Day 1: First things first – pick your niche

1.Tweet today’s quote→ 2. Get to work!

One of the biggest and most stressful questions a new dropshipper asks themselves is: “What should I sell?”

Obviously, this defines your whole business.But don’t lose sleep over it.(Like Amanda did.)

Because no matter what you do – no matter how many hours of research you put in –you’ll never knowhow well your store will perform until you get out there and try. When I started my first business, I wasted weeks trying to come up with product ideas.

And here’s a secret that most people won’t tell you: it’s not really about what you sell… it’s aboutwhy you sell it. In the end, even an amazing product is nothing without a valuable experience for shoppers. (I’ll show you all about that when it’s time to build your store and create a brand.)

One more thing. I have a bit of an unpopular opinion… butI truly believe that there’s no such thing as a saturated niche.I think that if you really put in the time, you can find success selling just about anything.

All that said, there are some steps to help make sure you’re choosing promisingniches in 2020.

Today, we’re going to:

• Choose a dropshipping niche (but not necessarily your products yet), with the help of our spreadsheet template
• Validate the niche to make sure people are actually buying
• Sign up for Shopify and DSers so you can poke around

[highlight]IMPORTANT:If you haven’t done it yet, remember todownload your Calendar now, add your name with a marker, print it and hang it somewhere you can see it everyday. Snap a picture and post it on Instagram, hashtag: #Oberlo21.[/highlight]

Let’s get started, shall we?

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How to find your niche

Before you find a niche, you should probably know what it is. A niche (short for a niche market) isadistinct, targeted market segmentinside a bigger segment.

For example, you can divide the clothing market into niches like men’s, women’s, and children’s clothing.

But these are still huge.

Once, I worked with an aspiring entrepreneur who wanted to sell shoes. When I asked him to be more specific, he had a blank stare on his face. He was disappointed to learn that this wasn’t going to cut it. He needed to be able to answer some questions… What kind of shoes? Who were they for?

So you can – and should – even go smaller, say women’s clothing styles like bohemian, vintage, punk, high-fashion, or minimalistic. And even then, you can still go smaller.

Remember the sunglasses store I built which made $8,873 in 31 Days? My niche wasn’t just sunglasses. This would have been too broad. I only marketed these sunglasses to bloggers and people with a social media presence. I aimed for people who love to share their newest fashion accessories on Instagram.

The key takeaway is that the people buying these types of niche items havemore specific wants, needs, and buying habits.

That’s why you should cater to a niche instead of being like a big chain or department store that sells a little bit of everything.

There are some key benefits to this strategy:

• When you’re marketing to a niche audience, it will bewaaaaay easier to find and reach your best customers, because they’ll share super-specific traits and habits.
• Generally,the more narrow your niche, the less competition you’ll have.
• You’ll have a better chance of gettingloyal customers who trust youto meet their unique needs and wishes.

And in the game of dropshipping, loyal and trusting customers are a golden ticket.

Here are some more niche ideas. Keep in mind that this is just barely scratching the surface!

Beauty All-natural makeup Eyeshadow palettes Body scrubs Fake eyelashes Skincare products Nail art Fitness Running Cycling Bodybuilding Yoga Swimming Crossfit Health* Vegan or organic products Weight loss products Digestive health Teeth whitening Anti-stress toys Massagers

Fashion accessories Scarves Hats Hair accessories Sunglasses 珠宝 Vintage purses Home Minimalist decor Kitchen appliances Cooking accessories Terrariums Rustic furniture Outdoor gardening Tech ‘Smart’ speakers Smartphone accessories iPhone repair kit Projectors Wireless devices Air purifiers

*Note:Be careful in the health category. Some countries have laws and regulations about what you can sell. If you choose a health niche, make sure you do your research.

[highlight]Pro Tip: I like to avoid clothing and other items that need sizes. When you go for a ‘one-size-fits-all’ kind of niche, you won’t have to deal with all the returns from people who didn’t find the right fit the first time. Or even worse – those shoppers who order multiple sizes on purpose and send back all the ones that don’t fit![/highlight]

Amanda came to me feeling overwhelmed about choosing her niche. She felt like it was a huge investment, and she was nervous about choosing the wrong one.

I advised her to answer some key questions about her search.

Steady or trending?

A steady niche (aka ‘evergreen’) is one that will have demand all-year round, for the indeterminate future. It’s the kind of product category thatisn’t going away, like various types of clothing and accessories, personal hygiene products, home goods, and sports and hobby items.

