3 Quick Ways to Evaluate Your Niche Before You Start Building Your Shopify Store

Zac Hansen
Jul 27, 2017 · 4 min read

Test Before You Launch

Selecting and validating a niche is one of the biggest questions that most new drop shippers have and it can be an incredible stressful process. In reality, there is a number of easy ways that you can validate your niche before you even launch your store! This is an important step as you don’t want to spend a lot of time working on your Shopify store if you are entering a dying niche. Here are 3 quick ways to find and validate your niche.

1. Google Trends

Google Trends should be one of the first places you go to evaluate your niche. With Google Trends, you can quickly see the health of your niche at this current time. Google Trends does not tell you search volume but does show the health of the niche comparing search data across a date range.

As you can see, drones compared to chokers are currently growing in popularity while chokers are staying static

As you can see from this graph, chokers and drones receive a lot more search traffic compared to novelty pillows. That also means that they have a lot more competition.

If you look at novelty pillows on their own, you can see that Google is expecting their popularity to increase. With a little more research, the novelty pillow niche could be an excellent direction to go as they would have much less competition then the other 2.

Conclusion: Google trends is a great tool to ensure that your Niche is not on a major decline. If it is, that means it is a fad and will most likely die off in the coming months.

2. Instagram

Our partner Tim Kock has a great article about how to quickly find niche ideas through Instagram. Rather than writing this all out again, here is a great example of how to find a niche through IG by going deep through hashtags. One great tip Tim has is to reach out to potential customers and ask their opinion about potential products you would be looking to sell!

Full Link to Tim’s article here

FEMALE FISHING

I checked the AliExpress Bestseller (Sports) and saw that fishing equipment appeared 6 times. Pretty good, huh?

Then I just jumped over to Instagram and put in the general hashtag #fishing. I scrolled through the suggested hashtags and somewhere #fishinggirl appeared.

#fishinggirl (52.619 posts)

also (maybe) some good ones: #fishinggirls #girlswhofish #girlsfishtoo #girlsthatfish #fishingchicks #ladyangler

Congratulations, you have a niche. Now you need products:

Because it would make absolutely no sense to open a fishing equipment store which just contains the same products every other store contains you have to stay with your niche: girls.

The first thing I was thinking of was to bring on some colors. especially white, rose and pink.

I even found products for you:

PINK FISHING LINE

PINK FLY ROD

PINK FISHING LURES

[you should be able to find more products if you take your time]

Go through IG and look for common trends. What are people posting about? What kind of items are celebrities wearing? Instagram has incredible information right at your fingertips that you can spend time going through.

3. Ask Your Potential Market

With Instagram, Twitter, FB Groups + Pinterest, you should have no problem finding a number of potential buyers in your niche on a social networks. One of the easiest way to get product and niche validation is to simply ASK. You can reach out to these people and simply ask them if they would be willing to give you some feedback in exchange for a coupon code. Send these people pictures of the products you are willing to sell and see how they respond! If they ask for a price, that is an excellent sign.

Easy Way to Find a Niche: Your Credit Card Statement

This one is so under looked but such an excellent resource! Go through the past 6 months of your credit card statement and see what you have been buying. If you are buying these items, there is almost a guarantee that other people out there are looking to buy similar items.

Put In the Work to Find and Validate Your Niche

Don’t rely on online courses or eCommerce guru’s to find your niche. If you spend the time looking through the web, your environment and run the numbers, you are bound to find your ideal niche.

Having Trouble Finding Niche Ideas? Here Are a Few Additional Resources From Around the Web to Find Your Niche!

Google Keyword Planner

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Zac Hansen

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Turning Ice Cold Traffic Into Flaming Hot Buyers

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