How to Choose a Niche for Your Dropshipping Store

17 min readSep 20, 2022

You can follow my experience to discover how to create a brand-new online store from scratch, from coming up with the “big” idea to making your first sale.

Along with that, I’ll demonstrate how to create a professional brand for your online store. I’m Nicole Martins Ferreira, and in case you don’t know who I am, I work in marketing and have built online stores since 2013.

I wanted to give you a behind-the-scenes look at what I do when creating a new online store because I frequently get messages from new store owners asking for advice on how to create a store, generate sales, and create a brand they can be proud of.

I want to show you all that you can find high-quality products to sell and that, yes, even dropshippers can create an amazing brand.

So, I’ll let you know when to change course as well as some effective problem-solving techniques. I can’t predict what will go wrong because I’m documenting my journey for you as it happens, so all I can do is act to fix it.

Follow along with my journey if you want to learn from my wins and challenges. This weekly series is as real as it gets. You’ll get a true inside look at what it’s like to build a dropshipping business.

You’ll learn how to select a niche, select the best theme, the step-by-step procedure for setting up a Shopify store, how to select products for your store and order samples for quality assurance, the process for designing a store, and of course marketing over the course of the next eight weeks.

In order to create a store for the duration of this weekly series, I will select a niche at the end of this article. You’ll learn what I look for in a dropshipping niche, which tools I use, and how I gauge popularity this week as I break down the exact procedure I adhere to for selecting what niche to build a store in.

So let’s get to the main issue.

Should I choose passion or money in a niche?
Evergreen Niches vs Trending Niches
Tools for Finding a Niche Market Amazon AliExpress Trend Hunter Trending Products Blog Posts Wikipedia’s List of Hobbies Google Trends
Amazon
AliExpress
SimplyTrends
Trending Products Blog Posts
Wikipedia’s List of Hobbies
Google Trends
Do you need to be an expert?
Using Intuition to Choose a Niche
FB Search
A Bit More Research

Should I choose passion or money in a niche?

In order to “do work they love,” some people need to be passionate about what they’re selling. However, others become motivated as their bank account grows and could care less about what they’re selling. But the truth is that in order to truly build a successful brand, you’ll probably need to strike a balance between the two.

When it comes to pursuing passion, it doesn’t always make you the success you envision yourself as, so there has to be some interest within the niche that keeps you inspired to further explore who your audience is to better align your content to them.

How then do we strike a balance between the two?

What is the best way to identify a lucrative market where we actually want to build a recognizable brand?

Finding lucrative niches within your areas of interest, making sure your product pricing enables you to turn a profit, and selecting a niche for which you would simply enjoy creating content are all ways to achieve this.

Let’s look at what you ought to be considering in order to identify your passions.

If you want to select a niche based on your passions, think about the following:

Which blogs and websites do you visit the most?
Which pages or accounts do you follow on social media that you enjoy?
What type of online stores do you buy the most products from?
If you asked your friends to describe your biggest obsession, what would they say? (Feel free to ask them)
Are there any products that you collect?
If you had $1000 to spend on any product you want (not need), what would you buy?

In order to compile a short list based on my personal interests, I will now respond to these questions.

My favorite blogs and websites are:

Shopify (the coolest ecommerce blog)
Lulu’s (their dresses are amazing)
Fabletics (I love buying athleisure products)
Dynamite (fashion retailer with a great style)

I like these social media pages:

Berta (bridal wear)
Blake Lively on Instagram (I like her sense of style)
Relationship Quotes for Couples (I follow a lot of quotes pages in general)

Which kinds of online retailers do you frequent the most?

Fashion
Fitness
Beauty
Non-online stores: coffee, travel

According to friends, my biggest obsessions are:

Pugs
Running
Daiquiris
Traveling
Britney Spears

Merchandise I gather:

Leggings and sports bras
Books
Shoes
Makeup

What I’d spend my $1,000 on:

Vacation to Italy, France, Azores, Egypt or Japan

I’ll make a shortlist of passion-based niches now that I’ve responded to those questions:

Fashion
Fitness
Beauty
Travel

Asking yourself these questions can help you decide on a niche based on how much money you could potentially make in it:

Which online retailers have been skyrocketing in popularity lately? And what products do they sell? (Focus on a few specific niche-based retailers instead of brands like Amazon)
Which product are the most popular right now? (I’ll show you how to find some of these later in this article)
Which products have the highest profit margin?
Which niches have the biggest audiences?