You can check easily if a niche is steady or trending withGoogle Trends. For example, I typed in ‘men’s sunglasses’ and U.S. as the location and ‘2004 – present’ as the timeframe.

You can see that it’s a pretty steady niche that’s actually growing. Since 2004, more people are looking for men’s sunglasses online.

As you can see, searches peak every June and July – which makes perfect sense, since that’s the peak of summertime sunshine.

I can personally vouch that selling sunglasses is very viable. You recall thecase studyI mentioned earlier where I made $8,873 in 31 days selling them. (I sold women’s sunglasses, but men’s are a great option too.)

Back to Google Trends. You can also change things like your time range and the region where people are searching.

Here, you can see results for ‘smart speakers’ from users in England over the past 12 months. You can see that it’s fairly steady too. It peaked in November and December, which shows that it’s probably a popular holiday gift.

A trending (aka ‘fad’) niche is more temporary– it might be a hot-seller now, but the trendwill eventually die off. Like fidget spinners or the recent unicorn-theme craze. There’s definitely money to be made jumping into a trend (if you can get into it early enough), but keep in mind that your business will slow a lot once the trend is over.

For this reason, you should choose a steady niche if you plan to havea solid, long-term store.

Back to Google Trends, see what I mean about fidget spinners? A massive peak in May 2017, then it disappeared.

Passion or profit?

Do you want to sell things you’re personally passionate about, or just go for things that look profitable? Ideally, you can finda combination of these two.

If you’re passionate about your store, you havea special level of knowledge that can help youwith choosing good products and being a good source of information for your customers.

Ask yourself some questions and write down all the answers:

• What are your favorite websites, blogs, and social media accounts?
• Do you collect any products?
• Do you have any obsessions?
• If you had $100 to spend right now, what would you buy?

你甚至可以选择其中的一些问题ask your friends and family, too. The more data you can get, the better.

Amanda Asks

“How can I get some good ideas for a steady niche?”

When she first started her research, Amanda knew she wanted a steady niche, but had trouble narrowing down the millions of options she saw. She asked me for some advice on how to pick one.

My answer:one of the best ways to get niche andproduct ideasis tosimply look around you,在自己的购买习惯和别人布鲁里溃疡ying.

Check yourself

• 网上购买的东西是什么?在哪里did you buy them and how did you come across them in the first place?
• What kinds of products do you buy even if you don’t necessarily need them?
• Which online stores do you shop on the most?

When I started my first online store ever, a tea business, I simply sold something I personally consumed every day. The product itself wasn’t any different than my competitor’s. The only difference was the way I marketed the product.

当时,几乎所有公司销售茶very feminine way. I’m a man and didn’t like their marketing. I thought if I had this issue, there are probably other men who have the same issue. That’s why I came up with strong and masculine marketing that turned out to be very lucrative.

Check your surroundings

Go to the mall or some other public place andpeople watch.

• What are people wearing, using, and carrying? Clothes, jewelry, accessories, shoes, and tech are all fair game.
• What kinds of products are they buying?
• Go to some retail stores. What’s on the shelves? Are any particular products sold out?

Check influencers

Follow some popular social media influencers on Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, Pinterest, and YouTube. Look up ‘product placements’ andsee what types of products other brands are trying to promotewith the help of those influencers.

This can work well if you’re following ‘high fashion’ influencers (luxury brands like Gucci, Armani, D&G, etc.). You’ll be able to offersimilar styles but for way less money.

[highlight]If you want some more ideas, check out Oberlo’s ‘What to Sell’ section, as well as theOberlo YouTube channel.[/highlight]

Traits of a good dropshipping product

1. Less than $100.When products are too expensive, there’s a longer sales funnel, which means more work for you before you can get a customer’s trust to buy. You might also need to worry about warranties and more returns.
2. Not super common.Don’t sell something available at a store down the street. If it’s so common, what incentive do customers have to buy from your store and wait 2–3 weeks to get it?
3. Impulse buy items.The kind of thing you don’t really need, but you want anyway! Affordable and unique impulse buy products are a perfect way to rack in sales that don’t require much thought or planning in advance.
4. Not easy to guess the price.If it’s something unique enough that you can’t really guess the price, it can help avoid the issue of customers trying to find it somewhere else online for cheaper.

