How to Find HOT Products to Sell Online Which are Guaranteed to Make You Money
by Andrew Whannell on March 5, 2015
Are you considering becoming an online retailer and hoping to get a slice of the trillion dollar market? Selling products online is becoming incredibly popular.
Some are doing it as a hobby, other to make some quick cash on the side, some to get their own branded products out there in the world and others are making a living from being online retailers.
Some of these people… are selling products online and generating millions of dollars annually.
So how do you get started? How do you know what products to sell which is guaranteed to make you money online?
****In the realm of online stores, the PRODUCT is the ruler of the domain.
Advice about selling a product, as a standard, either concerns itself with common conventions like ‘try your luck with anything’ or vague recommendations such as selling a product you just love.
BUT successful online stores, however, don’t typically follow vague tips and advice, or sell products on a ‘hunch’ it may be a winner.
There is in fact a two step process finding great products to sell online and you cannot do one without the other.
First and foremost you are going to need to do the following,
Step 1: Identify a Product
Sometimes coming up with an idea can be the hardest part of the process. People get stumped about what would be a great product and give up. However, the key is to come up with a list of ideas to start with, instead of just one. You can get help coming up with ideas by going through the following options:
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Think about what have you recently purchased and do you think there would be a market for it online?
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Check out what products are making the Amazon Best Sellers List?
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Magazines- see what is being sold within these publications. Go into a news agency or visit www.magazines.com.
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Business broker sites are a great place to see what businesses exist and are on sale.
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Gumtree/ Craigslist will help you identify what people are buying and selling locally.
At the end of the day, what makes your product successful is if it’s selected with your customer’s wants and needs in mind. Otherwise, you would be wasting time and resources marketing products that won’t sell.
So once you have a list of ideas, how do you decide which product(s) are in demand? And which ones will be trending in the future?
The answer to these, and all the previous questions, is …
Step 2: RESEARCH
The importance of ‘products in demand’ discovered through research can’t be stressed enough.
Why, you ask? It’s a tried-and-tested methodology to exactly understand what your target audience is searching for and to identify potential market segments that your business can tap into.
Here are some reasons why you should not go about selling products without conducting research (a trap that many people fall into):
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**Loss of capital: **The product you pick may generate some sales but may not be enough to generate a positive ROI. This could lead to loss of capital and marketing dollars wasted, which could have been spent on promoting the right product.
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**A negative brand image: **The products you’re going to choose will have an effect on your brand image. If that goes wrong at the start, it would require a lot of effort to recover your business brand.
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**Business failure: **Your online store is doomed to fail if you don’t offer a product that people are actually interested in. Cross-segmentation will come into play to target a bigger customer base.
Why researching your product and niches is important.
By researching what the market is buying online, you will be in a better position to make an informed choice on what will be a **profitable target market/niche. **This strategy also enables you to gain information on the online market size, how many competitors you have and the quality of that competition.
This tool will give you plenty of groundwork when it comes to finding popular products to sell. It also has a built-in competition feature that enables you to pull critical metrics on the top ten results for your desired product terms, which gives you an idea on what competitors are selling.
Research will also give you the ground truth about your approach before you spend countless money and hours taking a new service or product to market. It’s the ideal way to find what your customers want and what they will pay for it.
Luckily, conducting research online is far easier and less expensive than conducting offline market research. There are many online tools available for testing and measuring the quality of your chosen product such as,
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Google Keyword Planneris fantastic to search for product keywords
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**Market Samurai**tracks the ranking of certain products by using keywords
But the number 1 tool for identifying and confirming million dollar nichesis called…
Terapeak
It provides you access to data from eBay/Amazon to help you determine what product to sell, in what category, and at what price.
If you’re planning to build an online store and start selling products you must do your RESEARCH and identify what products are guaranteed to sell like hot cakes online to avoid any disappointment.
Roundup..
Having reliable and real data through product research is a crucial element of creating and launching a new online store and needs to be a key consideration in the product selection process. Products stocked or selected for dropshipping without research may cause an endless supply of headaches from botched sales to wasting precious time pouring energy into a niche that will never work.
Now it’s YOUR turn..
Thinking of starting an online store? Let us know what challenges you are having regarding choose your niche or tools you want to use to do your research with?
Feel free to leave comments below, with as much detail as possible so we can respond as quickly and as efficiently as possible.
Andrew Whannell
Director of Sales and Marketing at Supercell Media
As the director of sales and marketing at Supercell Media, a huge part of my everyday life is in creating tailored solutions for online store owners and marketers. I get the opportunity work with all types of online stores from online retail giants, such as Cheapsheds.com.au to exciting startups across dozens of niches. On a daily basis, I have the privilege of working with business owners refining, redeveloping, marketing or launching their online stores.