How To Find Products To Sell Online in 2020

What to sell online? – Is the biggest and the most pivotal question that plays a crucial role in making or breaking your online marketplace business? You may have the most effective business plan, brilliant website design with cutting edge technology, best marketing strategies, but all these are like an empty shell without a great product to support them.

While you are on the quest of finding what to sell online, you should keep in mind the current scenario of the multi-vendor e-commerce business.

• Fierce Competition
• Saturated product markets and
• Convenience of consumers

Before you begin brainstorming branding ideas, website design themes, payment modules, customer service etc., you will have to decide on what products you will be selling. This in itself is the biggest strategy for the success of your marketplace business.
In these situations, you should put on your customer’s shoes and think from their perspective.

• What will you buy online?
• Based on what criteria’s will you browse products?
• How will you finalize on the product you buy?

These solely depend on,

• Ratings and reviews
• Popularity
• Cost
• Discount offers
• Brands
• Delivery duration and many more

Let’s dive right in and find out How to find the right product for you to sell on your Online Store.

There are two basic categories of products which you can sell on your online store.

1) Physical products: Tangible products that require inventory management, physical storage place, and delivery detailing.

Ex: fruits and vegetables, hardbound books, food, etc.

2)Digital products: Virtual goods that require no physical storage space or delivery.

Ex: e-book, music, movies, etc.

They can further be categorized into,

1) modified products: Products that everybody needs. The essential, high demand can be physical or digital products. These are what make up the majority of online sales.

Ex: clothes, provisions, stationery, toys, etc.

2) Niche products: Good and services that serve a specific type of product category and aims at a particular customer base. These are unique and custom made products that are usually manufactured in small batches and are run on-demand basis.

Ex: personalized passport holder, customized jewellery, herbal beauty products, etc.

Selling any one type of product is not feasible for a newborn online store.

For instance, if you choose commodity products there is a lot of competition from the giants like Amazon who can afford to buy in bulk and make a profit out of it. But, as a start-up, you will not be equipped for that. Hence, selling a combination of products is always the winning combination for any online store.

Next biggest question is How to choose what products to sell on your e-commerce platform.

Your products should,

1) Solve a problem: “If we tried to think of a good idea, we wouldn’t have been able to think of a good idea. You just have to find a solution for a problem in your own life.” says Brian Chesky, Co-founder of Airbnb.
You will definitely get innovative and unique solutions and products that the customers might dive in for

2) Have branding potential: Create a resounding brand message and can make a splash in the competitive e-commerce space. In other words, you want to build loyalty based on audience identity. Your products have to speak to your customer and oblige them to come back to your online store.

3) Be up and trending: It is of extreme importance that you stay up-to-date on recent, trending products and then launch your eCommerce site to capitalize on them before they hit peak popularity. Being a new business owner, hopping on trends early will give your business a huge upside.

4) Be pleasing to customers: Shoppers often spend more on their guilty pleasures, and in turn develop loyalty to brands that understand their obsessions and preference. Products that trigger emotions are the ones customers are attracted to.

5) Have the potential to customize: If your products are open for customization, you win! Giving customers the option to personalize is a perfect way to carve out a niche for you.

6) Not be fragile, heavy, occupy more space: These characteristics lead to additional expenditure from your pockets, in case they break, occupy more storage space, exceed shipping weight etc. So always choose products that are safe and easy to handle.

While on the product hunt also keep in mind too,

1. Seek business opportunities everywhere:
2. Avoid seasonal good:
3. Find a niche that is popular:
4. Find the sweet spot for pricing:

To get further clarity,

a) There are many study cases available to you already in the form of successful e-commerce platforms like eBay, Amazon, Alibaba, Etsy and many more.

You can learn a lot by just observing their businesses. These are the basics you should look up to before setting up your online storefront.

• Sales and Marketing strategies
• Types of products they sell and trends they follow
• How do they manage Sales and Delivery
• How do they manage Return and Refund etc?

b) Sign up for Newsletters: Keep yourself posted on the latest happenings on all the matters with regards to online businesses. Who knows? Someone else’s idea might turn out to be a game-changer for you.
Ex: medium, invision etc

c) Use Comparison Shopping Engines (CSE) for product analysis: Just like search engines, you have shopping engines to compare products based on features, reviews, prices, and other things customers use to find products. Most popular among them is – Google Shopping. Other notable ones are PriceGrabber, Shopzilla, Nextag, pronto and many others.

d) Use Analyzing Tools to find what’s trending: It makes sense to look at what people are searching for to find good products to sell online. Google Trends is one such platform which shows what’s trending on Google. It also allows you to compare products against one another as well.

e) Optimize with SEO framework: Keywords are what potential customers use when looking for products. Keyword research is considered to be one of the most high-return activities when starting an online store. You can use tools like Google Keyword Planner to analyze the average search volume for your products and get prepared for the competition.

f) Extensively go through product reviews: The value of social proofing is huge. Take advantage of it. Websites like Quora, Trustpilot, amazon customer reviews, Angie’s list and many more provide customer reviews that will help you decide on eCommerce niche products and ideas. Social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook also will be handy.

There are a few red flags you need to be careful about too.

• Products might be out of stock
• Be wary of hackers
• Be aware of competitive products; No competition means no sales.
• Your products might lose its value over a period of time

Now that you know what to sell and how to find the perfect product for your multi-vendor eCommerce platform, here are a few stats regarding which products are currently in trend.

During this pandemic time, in particular, you can see what products have gotten their sales spiked tremendously.

On a general note, here is the latest statistics on products that are selling like hot cakes Worldwide.

Always keep in mind, trending items which drive profit for certain eCommerce sites might not always work for others. So it is very important to put pen to paper and thoroughly study and research on the niche and products you want to sell online before finally zeroing on them.

Hope the above pointers helped you in the process.
Do share your experience and views with us!