After some thought, Amanda decided to go with women’s fashion scarves. She chose this niche because:

• Scarves are incredibly popular – you see them everywhere you go.
• Since she was opening her store in fall, she knew it was high season as the weather gets colder.
• By selling trendy fashion scarves, she could target this season’s ‘high fashion,’ luxury brand styles for people with lower budgets.
• She has a lot of her own scarves, and it’s one of those productsshe and her friends found themselves buying even though they didn’t really need them.

Pick 3 of your top niche ideas. Then use the next section to check how popular and promising they are.

Validate your niche idea

In a way, we’ve already been low-key validating. Using Google Trends, checking your surroundings, and looking at social media are all small-scale forms of niche validation. After all,it’s proof that people are buying and using these products.

Let’s go a little further by looking at the 3 top tools to find solid product ideas in high-performing niches:

1. Oberlo
2. Amazon
3. 阿里巴巴全球速卖通

当你或e finding products in promising niches, write them down quickly in the first tab of our templates spreadsheet. The tab is titled ‘D1: Product Brainstorm.’

Just write 3 things: the niche, item name, and URL where you found it.

This will help you choose your specific products to sell onDay 4, so you don’t have to go back fishing if you need them. Plus, having a list now will help you narrow it down later.

[highlight]Don’t spend too much time on this list now – it’s just a reference point to keep track of your thought process. We’ll refine the list onDay 3.[/highlight]

1. DSers

To access the product search, you’ll need to sign up for your free trial and install the DSers app. I’ll show you how.

1. Go towww.shopify.com. Fill in your email address and click the ‘Get started’ button.

2. A popup will ask you to create a Shopify password and enter your store name. Fill them in and click ‘Create your store.’

• If you don’t have a name yet, that’s okay. You can write in something like ‘[Your Name] Test Store’ for now. (Keep trying until you get a name that isn’t taken already.)
• Note that this will be your.myshopify.comdomain forever and you can’t change it. But since we’re going to buy and connect a proper.comdomain name anyway, customers won’t see it.
• You should note that this will be your ‘username’ that shows if you message suppliers inside DSers in the future. So name it appropriately!

3. Answer a few questions and click ‘Next.’ You can just fill out what’s below:

4. On the next page, fill out your home address (or whichever address you want your default business address to be) and click ‘Enter my store.’

5. Voilà. You’re in the dashboard of your shiny new Shopify store!

6. Now it’s time to install DSers.

• Click ‘Apps’ in the left sidebar
• Click ‘Visit Shopify App Store’ button at the top right
• You’ll be taken to the App Store. Type ‘DSers’ into the search bar
• Click ‘DSers’ (the first result)
• Click ‘Add app’
• You’ll be redirected to your store. Scroll down and click ‘Install app’

And you’re ready to roll.

[highlight]FYI:We’re going to install a few more apps, and they’ll all use the same process as you just did with DSers. Two clicks and done.[/highlight]

After you install, you’ll be taken to the Dsers dashboard and home screen.

Here, you can type whatever you like into the search bar to explore any particular niches or items you have in mind.

I recommend poking around on this home screen, as DSers will show youloads of recommended products, like:

• Best selling products
• 快速航运产品
• Trending products
• Seasonal products (Autumn/Winter fashion for Amanda)
• Discounted products

钻ing down farther, you can choose options like:

• Best-selling products with great reviews
• Products available with ePacket shipping (will also discuss onDay 4)
• Products shipped from US warehouses so they can get to US customers faster

You can also change your country if you’re not in the US, of course.

It’s pretty great.

P.S. Don’t worry about suppliers and shipping just yet.We’ll get to this later onDay 4, when it’s time to choose specific items to add to your store.

Moving on, look for products that have high ratings, lots of orders, and lots of good reviews to get an idea of how successful that niche might be. Same goes for these other channels.

In your spreadsheet, jot down whatever catches your eye.

Just a note – whenever you want to get to DSers from now on, log into your Shopify account. In the left sidebar, go to ‘Apps’ and click ‘DSers.’ This is also the same place you’ll find the other apps we’ll install later.

2. Amazon

Check out theAmazon Best Sellerspage for more inspiration. You can also look at ‘Amazon Most Wished For.’

You can browse by category on the left sidebar to investigate the types of products that you’re leaning toward.

Look at the products’ ratings andwhat people are sayingabout those products in their reviews. You can get some insight into things that people love or wish were better.

Amanda checked out the ‘Clothing, Shoes & Jewelry’ category and found a scarf in the #2 spot –a perfect validationthat she was on the right track.

