Therese
If you are thinking about opening a Shopify store, join the club. Shopify is one of the most popular eCommerce platforms as of May 2021, with 20% of the marketshare. Second only to WooCommerce, the allure of this platform is great functionality and a visually pleasing site right out of the box.
Shopify handles many of the technical aspects of running an online store such as hosting and payment gateways. The shop owner can focus on their products, marketing and order fulfillment. With many print on demand and dropshipping integrations built right into Shopify, a business owner can even have a successful store without ever having laid hands on their own product.
A quick look at the Shopify app store shows that they currently have 193 different dropshipping integrations including popular ones such as Oberlo, DS-ers Aliexpress and Spocket. For Print On Demand, you can choose from 111 providers including industry leaders such as Printful (Whom I use for my POD dropshipping), Printify, and teelaunch.
What Is Shopify?
Shopify is shopping cart software. You may have heard the term SaaS, software-as-a-service before. This is a prime example. Shopify is an all-inclusive online store platform that provides businesses with a complete online store from hosting to abandoned cart reminders. This subscription-based service, starting at $39 for a starter shop, lets you develop, source, promote, sell and ship your products to your customers.
Shopify is not only for dropshipping. You can sell your own products or products you source from vendors and ship yourself. It is a very easy to use shopping cart software for beginners through advanced users.
The hardest part of this whole equation is going to be picking a successful Shopify niche and product and marketing it til the cows come home. You will have to do these things well and stick with it to make a successful store, but you’re free of the majority of technical hurtles.
That said, let’s take a look at picking your winning product niche.
Top Shopify Niche Categories for 2021
According to Shopify’s blog, they have shared with us that these are the best Shopify dropshipping categories for 2021.
Shopify Top Niche List
- Health and personal care
- Wardrobe and accessories
- Kitchen and grocery
- Home and bedroom
- Office products
- Tools and home improvement
- Camera and cellphone accessories
- Gaming
- Car accessories
The categories are quite broad. To really focus your shop, you’re going to have to narrow down your product and target market.
Why To Choose A Product Niche When Selling Online
“If you chase two rabbits, you won’t catch either one.”
or
“Jack of all trades, master of none.”
You don’t want to be chasing rabbits or be jack. You need pinpoint precision focus on your product niche. This focus will help you market the heck out of your shop with very targeted, very specific SEO…targeted at very specific customers and user-groups.
We want to have, for example, a custom cat shoes store that we market with a custom cat shoe lovers Instagram account. We optimize our store with long-tail keywords such as “custom cat shoes for cats with tiny paws.” Very specific. Look at niches within niches, called a sub-niche.
The folks who are failing at Shopify are making stores with no direction such as, “Ed’s Emporium of Craft Beer, Knitting Needles, and Hobby Aircraft Accessories.” I’m being funny, but in all seriousness, if you don’t hone in on a niche, you’re going to have a hard time with marketing and SEO and ultimately traffic and conversions.
We are selling keywords.
Finding your niche, and the keywords and marketing to promote yourself as “The Brand” for your specific audience will give you a heads up over the generalists who can’t find the keywords and laser focus you will have on your target audience.
There are a million profitable niches out in the world, so how do you find your winning opportunity? Let’s take a look at how to identify niche markets for 2021 using keyword mining. Keyword mining is the process of searching for a list of keywords or phrases, aka long-tail keywords, that are relevant for a specific business.
Using Keyword Mining Tools To Find The Best Shopify Niches in 2021
You have to a look at the keyword data to help you turn your hunch or research into something concrete.
My Personal Method for Keyword Mining
- Look at social media product categories and their associated hashtags
- Plug those hashtags into Google search with Keywords Everywhere enabled to see which are popular searches
- Further mine the top keywords from Keywords Everywhere using Google Keyword Planner to get long-tail keywords and associated ideas
TIP: If you open at least one Google Ads Campaign, you will get access to this tool under the tools & settings tab in the upper right corner of desktop version.
Start by taking a look at social media tags in a particular category you want to explore.
Let’s take a look at Instagram. I opened the search bar and typed in coolers. I pulled up a list of accounts with the name coolers in them. I pulled up a random account and looked at their keywords. #huntinggear #fishinggear #outdoorgear #campinggear.
Ideas i’m taking from that are: coolers for hunting, coolers for fishing, coolers for outdoors, coolers for camping. I’m then plugging those phrases into google search with my keywords everywhere chrome extension enabled.
The data here tells me that coolers for fishing is a somewhat seasonal product, notice the search traffic drops to almost nil in winter months. It also tells me that there is a huge demand for coolers, and a good demand for marine coolers and fishing coolers. People are contemplating purchasing a fish bag versus a cooler. Some want fishing coolers with wheels.
Now, take that info and re-enter it into google keyword planner.
After seeing these results, I see that I would rather focus on fishing bag over fishing cooler. But, better yet, I would focus on fishing backpack. BOOM, NICHE. It’s a solid niche. Actually, they are several solid product idea here: fishing cooler, fishing bag, fishing backpack, fishing tackle bag.
Take this research method as deep as you want to go down that rabbit-hole.
You can also use this method to find an unsaturated Shopify niche. Just look at search volume to find a product that is searching, but maybe not having a higher volume. I would be comfortable with a product in a sub-niche that is getting a search volume of several hundred to 1,000 searches per month, unsaturated but potentially still profitable.
I’m going to use the same keyword mining method I did above to find a potentially profitable product within several of the top Shopify categories.
Health and Personal Care
Instagram search: Personal Care > Found IG hashtag #personalcare > which led me to hashtag #collagen > Plugged collagen into Google Search with Keywords Everywhere and found “Collagen Face Masks” was a top search.
I entered collagen face masks into Alibaba and found a good product for that keyword:
This makes me laugh because I realized I actually buy these eye masks on Amazon all the time. #WINNINGPRODUCT
Wardrobe and Accessories
Instagram search: Accessories > Found IG hashtag #braceletcharms > Plugged bracelet charms into Google Search with Keywords Everywhere and found “Rose Gold Charms” was a top search. I entered Rose Gold Charms into Google Keyword planner and decided to stick with that as my product.
Alibaba had these cute rose gold charms wholesale. Bracelet charms could be a solid niche for you.
Kitchen and Grocery
Instagram search: Kitchen > Found IG hashtag #kitchendesign > Plugged kitchen design into Google Search with Keywords Everywhere and found “kitchen design ideas” was a top search. Google keywords planner showed me that “kitchen backsplash ideas” was a related keyword phrase, and peel and stick wall tiles was a highly searched product within that sub-category.
Found these mosiac peel and stick wall tiles on Alibaba. You could do an entire niche store of peel and stick wall tiles for the kitchen backsplash area.
Further Research Into Having a Successful Shopify Store
I hope I introduced you to an easy method for keyword mining your way to a successful Shopify store. While part of the equation, there is much more to learn about having an online store that stands out from the crowd and converts to sales. Consider taking the Ecommerce Empowerment Shopify Basics Course to jumpstart your Shopify business.
This 13 lesson course covers the setup and operation of your store, plus shares valuable wholesale and dropshipping contacts for product sourcing. Through videos, slide decks, and training manuals, this course will help get you on the fast track to Shopify profitability.
As always, never stop learning and happy selling!
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