Niche stores work by bringing in customers ready to buy. Those customers prefer the niche store when they want a specific product from a curated experience and they don’t want to get lost looking through thousands of options. Mass market stores may have almost any product they could want, but niche stores make the customer experience of finding what that want easier and faster.
Values of Niche Stores
Having a clear niche helps you imagine and advertise your business towards a specific customer, while making the work of creating business goals easier. You’ll bring in people who want what you have and get more orders because a good niche – one that you personally care about – helps your business stand out from the crowd and feel more authentic.
A well-designed niche store can offer high-end products and target a very specific market with expensive needs. You should always fight back against more generalized competition with high quality products and smart strategies instead of by dropping prices.
The customer experience at a niche store can be smoother if the seller is friendly and enthusiastic about their niche product. The seller should personally know what their customers want and engage with them. Providing faster answers to questions about their store and its products – or even personally solving technical concerns around ordering or dealing with refunds – helps get business and repeat customers. Niche stores bring in organic visitors because customers remember and talk about them.
Finally, consider that niche stores are more affordable to advertise because you can limit who sees ads and partner with influencers who care about your niche. Niche stores should focus more on providing the best service through great employees, generally paying more but retaining more workers.
Creating a Niche Store
The first step is to choose your niche. Select one that hasn’t gotten enough attention or which others failed to serve well. A great niche can be defined in terms of price, quality, target customer and region. Also consider environmental impact, wellness, popular hobbies and life goals. Remember that niches exist in every market, not just goods.
Make sure you actually care about the niche and know it well, which helps you talk about your products and decide how to sell them. Become an expert in your niche and continue to spend time learning about it. Your goal should be to add value to your niche by coming up with new ideas to serve your customers.
The smaller your niche, the more loyalty you will get with repeat customers. Yet always remember to target a niche that currently has an upward trend of interest. You can check initial interest into the niche with a crowdfunding campaign via sites like Kickstarter, Patreon, or Crowdsupply. Tease the product online and collect emails from people interested in learning more, or create content marketing to share on social media groups and forums that care about your niche.
When your store is set up, follow which products are selling well and remove those not moving. Stay focused on both your original niche and innovative methods of serving it. Other niche businesses in your area that work in a similar field make great friends, since you can ask them to refer clients to you in exchange for you doing the same for them. Check regularly to make sure interest hasn’t gone down significantly in your niche and continue to add products strongly related to the niche. Keep discovering new ways to stay in touch with customers and learn more about their needs.
Finding Niche Products
There are many ways to pick the products for a niche store. But always remember to perform these searches using the current year so you only see things that are popular now. Also record what people type into the search box of your online store to see what they wanted to find, giving you a list of potential products to add if they align with your niche.
Tools like Google Trends and Adwords can help you find what searches are popular, which is especially good at telling you what products don’t have a lot of interest, and pairs well with Semrush or Sistrix. Other sites likes Trend Watching and Trend Hunter follow interest in specific ideas, while Springwise will help you follow interesting concepts for businesses. Google Keyword Planner, Answer The Public and Moz Keyword Planner can help with niche product ideas if you search for keywords without a lot of competition, or try Keyword Keg to check a keyword’s CTR Scope.
Online stores like eBay allow you to see what items are being watched, while Amazon lets you rank products by customer reviews or what is selling the most. Etsy has a section with the products that are most popular now, and sites like Kickstarter are all about getting funding for products based on popularity and building an audience while creating the product.
Follow groups on Facebook that watch product trends, and search Reddit for subsections based around your interests. Quora lets you set up your feed to get emails containing related topics, and with a business account on Pinterest you can see if many people have pinned buyable items. Finally consider the many forums and conferences focused on niche products and selling them.