One of the biggest challenges is to find profitable and marketable products. But sometimes no matter how hard you rack your brains, the next great product idea is still difficult to achieve.
Of course, you may be lucky to come up with a good idea at some point. But if your product has no market demand, you cannot succeed either.
For entrepreneurs with limited time, a better way is to find popular products to sell online.
In this article, I will share 10 ways to find popular products to sell in your store. You see my videos or read the article to learn.
When you finish reading this article, you will be confident in the development of new products.
1. Find the products you love.
You may have heard this statement many times, but the reason I still want to put it on the first point is that it is really important. If you are not interested in the products you are operating, or do not love your work, just work. Then you will not be able to actively research the product in-depth and dig more value in the product. At the same time, you will lack the confidence and motivation to overcome difficulties in the face of obstacles. But passion can solve these problems well. Because you do this job, this product, not only for money, you love it. Love it from the bottom of your heart, through it you can reap happiness and satisfaction. So you have more motivation to persist longer and do better than others.
In this part we need to ask ourselves a few questions:
- What product categories and industries are I particularly interested in?
- Why would I be interested in them?
- What are the pain points and problems in my life I am seeking solutions to?
- What products and industries do my friends and family like?
- What are the common pain points and needs of people around me?
Passionate makes work into a career and turns products into arts.
2. Consider your professional experience and skills
If you already have a period of professional experience or related professional education background, it is very valuable to combine them with the products you are developing now. It is a safe decision to start from a field you are familiar with, and you will be more comfortable with it. At the same time, your professional experience and skills will make you appear more professional than your peers, and then stand out.
3. Analyze your competitors
3.1 Peers in the same industry:
By analyzing the advantages and disadvantages of your peers in the same industry, you can get rapid improvement. Top sellers often have their own strategies. Through study, you can recognize what products are hot in the current industry, learn their sales strategies, and know a deeper understanding of the product by observing their customer reviews. And avoid making mistakes made by others. Achieve that you have the hot products that your peers have, but the products and services you have may not be available to your peers.
3.2 Merchants with similar features in different industries
For example, suppose you are a brand owner of Bluetooth headsets, and you are running with content marketing and social marketing strategy. Then you can study how similar strategy brands in the smartwatch industry do. How do they output content? In which channels do they interact with fans? How do they build their brand image? There are many things you can learn to improve your content and social marketing.
In this part, we can ask ourselves a few questions:
- What products or services do they provide?
- What is their most successful product?
- What are they doing well, and where do they still need to improve?
- Who are their target customers?
- What pain points did their products solve for these customers?
- Assuming you are in charge of this product and service, what would you do?
By analyzing outstanding merchants in different industries but with the same features, you can get inspiration from different perspectives. It makes you jump out of industry restrictions and becomes an orange in a bunch of apples, making your goods and services look unique.
4. Know the market through partners
Logistics providers
The logistics provider has first-hand information of goods in the specific area he serves, including what products have been shipped most in the area during this period (may be different from your current industry). Where sellers gather in the area, and which living area has stronger purchasing power, etc. This information may inspire your product development and promotion marketing.
From supplier
Suppliers face different sellers directly, and the bosses of the same industry often chat and exchange information. So the suppliers grasp more information in-depth and are more sensitive to the latest technological changes in a certain industry. At the same time, the suppliers often know your competitors’ nearly needs and new products direction currently.
From clients
Customers are our direct service targets, and their needs are our business direction. We should not only solve customer problems but also treat customers as friends and establish more contacts. Through customers, we can directly understand the first-hand information of the local market. The common needs of your customers are the development direction with great potential.
5. View reviews of existing products
Whether from product reviews in your own store or from product reviews of brands and excellent sellers in the industry and product category you are interested in, you can get valuable inspiration.
During this process you can ask yourself the following questions:
- What makes customers like the most about this product?
- What are the main dissatisfactions and complaints of customers?
- How can I solve these problems?
