Niche Markets
This tutorial contains dialog about niche markets. When choosing a drop shipper, it is important to make sure that you have your product chosen first. Because this stumps so many new online business owners, we thought it would be a good idea to address the beginning stages.
We will first define what a niche market is. We will then discuss why you want to focus on a niche market and then follow with an explanation of how to identify and choose a niche.
Webster's dictionary defines a niche market as "a specialized and profitable part of a commercial market: a narrowly targeted market." Here are some examples:
- Plus size women's clothing is a niche market of the larger apparel market for women.
- Athletic men's shoes are a niche of the larger male shoe market.
- Flax seed products are a niche of the gigantic nutritional supplement market.
An important component of choosing a niche market is that the niche target market is willing to spend money. If your target market is not willing to spend money to support their interests then you won't have a profitable site. A niche market must also have sustainable demand. One of the main reasons you want to focus on a niche market because this will /increase your chances for success. This in turn helps you to find the drop shipper that is right for your online business.
First, understand that when people use search engines to shop online they tend to look for products not for websites. If they already know of a website they just type the URL into the address bar, they don't use a search engine.
As a small or new merchant you may not have a large offline marketing budget to let people know about your website. You will be using online marketing to promote your site, and a large component of that will be search engines. A site focused on a niche will be easier to promote through search engines.
Another reason you want to focus on a niche market is that it will be easier to define who your target customer is. Once you understand your target customer it becomes easier to create a website that will appeal to potential customers and make them feel as though you have the item they are looking for. We hope this help put everything in place. By choosing a niche market, you can choose a good dropshipper, and you can create a website that is focused on your customer. Without the niche market your are guessing at everything from the very beginning.
When your customers know what they want to buy, they will be searching for a niche. If they are searching for something too broad they don't really know what they want and they will be less likely to buy from you.
You need to have a market that is focused and knows what it wants. Know what you want and then you will be able to focus your market and tell what they want. Sometimes you have to tell someone what they want and why they want it. When you're focused on a niche persuading them to purchase your products can be easier to do.
A niche market allows you to learn more about your product. As you learn more you will have an easier time creating a user friendly site that appeals to customers and you will understand the market better so you can sell to your customer at better prices, find more product sources and look for the trends in that market.
A niche market makes it easier for you to create repeat customers. It is much easier to sell to an existing customer than to conv/ince a new one to buy from you. If you have proven your product and your customer service people will come back time and time again. They will also have friends that like the same things.
When you have a niche market your customers will be able to pass on the word to the friends that enjoy the same things. If you sell someone an athletic shoe and they are able to find the exact Nike they want, because you have focused on the athletic shoe niche, it will be easy for that customer to tell all of their athletic friends where they found the perfect shoe.
Here is an example: someone typing pet supplies into a search engine may or may not be looking for something specific. They may or may not be buying. What will happen is they will get results for all kinds of things, and if they are looking for something specific they will get frustrated and generally go back to the search engine and type in something more specific so that they have fewer results to search through. Someone who is serious about buying will not usually be interested in browsing through extraneous pages. The people you want coming to your site are the buyers not the browsers. This does not mean that you won't get some browsers as well, but those browsers will be more qualified and hopefully you can, in time, turn them into buyers. Build a site for your target market, the buyers, not for the "maybes".
Drop shipping isn't as hard as some may think. However, it is easier to make it harder than it really needs to be. By trying to sell to the customer who isn't a niche customer, we can often make the sale much harder than it needs to be.
