I have a question about how you would suggest an e-commerce retail company identify new product categories to get into. The main question is how to discover new retail categories? What tools online will help you discover that? So - I am wondering how you suggest a company research a new category first? Besides the obvious tools like google KW tool or google insight or other similar KW tools. If I am selling shoes, maybe I want to sell washing machines on another site - so I want to be totally open to any category. I mean how would I know in the first place that washing machines are a great category??? Thats the key It there a tool or service that identifies the hot selling categories online for retailers? In the past we have gone into hot categories like GPS and even Vacuum Cleaners - both with tons of search volume. But competition was super strong and margins really poor - even if you inventory product. Any help here to have a standard way to find new categories would be great and I am sure the other readers would be interested as well. thanks so much
Let me recommend there is a lot more to life than Google keywords. Go to the public library and ask for help. There are companies who do this exact type of research full time and publish their results for everyone to see. You can find labor statistics, consumer price indexes, recent sales for different categories of goods and services in almost any region of the world. My suggestion is that you simply buy the Sunday edition of any newspaper published in a major city like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and look through the business, money, real estate, and other sections that would help answer your questions. You need to read offline and conduct some secondary research of your own.
No easy tool. Have a look around the web, brainstorm your ideas and then take each idea and wonder if they would be feasible and a good use of time or not.
Right, I dont want to use google KW tools. I am wondering what other services out there help identify and discover categories. Just like we have top business rankings - are there top category rankings? thanks
Thanks KivaLight, this is what I am afraid of, that there are not tools for this. Hopefully there is something we both do not know about - as I mention below there are top rankings of businesses and top blogs, how about top categories or verticals?
The consensus is to use Amazon and look for best sellers "off the beaten path." Items with 50+ reviews are definitely in demand. Home and garden is a good place to start. Electronics are extremely competitive.
there must be some tool online that allows one to see what is hot and what is not. ebay pulse gives a good idea of what is selling on ebay for example
TeraPeak might help you a little bit. It's an eBay marketplace research tool, but it can be useful to identify certain retail trends and pick in-demand products or categories. On a personal note, i would rather discover niche retail categories than good retail categories. Like you've mentioned, super hot categories have super strong competition and super low margins. It's better to go for a niche low competition high margin category.