- What other functions or improvements do customers expect the product to have?
- How can I upgrade and improve these functions?
By the way, if you neither have your own store nor can you be sure of the industry and product category you are interested in. Then you can try to locate the target population, such as age, gender, consumption bias, income level, and other characteristics. It is also a good direction to pay attention to the brands and products these people like.
6. Upgrade existing items
Some products may have been very popular, but as technology is updated, customer preferences change, or peers continuously join the competition, old products are becoming less competitive. But it is a pity to give up directly, after all, this product may be very good in appearance, quality, and profit rate. What should I do then?
At this time, you can consider upgrading its version, as we often see on computers and mobile phone programs. Through upgrades, your star product can keep up with the trend, continuously increase the value, and create the greatest profit for you.
Function upgrade
You can determine whether you want to improve a certain performance or add new functions based on customer feedback and industry technology updates on the basis of existing products. Actively communicate with your suppliers to achieve this. If the old supplier can’t do this, you can try to find a new supplier that can meet your needs, even if the appearance of the product is slightly different, it can just be described as one of the features of your version update.
Packaging upgrade
For those products that are particularly suitable as gifts, exquisite gift box packaging can enhance the happiness and satisfaction of the person receiving the gift. At the same time, well-matched gifts accessories can also really enhance the user experience. In addition, the upgrade in the selection of outer packaging materials can also appropriately reduce the damage caused by logistics.
For example, if you sell a mechanical watch with a stainless steel strap, in addition to a suitable box, tag, gift bag, a detailed instruction manual, and strap adjuster tool should also be matched. In addition, you can also add some gadgets to the suit, such as rings, bracelets and so on.
If you sell gaming chairs, you can ask the supplier to provide a few spare screws in the package just in case. At the same time, you should also provide the tools needed to assemble the chair in the package. Such as a hex key and wrench. In this way, the customer can install the items directly, and there is no need to prepare the tools by themselves. In addition, a Simple and clear operation manual is also necessary. Besides, to avoid damage during transportation, you can use a foam bracket to fix the main parts in the packaging box to avoid shaking, and it can also be shockproof, anti-fall, and anti-impact.
Rebrand update
You can build a brand image for your products. Add your own brand to the product. Customize a set of visual materials unique to your brand to make significant differences from the others, such as pictures, videos, and promotional materials, all rebranded according to your need. By combining the previous function upgrade and packaging upgrade, I’m sure you can make your products exceed your peers in all aspects，and stand out.
7. Identify customer pain points and provide solutions
What are the pain points? It is a persistent or recurring problem (as with a product or service) that frequently inconveniences or annoys customers.
If you can find the pain points of customers and provide products and services accordingly. Then accurately sell the products to these customers to solve their pain points, then the ideal profit is just around the corner. So pay attention to the inconveniences and small problems that you often encounter in your life, which may provide inspiration for your next profitable product. For an existing mature market, customer needs and pain points are clearly listed in your competitor’s website reviews.
For example, the well-known online food delivery platform “Ele.me”饿了么 in China covers 670 cities and more than 1,000 counties across the country, with 3.4 million online restaurants and 260 million users. The registered delivery staff of its “Hummingbird” instant delivery platform has reached 3 million. The company currently employs more than 15,000 people.
The inspiration for the creation of such a giant enterprise came from a few college students. When they playing games in the middle of the night and often feel hungry, they find it is hard to order takeaway. So they have the idea of making a takeaway platform by themselves. Then a few classmates created the Ele.me platform together and reached today’s scale step by step. These college students were Keenly aware of their own pain points and successfully solved them. This pain point is also the pain point of thousands of people who want to order takeaway anytime, anywhere.
8. Grasp the upward trending
There are many benefits to discovering product trends earlier than others. For example, establishing a leading place, occupying the minds of customers. In the era of digital marketing, entering the market earlier than any others can greatly save your advertising costs. But how to recognize the trend? I will show you next.
