Can anyone give me there opinion on finding a niche and selling a unique kind of product, or expand to all kinds of products? For an example, just selling old school shoes or selling a wide array of shoes. My thinking is that finding one specific product will be a lot easier when competing for top spots in search engines for those specific keywords relating to your product.
If you find a TRUE NICHE MARKET, that ONE product can get you LOTS of money, just make sure to ALWAYS have a backup plan and NEVER stop working on the next BIG THING.
I appreciate any advice. So if the niche product just isn't making sales, what could be a back up plan? Ellaborate please.
if you will focus on particular product then sales and traffic for your store will be reduced. So better you do wide range of sales on online store.
That really depends. I had a client that tried to sell lots of products, and didn't make it because he failed to understand that his competitors were big supermarkets. You can't beat the competition if you don't have the means for it. If you're a bit less connected to marketing brands (like the most of us), you should go for content, quality to your customers, and niched product base. Target your customer's needs, don't be a black marketeer.
If I were you I would concentrate on single product vs wide range of products. Lets say for instance you were selling a particular brand or model shoe from manufacturer to your customers. Your customers maybe looking for particular style from that manufacturer vs every make and model which that same manufacturer may also make & put out. Research what your customers are interested in & looking for, before jumping in so you're not wasting money and time trying to figure out what they want. Then start your ecommerce business getting the inventory that you'll need to sell to them & marketing your website. Best of luck.
Do you think this works the same for instead of a certain brand of a product, but a certain style of a product. For an example, vintage style shoes?
With your example "vintage style shoes", you'll have to do your research to find out how many customers are exactly looking for that particular style of product. It can work, but like I said originally do the research before diving in.
Took me three years to receive the best piece of advice ever! Internet Guru Mike Filsaime at a World Internet Summit Conference.... "research and decide on your niche... then focus totally on it". Seriously, forget about the "next big thing". There'll be another "big thing" tomorrow, and the next day and the one after that. In the meantime, you're focusing totally on your new niche and working towards building a reputation... and a mailing list. Good luck.
@ChristineR - solid rock. I totally agree, and that's exactly what I recommend to anyone starting-up a new business. Moreover, up until you get bigger and have a large customer base, niched products give another benefit - the high-payroll customers. When you are focusing on a niche, you're actually focusing on more targeted customers, which ultimately are willing to pay more for your products/services.
In today's market hypothetically if I wanted to sell shoes I would look for shoes that where recently released in the last few months. Let's take Nike Air for an example. Let's pretend that it was released this week. If I was selling shoes I would try to capture the search engine share of that keyword. You might ask why, I will ask you why don't you try compete with keywords that have been in the search engines 10+ years? The reason is many of these websites at the top of search engine result pages have a huge link network that drives where they list within search engines. By targeting newly released products it evens out the competition for those keyword spots. Meaning each webmaster has a chance to compete against those (newly released products)keywords with a fresh slate. You stand a higher chance to capture more visitors by following these trends. This doesn't mean you can't ever possibly compete with high profile keywords, it is very unrealistic to do so when starting out. So create content that caters to high profile keywords but don't expect a huge amount of traffic to come from them till you build yourself website authority.. Your traffic will come from the content/products you create around trends.