How To Choose A Profitable eCommerce Business Idea

By: Darren DeMatas 

Your dream of sitting on the beach and running a successful e-commerce business starts with choosing the right niche and validating your business plan.

I’m dreaming. Are you?

If you’re planning on diving in to e-commerce (like we are), the first step is to research and decide what niche to attack. If you want to compete in today’s competitive e-commerce world, you need to build a sustainable brand.

Churn and burn ecommerce business models fail.

Since this is our first adventure into this world, we wanted to conduct our own analysis. We analyzed over a 100 niches and narrowed down our choices to 30. With a million product to sell on Amazon, there’s too many small ecommerce business ideas out there.

To avoid making mistakes along the way, we asked some of the top e-commerce entrepreneurs in the game the following question:

 What is the single biggest mistake entrepreneurs make when choosing their first e-commerce niche?

Their responses are below (and in no particular order):

Sam Mallikarjunan

The biggest mistake is going after catalog depth instead of trying to own a buyer persona. The idea of customer centricity and solving for customer lifetime value instead of transactional margins is still something that hasn’t sunk in for many entrepreneurs, and it involves solving for earlier in the buying cycle and using up-sell, cross-sell, and re-selling strategies to retain customers once you’ve acquired them.

Shabbir Nooruddin

The single biggest mistake entrepreneurs make when choosing their first e-commerce niche is they don’t do enough research (I know I didn’t!). Often, a niche may look promising from far away, but as you get deeper and deeper in it – usually after launching and investing some money into – more competitors turn up, customers seem a lot more finicky, and it seems a lot more difficult than it actually was.

Linda Bustos

A true niche means there’s not many competitors relative to demand. If you’re fortunate enough to truly find a niche not already infiltrated by Amazon and others, understand that if you’re successful, it won’t be long until competitors spring up. Consider vente privee, subscription boxes, dollar razors, yoga wear, moustache wax…

Invest heavily in your brand, and never rest on your lead. Customer loyalty is hard to come by, especially in the online age. Always be acquiring new customers — this may include “joining” competitors like Amazon marketplace at the point your offering is no longer niche. It may be diversifying and expanding your product offering ahead of the competition.

It may be exploring new business models like subscription boxes. Don’t take for granted that anything successful inevitably will be copied.

Read More at >> https://selfstartr.com/ecommerce-business-ideas/