Evergreen Niches vs Trending Niches

Consider this: Fashion, beauty, gaming, and weight loss are examples of evergreen niches; in contrast, a trending niche, also known as a fad, is a niche that experiences an instant rise and fall in popularity.

While you can make fast money on a popular niche like that, you’re just as likely to be late to market given how there was a sudden peak and decline.

We can benefit from quick sales from a trending product that is skyrocketing because the fashion niche, which is evergreen and has endured the test of time, has proven to be a long-term business. When I choose a new niche, I usually look for an evergreen niche that frequently has trending products. For instance, fashion has seasonal trends; at the moment, athleisure, lace, and florals are popular within the fashion niche.

I typically look for an evergreen niche when creating new stores that has endured the test of time and has a rotation of trendy products that will facilitate online sales.

Since I haven’t started my research, I’m still unsure of the niche I’ll select at this time.

Tools for Finding a Niche Market

To help me choose the best niche for this case study, I’ll be using a variety of tools in this section to generate shortlists of potential niches. I’ll do this to see if I can spot any markets that have the potential to be very lucrative or that are in line with my interests.

I’m going to start by looking at the big two: Amazon and AliExpress. On both of these websites, you can easily find the trending niches. I’ll look at what niches keep coming up and try to find any potential sub-niches that would work well with them.

Amazon

Since I’m still in the research phase, it doesn’t make sense to try to capitalize on this holiday, but it’s still worthwhile to look for any patterns within these gift guides. Right now, Amazon is showing a lot of Mother’s Day gift ideas.

I make a mental note of it, but keep browsing. I keep seeing jewelry, candles, handbags, home decor, fashion, watches, makeup, towels, and footcare.

Prior to starting my research, I had my heart set on the fashion industry, but after seeing the letter boards, I believe I have discovered a product that would be interesting to market. I then look through Amazon’s Quirky & Unique category to see if there’s anything that stands out, and I discovered a few items in the outdoor gardening niche, art supplies, letter boards, journals, and phone cases.

I then looked through the Interesting Finds category, where I kept seeing items related to plants, mugs, pets, gay pride, kawaii goods, and tea.

Notably, some of the searches are tailored to me specifically, which helps keep the focus on my own interests and may be beneficial if you’re looking to start a business based on your passions.

My selections from Amazon are as follows:

Letter boards (really excited about this as a product)
Beauty
Handbags
Jewelry (those who sell jewelery online make usually enjoy good margins)
Fashion
Outdoor gardening

AliExpress

Don’t be afraid to follow your instincts. I admit that I use a little bit of intuition when trying to come up with a niche to start an online store in, but when browsing the top ten best sellers nothing really jumps out at me.

Phone accessories are typically quite popular, so it’s something that can be taken into consideration. However, the main issue with the top ten best selling products is that they’re extremely competitive, and it doesn’t mention how long they’ve been selling this product for. In this case, the high order volume may be attributable to a product that has been in demand for two years rather than a recent hit.

When choosing what to sell, you should take order volume into consideration, but it’s important to keep in mind that if the order volume is extremely high, the product’s popularity peak may have already passed. While it’s always a good idea to sell a product that’s proven to sell, you don’t want to sell a product when it’s past its peak.

You can use the best sellers for various categories listed below the top-selling products as a source of ideas when choosing the products you want to sell.

Men’s top sellers include sunglasses, dad hats, backpacks, and wallets; women’s top sellers include fashion, jewelry, handbags, lingerie, and accessories; and the electronics category is dominated by phone cases, indicating a market opportunity. The most popular item in the sports section is fishing gear, and the fake eyelashes, makeup brushes, and concealer in the health and beauty section highlight makeup and related products. The fact that the majority of kids’ products are clothing shows how well-liked the fashion niche is. Other categories include Home and Garden, which sells kitchenware like knives, Automotive, which sells items for cleaning cars, breathalyzers, and driving accessories.

The following items are on the short list for AliExpress:

Phone cases
Fashion
Men’s accessories
Makeup products

Remember, I don’t know anything about fishing, driving, or kids, so those niches weren’t excluded due to a problem with the niche, but rather due to my lack of knowledge about the niche. After observing current trends, feel free to select the niches you are most interested in for your short list.

SimplyTrends

If everyone is selling the same product, you can easily sell it too. Starting your store with top-selling items can help you quickly expand your customer base and increase your sales.

