Every year, there are new ways of selecting profitable dropshipping niches. If you’re familiar with digital and e-Commerce trends, you know how fast things change.
This is still good news for you though! That’s because it’s only getting easier to research the profitability of a niche product before you start building your dropshipping store.
The following guide will give you a clear picture of the 2018 market trends, releases, and ways to be profitable within a broad, over-saturated niche, hint: sub-niches!
Don’t Rush the Niche Selection Process
One of the first steps in e-Commerce (and dropshipping in particular) is choosing a niche. It’s also the biggest and most usual point where people get hung up.
While you shouldn’t make niche selection harder than it is, it’s more important to not rush the process.
(Source: Yo!Kart)
To give you a little background, here are the words from Anton Kraly – Founder & CEO of the website Dropship Lifestyle:
“My very first e-Commerce store started making money within 24 hours of going live. I made a sale for $485 the FIRST night that my store was able to accept orders.
People are often shocked when they hear this because it sounds like I just threw together an online shop and starting making money through luck. But the truth is I spent A LOT of time prior to launching. In fact, it’s all about the preparation.
Before my store launch, I did a ton of market research in order to have the best chance of success once I was ready to launch. There was one reason that I made $485 within hours of launching. It was because I found a profitable niche that fit a certain criteria.”
->> Lessons from 3 small-scale e-Commerce success stories
With that in mind, keep reading to learn all the details, step-by-steps of the most efficient methods to research the current profitability of any e-Commerce & dropshipping niche.
4 Guaranteed Methods to Finding Profitable Dropshipping Niches in 2018
This guide will cover the first and arguably, one of the most important steps in building your own profitable e-Commerce business: Selecting profitable dropshipping niches.
Selecting a niche can make or break your dropshipping business, making it one part of the dropshipping process you don’t want to rush.
->> Find the right ‘niche’ to elevate your e-Commerce business to new heights
Breaking it down, there are two types of dropshipipng niches – the bad (non-profitable niches) and the good (profitable niches):
It’s not hard, but there are quite a few methods that you need to know in order to select a profitable dropshipping product. When searching for a profitable niche that’s good for the dropshipping model in 2018, you’ll want to leverage these methods:
Method #1: Focused Brainstorming
Dropshipping is a kind of project. And like all projects, the first step is brainstorming.
Before you can test different dropshipping niches for profitability, you need to think of niches to test. This doesn’t mean you think about it on the ride to a friend’s house – you need to block off time and focus on brainstorming.
To brainstorm new ideas, think of things that you yourself have recently bought online, as well as asking family and friends what they’ve recently purchased. Also, think about what you’ve bought in the past.
Think about all your family and friends and what they have in their houses.
Write everything down, even if it seems questionable at the time. Tons of dropshipping niches are profitable, but that doesn’t mean you should rush into them immediately.
Once you have your first list of dropshipping niches, view them through these five lenses:
- Competition – Scout out other dropshipping stores and see what products are over-saturated. You don’t want to sell those.
- Loyalty – Don’t go for a niche or product that is dominated by a national brand(s).
- Pricing – It’s easy: The higher the price of the products, the greater your profit margin will be!
- Weight – Shipping is expensive but a winning combo is a high-priced product that has low shipping weights. Check out our 4 useful tips on shipping for more information.
- Returns – Don’t pick a product with sizing and style preferences, as they will probably have an astronomical return rate.
Method #2: Research and Evaluate Current Dropshipping Trends
eBay is still a good place to check if items sell online but don’t base your prices off of eBay’s. They’re far too low. Even though it’s not as relevant these days, it’s still a good place to brainstorm profitable dropshipping niches.
Once you’re on eBay, you want to identify products in different niches that are expensive (that’s usually $500 or more, but it’s entirely up to you). Then go through different categories on eBay and change your search results to show “completed listings”.
If the completed listing is in red, it means the item did not sell. If it’s in green, it means the item sold.
Look closer into the products that are shown in green and search for completed listing only for that specific product. Do this over and over until you successfully identify about 20 products within one dropshipping niche that almost ALWAYS sold (10+ units per day).
“When I started I wasn’t dropshipping. I was importing from China, so I contacted a few suppliers that I had found on Alibiba.com and requested price lists for these exact products. I then contacted a customs broker and got shipping quotes for a container of the products.
Next, I factored in all of my other expenses and learned I could sell these on eBay at the same price as many competitors and make a 50%+ profit on each sale! But that was back in 2006…” – Anton Kraly
Method #3: Use Amazon’s Help to Select Very Specific Dropshipping Niches
Amazon is the world’s biggest retailer, and they sell pretty much everything under the sun. That’s what makes it one of the best places to find profitable dropshipping niches and the products that are “red hot”.
Here’s the step by step process to finding profitable niches using Amazon:
1/ Click on the ‘All’ tab at the left of the main search bar. It will show a list of categories or ‘niches’.
2/ Click on a specific category that interests you (or at random).
3/ Then leave the search box blank and hit ‘Go’.
4/ A new page will display and on the left-hand side a whole list of subcategories or ‘sub-niches’ will pop up.
5/ Click a subcategory and it’ll take you further down into the niche into a more specific sub-niche.
6/ You now have drilled down into specific niches and can even go further still.
Amazon is especially great to help you find a super specific niche and the products that sell best. Even better is you can choose ‘best sellers’ from the navigation bar at the top of the page, just under the search box, and see what’s currently selling best.
There’s no way you can’t find a profitable dropshipping niche on Amazon, or at least have a good brainstorming session browsing the site. Amazon’s “Best Sellers” page is updated hourly, making it a solid resource for profitable niche selection!
Method #4: Think Like A Marketer
Nowadays, not too many people are selling on eBay anymore and you shouldn’t, either. But, a lot of this advice is still useful in the world of dropshipping today. The first (and most important) tip on finding a profitable niche when dropshipping is SELL EXPENSIVE ITEMS!!
Based on certain calculations, the average net profit when dropshipping is about 20% of your total sales. Basically, you’ll make 20% profit whether on a $1,000 item and a $10 item, so you could either make $200 or $2 per sale. If you want to make money, you need to sell expensive items.
There’s nothing else to it. Not that complicated, right?
Once you’ve identified these items, you need to find some potential “future competition” – online retailers who are already selling these items. Unfortunately, there’s no way to find out how much money they make on each sale at this point. BUT you can find out if this dropshipping niche is profitable by seeing if the suppliers enforce MAP policies.
Basically, suppliers set MAP pricing and sellers agree not to advertise below. MAP stands for Minimum Advertised Pricing and is the lowest price a retailer can sell the supplier’s products.
If your results show different prices that are all over the place, then this supplier does NOT enforce MAP. If the results say something like “$999 from 3 stores” and there are no other prices listed for the same exact item, then you’ve likely found a supplier that enforces MAP!
You can call these potential suppliers to see if they enforce MAP policies. But the easiest way to check if MAP policies are in place, is to go to Google Shopping and search for some random products in your dropshipping niche:
(TO BE CONTINUED…)
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WANT TO LEARN MORE?
->> What makes a product that sells when dropshipping on Shopify, Amazon, eBay?
->> 9 best dropshipping suppliers for your e-Commerce business
->> Why are dropshipping margins so tight and How to maximize the profits it brings?