Google Trends
Google Trends is the most commonly used tool for observing trends. You can easily find the current popularity content people are most concerned about in various regions of the world.
Exploding Topics
Exploding Topics is a new software that scans various sources to obtain new information and understand current trends. Then select the hot topics that are popular or about to be popular. Through it, you can easily create content around these trends and improve your SEO and social media content. This tool also has a section dedicated to “products”. Through it, you will know what products have potential in the industry you care about.
Shopify’s trending products
Shopify’s blog will regularly update a list of product trends and share some potential products in it. The advantage of Shopify‘s trend list is that these data sources are all based on sales. Google can more fully reflect what people around the world are searching for, and this list of Shopify will tell you what products people are buying recently and the changes in sales.
Jungle scout
Jungle Scout is an Amazon platform research tool that can help you easily find products that are trending upwards, estimate the market size of the product, research keywords, and monitor competitors. Through it, you can understand which products will be profitable and easy to grow your business.
Kickstarter
Kickstarter, today’s largest crowdfunding website. There are many ambitious people here who are trying to turn creative ideas into products.
You can check the discover/popular on Kickstarter, the page filtered by funding earned, staff picks, or popularity.
Some other pages worth looking at:
Billions of people are active on various social media, where they can express their opinions and interact with others. Popular comments and categories on social media reflect the hotspots currently. But you should be noted that in terms of obtaining product ideas, not all websites have the same effect. I will introduce a few several social media that can be a real product inspiration goldmine.
Reddit is a social forum community, where there is a lot of social news for everyone to discuss. At the same time, it also allows individuals to submit content for others to participate in discussions and vote for different views. At the same time, according to different topics, Reddit divides them into thousands of subgroups (called subreddits). You can join the relevant subreddit community of the products and industries you are interested in to see how people are discussing the niches or product categories that you’re passionate about.
There I strongly recommend you to check out some of the subreddits:
Buy it for life: Durable, Quality, Practical
These two subreddits are completely focused on discussing products and product ideas, are valuable for reference.
Quora
Quora, a question-and-answer website. Here you can select topics related to your niche products and industry to add to your personal feed. Look at the views and ideas on those popular topics.
Pinterest is one of the fastest-growing social networks. You can check the “popular” section to see what products people are currently excited about.
Instagram is another social networking site that can quickly spot product trends. Search through different tags to see which products are more popular in your target market.
For example, if you are selling in the “men’s watch” niche, you can search hashtags such as #menswatch and #menfashionwatch to see what is most popular in your target market.
Others
In addition, search the trending hashtags on Twitter or topics on Facebook, or popular product videos and comments on Youtube can also provide you with inspiration.
Note:
Also note that some celebrities, bloggers, have thousands of fans and subscribers on social media platforms. These people have a huge influence on their fans and often become the driving force behind trends and fads. Therefore, grasping these key opinion leaders and cooperating with them can also boost your business.
10. Quick test the product
Thank you for your patience in reading the previous long talk. Congratulations you have reached the last and very important step.
There is a famous Chinese saying: Practice is the only criterion for testing truth.
Therefore, even though you have taken various analyses and are full of confidence in your new products, it is best not to directly invest heavily. Testing is a must at all times.
Test your new products in different promotion channels through some discounts and paid advertisements. And think of ways to leave customer contact information to collect product feedback.
Although, the success of advertising effects depends on many factors. However, through the initial test data, you can provide an important basis for your further promotion in the future.
You can know whether the idea of the product is practical through customer feedback? Are the performance and quality qualified? Who will pay for this product? Which promotion channel works best? etc.
With these data in hand, you will definitely have a more accurate decision to promote this product.
In summary:
There is no perfect method in the world, the one that suits you is the best. The important thing is to act quickly and discover in practice, and find the methods useful for you (usually a combination of several methods is better). I hope these methods can help you find the product that people want to buy and you also feel excited about it.
