller category for most independent stores. Margins are thin, perishables need cold-chain logistics, and you're up against giants with their own delivery fleets. There are good plays in shelf-stable specialty food and snack subscriptions. There are very few good plays in trying to out-Amazon Amazon on bananas.

7. Health and Pharmacy

Fitness trackers, recovery tools, mobility and sleep aids, supplements. Strong trend tailwinds, and men research these heavily before buying. The hard line: supplements and anything making a health claim are regulated, and getting it wrong is expensive in a way a bad apparel return never is. Equipment and accessories (resistance bands, massage guns, a smart scale) are the lower-risk entry point. Supplements are for sellers who understand the compliance side cold.

8. Auto Parts and Accessories

Car accessories, detailing products, replacement parts. These are high-intent buyers: someone searching for a part for a specific make and model is ready to buy now. The entire game is fitment. Sell a part that doesn't fit and you get a return plus a frustrated customer, so fitment tools and clear compatibility info aren't optional, they're the product. Accessories and detailing (mats, organizers, cleaning kits, lighting) are friendlier for newer sellers than precision parts.

9. Home and Garden

Tools, storage, fixtures, decor, smart-home upgrades. Practical, research-led demand that holds up year-round, and one of the categories ONS data shows men buying online at a healthy clip. The friction is physical: this stuff is heavy and bulky, and shipping eats your margin fast. Smaller tools, smart-home devices, and hardware ship better than a 40-pound toolbox. Run your shipping math before you fall in love with a product.

10. Jewelry and Accessories

Watches, wallets, sunglasses, rings, belts. Lower buyer share, higher margin potential, and a heavy lean toward gifting. A lot of men's jewelry is bought for a man, not by him, which changes how you market it (think occasions, gift guides, personalization). The watch-out is differentiation: this category needs a brand, a story, or a customization angle, because a generic watch is a race to the bottom. For one well-trodden path, see selling smartwatches online.

The Part Most Sellers Skip: Which Category Should You Pick?

The ranking tells you where the buyers are. It doesn't tell you where you should start. That depends on your goal, your budget, and your stomach for support tickets. Here's how we'd steer it.

If you want the next level of detail (15 specific men's products with price ranges and supplier recommendations), that lives on our dedicated guide: Sourcing and Selling High-Demand Products and Gifts for Men.

How Men Actually Decide to Buy Online

Knowing what men buy is useful. Knowing why they buy it the way they do is what makes your store convert.

There's an old line out of Wharton, from marketing professor Stephen J. Hoch, that men buy and women shop. The idea is that men tend to treat shopping as a task to finish rather than an experience to enjoy: find the thing, confirm it's the right thing, buy it, leave. It's framing from around 2015, so treat it as a durable behavioral pattern rather than a fresh stat, but it lines up with what sellers see every day, and the spending data backs it up. Men shop online slightly more often than women and spend more per order when they do, somewhere around $220 a transaction in one widely-cited comparison against roughly $151 for women. Fewer trips, bigger baskets. They decide fast once they trust the listing, and they hesitate when anything's unclear.

That hesitation is your real competition. So:

On apparel, the question in their head is "will this fit?" Answer it with a real size guide and photos on real people, and put your returns policy where they can see it.

On electronics and auto parts, the question is "will this work, or fit my setup?" Answer it with compatibility info, specs, and a visible warranty or support promise.

On grooming and health products, the question is "will this actually do what it says?" Answer it with ingredients, honest use instructions, and reviews, not hype.

Across all of it, delivery certainty beats a slightly better price. Men reward a store that tells the truth about shipping times and then hits them. Publish your cutoffs. Hit your dates. That reliability is what turns a one-time buyer into the guy who reorders your beard oil for the next three years.

What Actually Trips Up New Sellers (Learn It Before Your First Order)

The polished version of this helps nobody, so here's the unglamorous reality.

SaleHoo exists because of this stuff. Simon (our co-founder) started it after years selling on Trade Me, where the constant question was always the same: where did you source that? The answer is rarely as clean as a supplier's sales page makes it look. Two things bite new sellers more than anything, and neither shows up in a category ranking.

First, lead times run long. A supplier advertises one shipping window and the real one, once you've placed an actual order, is longer. If you've already set customer-facing delivery estimates off the advertised number, you're now late on every order out of the gate. The fix is boring and it works: order a sample yourself, time it from click to doorstep, and set your store's promises off that number, not the brochure.

Second, payment holds. New seller accounts often have funds held by the payment processor while the account builds a track record. PayPal, for example, can hold a new seller's money for up to 21 days per order. Completely normal, completely cash-flow-wrecking if you didn't plan for it, because you've paid your supplier and you're waiting on money you've technically already earned. Read coping with PayPal payment holds before your first sale, not after.

Men's Products That Look Easy but Bite Back

Most articles only show you the opportunities. Here's the other half, because avoiding a bad category is worth as much as picking a good one.

Supplements and anything with a health claim. Regulated, market by market, and the penalties for getting it wrong dwarf any return headache. Don't touch this without understanding the compliance side.

Branded electronics. Selling someone else's brand without authorization invites IP complaints and pulled listings, plus you inherit warranty and support expectations you can't always meet. Accessories sidestep most of this.

High-return apparel categories. Fitted clothing, anything where "true to size" is a gamble. The demand is there, but the return rate can quietly turn a profitable margin into a loss.

Bulky home and garden goods. A great product that costs $30 to ship is not a great product. Weigh it, measure it, price the freight before you commit.

Licensed entertainment and collectibles. Logos, characters, franchises. If you can't prove the licensing, walk away.

None of this means "never." It means know what you're walking into, and don't make it your first product while you're still learning the basics.

How to Validate a Men's Product Before You Order a Single Unit

Picking a category is step one. Validating a specific product is what saves you from a garage full of inventory nobody wants. The short version:

Check that real demand exists and isn't already collapsing, using actual data rather than a gut feeling. Check how crowded the listing space is, because a product everyone already sells is a price war you'll lose. Compare a few suppliers on price, minimum order quantity (MOQ, the smallest batch a supplier will sell you), and lead time, not just the cheapest unit cost. Run your margin honestly with shipping, fees, and returns baked in. Then test small, and only scale the winners.

This is the whole reason SaleHoo's research tools exist: to take the guessing out of that loop. You can dig into finding profitable products, browse trending products to dropship, and when you're ready to source, the supplier directory gives you 8,000+ vetted suppliers so you're not gambling on a stranger. For the money side, understanding dropshipping profit margins keeps you honest about what's actually left after costs.

Frequently Asked Questions