Start With Winning Products

SimplyTrends gives you a good idea of what products are worthwhile selling at the moment, also called winning products. Once you have locked winning products in the market, you can easily nail down a niche to start in. Follow the below three ways to find winning products with SimplyTrends:

Discover Real-Time Sales

With SimplyTrends you’ll find the hot-selling products in real-time by staying in the loop of the products that are actually selling across 1 million Shopify stores. With just one click, you can access statistics such as the accurate number of prices, orders, ranks and revenues, and other details of products.

Get Inspiration from Winning Ads

From a list of profitable ads across social media platforms, you’ll get inspiration on what products are trending in the market. Meanwhile, you can learn how they are selling by checking the ad details and visiting the product page. These are all presented on one page of SimplyTrends for your convenience.

Catch Opportunities with Trends

SimplyTrends also demonstrates real-time trends on Google for you. Through a glance at the data of how many times the product is being searched, you can easily judge whether it is hot-selling for the time being. Moreover, an array of information such as CPC, SEO difficulty, and competition level can help you make the right marketing decision.

Perform Competitor Research

Additionally, competitive research can be used to verify your business idea. Find out the performance of brands in your niche, and you will get an idea of whether it is worth to start your business in this niche. The full-featured tool SimplyTrends can also help you with competitive research, in addition to its winning product hunting functionality.

Input the domain, keyword, or the name of your competition with SimplyTrends, you will get their data in one place, including consumer analysis, website traffic data, product details, and marketing channels. Pay more attention to their website traffic data, as knowing how much traffic and engagement your competitors receive will help you determine whether or not they’re making money.

Meanwhile, the tool can keep you on track of your competitors’ every move. With just a click on the follow button, you will be informed when your competitors take any action- from product launch to Facebook ads publish, in a twitter-like feed.

Find Suppliers and Run Your Business

You have decided on your niche and have winning products in your brain. Now you can use SimplyTrends to instantly find suppliers direct from factory AliExpress, with key information like prices, orders, and customer ratings for your quick and easy reference, just by dropping an image of products. Many eCommence freshmen fail in their business because they never find a profitable supplier. Go with this tool and find the best supplier.

Wikipedia’s List of Hobbies

You can browse through Wikipedia’s list of hobbies, which includes every hobby you can think of, to find a niche that immediately appeals to you. If any of the hobbies on the list match your own interests, you can browse the list or conduct in-depth research to identify lucrative market niches within these categories.

The great thing about hobbies is that typically people will join groups and spend money to pursue their interests, so some of them have a big enough market that you can build an entire store around it. Finding a market to sell to is thus made possible.

So let’s combine all of our shortlists into a single mega shortlist to identify any potential niches.

Google Trends

Some niches were broken down into sub-niches to better determine what to sell and who to target. To save you time, these are the niches that showed stability or a slight growth on Google Trends.

Women’s fashion is growing slightly and is predicted to keep growing.

Given that menswear is an evergreen market, it has shown stability and will probably continue to do so.

Beauty is an evergreen industry, but after noticing eyeshadow pop up a few times, I decided to directly look it up and it shows a growth; the downward trend is probably due to seasonality and a lack of data for the month of May.

I also looked at eyelashes in the beauty category because they are currently on the rise and would go well with eyeshadow products. Eyelashes are frequently sold in Facebook groups.

The product is likely to increase throughout the spring and summer. The dip is likely caused by insufficient data for the month of May, but beach accessories, specifically pool inflatables, are seeing a strong upward trend. These products tend to be popular on Instagram with influencers sharing their images online.

Worth considering a store built around women’s bags, such as crossbody bags and totes, which have experienced strong growth.

As demonstrated by its consistency from 2004 to 2018, the market for home decor is one that never goes out of style and is therefore likely to maintain its steady popularity for many years to come.

This could be a staple product or a fad, but it may still be too early to tell given the letter board market’s strong, rapid growth, slight dip, and recent recovery.

With new phone case designs for new models, the popularity of phone cases has grown over the years and is probably going to keep growing.

It’s possible that new trends within this niche will emerge that can be tapped into. Sneakers have experienced steady growth, and in the past LED sneakers were quite popular.

Smart speakers exhibit growth with a decline that is probably seasonal.

Athleisure, leggings, and sports bras all saw an increase in traffic, and since the weight-loss and fashion niches are perennial, it’s likely that this is a trend that will continue.

If I combine the Do it Yourself Home search volume with another DIY niche, it is not only stable but also high, and I can concentrate on making money from these kinds of products.

