The Inside Scoop

e-Commerce Simplified (3)

Once you have found a niche you believe has a lot of potential for both profitability and passion, you should try to drill down even further to create the tightest niche possible.

For example, let’s say you’ve decided you want to concentrate on the outdoor hobby niche. This might include things like camping, backpacking, hiking, hunting, and fishing. But there are thousands of popular stores that specialize in this area, so it would be quite difficult to compete.

In order to have an all-encompassing store in a broad niche like this, you’d have to source thousands of products, and make sure the prices stay updated. It would be a tremendous amount of work for just one person, or even a small team.

Instead, it’s good to focus on a single area. It could be the area you are most interested in, or the one you believe will be most profitable (as long as you’re still interested in it). But it’s important to drill down to the tightest niche you can without going so tight that it would be difficult to find an audience or source products.

For example, instead of “outdoor hobbies”, you could drill down a bit to fishing. This may still be too broad, so you could drill down to fly fishing. This is pretty good, but you might even go a little further to specialize in a specific type of fly, or maybe into fly tying supplies for people who want to tie their own flies for fishing.

Keep drilling down until you reach a point when you can no longer find enough products to source or interest in the niche. You’d be surprised just how far you can go in many niches! For example, blacksocks.com specializes in—you guessed it—black socks. They also have other products that they expanded into, such as colored socks and underwear, but they started out selling black socks and have been wildly successful!