She realized that beanies are also pretty popular (which makes sense… if your neck is cold, your head is probably cold too). She kept this in mind for later consideration.

3. AliExpress

If you’ve never heard of it, AliExpress is owned by Alibaba, a Chinese powerhouse company that spans all sorts of sectors like retail, ecommerce, Internet, artificial intelligence (AI), and more.

阿里巴巴全球速卖通can be a valuable tool for you, because you can use it tolook for product ideas and also actually sell those items in your store.There are many companies that use AliExpress suppliers for dropshipping.

I strongly recommend going through DSers, because the process will be a lot easier for you. But that said, you can also go through AliExpress if you’re a daredevil like that.

We can get into using AliExpress suppliers and products later. For now, we’ll just talk about how to use the platform for picking and validating your niche.

Go to the AliExpress homepage. You can type items into the search if you have specific ideas, or you can use the‘Categories’ tabon the left sidebar.

When you click a category, it will show all sorts of good stuff likebest sellers, top stores (suppliers) on AliExpress, and top niches.For example, searching ‘Women’s Clothing’ brings up top ‘Chic’ stores, which must be a popular category of women’s clothing.

If you use the search bar, type in your query. On the results page, go to ‘Sort by’ and click ‘Orders’ in the dropdown menu. This way, you can seethe most-ordered products.

Take note that under the search bar, AliExpress also shows yousuggestions for related searches.This can be an awesome tool for getting more inspiration and validation.

Amanda typed ‘women’s fashion scarves’ and saw helpful suggestions for:

• Winter scarf
• Silk scarf
• Cashmere scarf

Sounds like silk and cashmere are pretty popular.

Once she sorted by orders, she could see the top-performers. Looks like plaid is popular – and if you recall,we saw a top-selling plaid scarf on Amazon too.

Right from the search results, you can see that these top results have great ratings, lots of reviews, and lots of orders. Good contenders.

As you can see, finding a good niche and product ideas is all about digging and observing. Keep going until you’ve found an idea that you feel good about.

Pick your store’s name

Typically, I don’t like spending too much time on picking a business name, and insteadaim for a short, snappy business name.

A short, snappy business name works best for several reasons: It’s easy to write, it’s memorable, and it seamlessly fits in the header area of an ecommerce website’s homepage.

For example, I named my sunglasses store ‘Sunyez.’

At that time, my aim was to find a couple of words which I can mix and match to make my store name. After a few minutes, I locked Sunyez in. The name appealed to me because it had a different spelling to ‘sunnies,’ which is a nickname for sunglasses.

You could alsotry combining 2 or more words,make up a word, ortweak an existing one. Trust me, it’s not that hard to figure out something compelling.

Amanda named her store ‘Evooli’ which is ‘I loove’ backward.

Good store names come from all types of ideas, though, and may be the same ones as rolling through your competitor’s head, which is why it’s smart tobrainstorm 3-4 business namesand moving on from there.

If you’re not feeling inspired or short on ideas (it happens to the best of us), you could take a few ideas from abusiness name generator. I personally use Oberlo’s.

It gives you hundreds of name ideas for your niche with the click of a button. All you need to do is put in a keyword that is related to the core concept of your store, and click ‘generate names’. The generator will then present you with pages listing dozens of potential names to choose or take ideas from.

After you decide on a business name, look it up on theWIPO Global Brand Databaseto ensure it is not associated with any other company – I did the same for Sunyez.

If the database says ‘no documents match your query’, you’re good to go.

As the last step, see if the .com domain is available for your business name onDomize. It’s a website that lets youquickly see domain name availability for .comand other extensions, highlighting available domains in blue and the ones that have already been taken in red.

Domize also has advanced features that enable you to createnew domain names.

The tool lets you quickly search for a wide range of terms by entering a comma-separated list of words, numbers or letters between square braces [ ]. You can choose things like endings, propositions, colors, verbs, and phonetic alphabets to come up with a new domain name.

For example, if you write [color]scarf in the Domize search bar, it will present you with domain ideas based on different colors.

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Day 1 Recap

Today was a beast of a day with a lot to cover (and to think about). But look at all the awesome things you accomplished:

✓Got your feet wet and explored the wide world of dropshipping
✓Picked a solid, promising niche (and an idea of the products you’ll sell)
✓Validated your niche by confirming that people really are buying these types of products
✓Opened your shiny new Shopify store – complete with DSers!
✓Picked a name for your business

Great work. Now get some sleep and I’ll see you tomorrow.