The popularity of the DIY movement and those looking for a less expensive alternative to real flowers are probably to blame for the steady growth of fake flowers.

You can look for products in this niche that serve particular animals knowing that the niche will probably continue to be popular for years to come. The pet niche has seen stability. The dog niche has seen growth.

Do you need to be an expert?

It can get a little tricky, though not impossible, to build a successful brand without having niche experience. While you don’t need to be an expert in a niche, you might want to have some experience in the niche you’re planning to serve.

You can either build an audience using influencers on Instagram or you can fake it until you make it by running Facebook ads to find the right target audience. And all of this can assist you in making sales.

You can outsource these tasks, but when you’re starting out, most entrepreneurs have a do-it-yourself attitude to keep their costs low. However, you might find it difficult to create blog content that resonates with readers or create social media posts that bring traffic back to your store.

Being somewhat knowledgeable in a particular niche can also inspire you to continue running the company through slow periods or help you decide when to give up.

Using my own areas of expertise, I will then narrow down my shortlist.

Here is my list: Now that we’ve compiled a shortlist of popular niches, you can refine your own list based on your interests, areas of specialization, or things you think you can market effectively.

Women’s fashion
Letter boards
Fitness apparel

I selected women’s fashion and fitness apparel because those are the two markets where I spend the most money and because, as a frequent shopper, I’m always up to date on the latest styles and best retailers in those markets.

As a writer, I also selected letter boards because I believe I can create some original quotes to add to the letter boards for social media. Additionally, I thought this would be a fun product to market.

Using Intuition to Choose a Niche

My instinct is telling me to choose the letter board niche after spending a week browsing various websites and perusing popular products.

Like some of you, I can’t tell how successful it’ll be before I start, but my mind keeps imagining what the social media feed would look like, what the copy would sound like, and what the blog could become. The product simply seems marketable based on my marketing experience.

But the truth is, every product has an audience, and it’s a marketer’s job to find it. Logically, I’m not sure how viable this niche is.

I’m going to conduct some more in-depth research now to find out who the rivals are in this market, how they promote their brands, and where this product is promoted the most.

FB Search

You can look up particular brands in your specialized market. Facebook Search is a special tool that I’ve personally used numerous times to help gauge the level of engagement social posts receive. It also serves as a competitor analysis tool that enables you to view the posts your rivals and customers make.

I’m shown pages, photos, marketplace posts, links, and public posts with those keywords because letter boards is a specific niche, and I can use those exact keywords in the search bar.

This enables me to determine the frequency of my Facebook posts, which should ideally range from 1–2 per day in order to gain a competitive edge and scale quickly. Most of the pages in the niche have a few hundred or thousand followers, but I notice that most are inconsistent with their posting schedule. Some haven’t posted in months, while others don’t post every day.

However, looking through these pages gives me good direction for my ultimate plan. I’ve noticed that the majority of Facebook pages have quotes and humorous expressions on their letter boards, so I’ll need to put my own spin on it while staying true to the niche.

I can better understand how to design my store’s appearance thanks to this before I begin construction. There are many wedding, pregnancy, business, and religious letter boards, most of which are used for wedding signs, baby announcements, home decor quotes, or to inform users of a sale. Looking through photos of the product helps me comprehend some of the markets I can target.

A Bit More Research

Before you begin creating your store, there are a few more things to consider. After all, you want to be certain that there is a market for your niche before you invest time and money in marketing.

The following is a quick list of what to look for:

Which social platforms do people market your niche?
Are there Facebook groups for your niche?
Are there targeting options on Facebook for this niche?
Are there forums where people discuss the niche?
Do people host events for this niche?
Do influencers post about this niche?
Are there fans for your niche?

Since there is a proven audience on these platforms (Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook all have popular letterboard pages and content), it is best to focus there. Why? Because it is better to be on the platforms your audience is on. Since these four platforms all rely heavily on visual content, I should put a lot of effort into creating eye-catching photos and videos as I build my store.

I don’t really see this as a drawback, as the engagement on social pages above tends to be high so I press on despite the lack of Facebook groups, forums, or events for this niche.

While there are no targeting options for letter boards, I can find my audience by focusing on the wedding, maternity, and do-it-yourself niches.

Customers may be sending their photos in the hopes of being featured, which can help us grow our pages, even though most don’t have influencers post about this niche.

There is a fan base for letter boards, which are typically found within the DIY community. Some people use letter boards for their wedding decor, while others might use it for their social media posts and photos.