Are you looking for a great product to sell online? Worried that all the best ideas are taken? Here is a rundown of what makes a product a good candidate for selling online.
It's the last two characteristics that can be hard to pin down. Here is a generally accepted method of arriving at an idea of how heavy the demand and competition is for a product.
First, make a list of some potential products that might fit the bill. If you have a special interest in some of them, great, but don't limit your investigation just to items you like. You are looking for a niche product with relatively good demand (just enough to make it profitable), but without heavy competition. Consider the characteristics listed above, but remember that there are many exceptions. ProFlowers.com, for example, has made a great business out of selling flowers online that are both fragile and perishable.
Next, you need to find out what the demand for your product might be.One way to approximate this is to look at search engines to see how frequently people search for your product. There are several free tools that let you do this easily.
Next, you want to discover how much competition you have. Search Yahoo! Stores or Google for the product you're evaluating to see how much competition there is. Yahoo! will tell you how many products, in how many stores, are listed on their site.
To see how hard it might be to break into the market, check Google or Find what to see how many people are paying to advertise the keyword.
The end result of all this research should be one or more products that fit into a niche market - products with some demand, and relatively little supply. For the best results, focus on one niche product category, and offer a wide selection. That way, you can become the best online source for that particular category. For example, instead of offering general craft supplies, offer the widest possible selection of needlepoint kits. This strategy will also allow you to rank higher in search engines because you can optimize your pages for fewer, more specific, keywords. A product that streamlines this research is The Market Research Wizard. This program analyzes the factors mentioned above, and then rates the probability of successful sales on the Internet. It is very useful for comparing the relative ranking of different products. I like the product, but it takes time to arrive at the best combination of keywords. The free trial is limited to 5 searches. The registered program costs $97.
Written by Ana Rincon