Author: EcommercePlatforms

Selecting Your Ecommerce Niche: Create Your Perfect Online Store

If you’re thinking of setting up your own ecommerce store, then you might be wondering where to start. You may have an awesome product idea that you want to turn into reality, or you might just want to make some big bucks fast.

Whatever your reasons, one of the things you need to consider when you’re about to delve into the world of ecommerce is selecting your niche.

Selecting the perfect niche for you can be the difference between a super successful store, or having to sell it on for 50 dollars after a year of crashing and burning.

In this post, I’m going to talk you through selecting your perfect ecommerce niche.

What is an ecommerce niche?

If you’re new to the world of ecommerce, you might be wondering what I’m referring to when I say “niche.”

Your niche in ecommerce refers to the distinct segment of the market that your business falls into. So, where your products fit in the grand scheme of products, and how they are categorized.

Niches vary in size: for example, electronics is a broad niche. Wireless headphones is a narrower niche that falls under that broader one.

Picking a niche means that you have to build your brand and your products around this idea, and market to a target audience.

Why do you have to pick a niche?

Essentially, picking a niche for your ecommerce store means that you’re more likely to be successful and make money.

Sure, there are huge online companies like Amazon that sell everything under the sun to a huge audience. But they’re the biggest online retailer ever, and they’ve now grown so much much that they have a total monopoly on the broad-niche market (and I’d say, transcending niches entirely).

If you’re just starting out as an ecommerce entrepreneur, it’s best to market your store to a particular audience, and do a few products really well. For higher success rates, it’s way better to target your audience with precision, and appeal to their wants and needs.

You don’t want to spread yourself too thin and try to please everyone. If you don’t have a clear idea of who you’re targeting, you’ll miss the mark with your products and marketing, and end up losing money rather than profiting.

Aim narrow with your niche to start with.Once you’ve conquered that, you can broaden your range and start building new ideas on a stable foundation.

How do you select your perfect niche?

There are various factors to consider when selecting the perfect ecommerce niche for you.

Below I’ve listed the things I think all wannabe ecommerce store owners need to take into account when selecting their niche.

Identify your passions and interests

Your ecommerce store is going to take up a considerable amount of time, regardless of whether you’re doing it as a side-hustle or leaving your job to pursue your dream of being an entrepreneur.

So you need to find a niche that you feel passionate about. An area where you’ve got a decent amount of knowledge and you’re happy to dedicating your time to.

If you’re not interested by your concept or the stuff you’re selling, you can quickly lose motivation and no longer push yourself. Things aren’t always easy when running an ecommerce store. Selecting a niche that you care about means that you’re less likely to quit, because you’re invested.

Identify any problems you can solve

The next step you can take to select your perfect niche is to identify any problems that you could potentially solve for your customers.

Ideally, you need to design a product that solves a problem for your customer, or makes their lives easier. This could be something revolutionary — a completely new invention — or it could just be a cheaper or higher-quality version of something already on the market. You’re still benefiting your customer in some way because you’re providing them with an alternative which saves them money, or lasts longer.

If you’ve already got an idea, then perfect. If you’re struggling to combine problem-solving with a topic you’re passionate about, then do some research.

Conduct surveys or research sessions with your target audience. Get a feel for their needs and desires. Identify any gaps in the market that you could fill.

You can also research keywords around your niche using tools like Jungle Scout or Ubersuggest. If you know what people are searching for on Google — any answers they’re looking for, or pain points they have — then you can use these to direct your ideas.

Look at online Q&A sites and forums like Quora to find out what questions people are asking around your topic. This can also guide your problem-solving.

Check out the competition

It’s always important to do competitor research when you’re starting any project.

If you’ve got an area that you want to set your ecommerce store up in, make sure you identify and research the competition. Find out who the big players in your niche are, but focus on who your direct competitors are likely to be.

You can using various online tools to discover more about your competitors, such as how well their site is performing, traffic, backlinks, keywords use and more. Analyzing this data will help you to understand where you can slot into in your niche.

Track ecommerce trends

When you’re selecting your niche, you need to get a feel for the ecommerce market and trends. You don’t want to pick a niche for your ecommerce store that’s actually on a downward trajectory and is losing consumers’ interest.

Google Trends is really useful for researching trends. You can track interest over time (and vary your time range), as well as split your data through location and more.

The main decision you need to make is whether you’re going to go into an evergreen niche or trending niche.

An evergreen niche is one that remains at a steady level — it has everlasting appeal, doesn’t rely on trends or fads, and you’re very unlikely to get huge dips. Evergreen niches are stable and reliable — good if you want your ecommerce store to have longevity.

A trending niche is one where interest and sales spike suddenly over a smaller period of time. Take for example, fidget spinners or unicorn-themed products. They’re influenced by fads and trends, are normally quite specific, and have a huge rise in popularity before falling.

Both have their benefits, so you just need to decide which route to go down. Ideally, you could merge the two and pick an evergreen niche with trending products.

Decide if you want to go micro niche or broad niche

Another factor to take into consideration when you’re selecting your niche is whether you want to go micro niche or stick to a broader niche.

A micro niche is one that focuses on a very specific topic or market. You go as narrow and in-depth in a niche as you can, establishing credibility and dominating specific searches.

There are some great positives: your store makes money by generating a smaller but steady level of traffic which turns into loyal customers. Plus you have less competition and you end up as a specialist in your topic.

The negatives to going micro niche are that you have limited traffic volume, and you’re dependant on a very specific market and small range of products (or just one). This means that if you attract any competition to your micro niche, you are vulnerable to getting bumped out with no back-up plan.

Broad niche stores are safer overall: you aren’t as at risk, and you have the flexibility to expand, draw more traffic, and grow to multiple revenue streams. All great benefits.

As for downsides, you’d have less credibility as a broad niche store, and you’ve got lower conversion rates (although this is boosted by casting your net wider). Marketing is also harder.

Again, you need to decide which of these options fits you best when you’re making decisions for your ecommerce store.

Examples

There are all sorts of great examples of micro niches and broad niches. If you can imagine it, chances are there’s an online store for it out there already.

Have a look at this website for an example of a micro niche store:

Image credit: Unicorn Rhapsody

Unicorn Rhapsody is an online store which specializes in selling unicorn-themed clothing, products and accessories. Their demographic won’t be huge, but they’ll have a distinct group of loyal customers who are willing to spend their money on unicorn goodies.

Want broad niche? Many well-know websites have made a success from being incredibly broad — such as Amazon and ASOS.

ASOS is a very popular online clothing store that fits under the very broad category of “fashion and beauty.” It sells anything from clothing to shoes, to face and body products, to homeware and stationary. ASOS haven’t dug down into any of these specific niches, but instead, sell a wide range of products and therefore appeal to a large audience of customers.

Image credit: ASOS

As for an evergreen niche, there are all sorts of different online stores that have placed themselves in an evergreen niche. You can choose anything from healthy living, weight loss, babies, pets, relationships and more as an evergreen store idea — none of these concepts or areas are going anywhere.

Check out LighterLife to see an online store in an evergreen niche:

Image credit: LighterLife

There will always be a demand for weight loss and health websites. You can sell your products and concept, which will always remain relevant, but vary your marketing depending on trends and seasons. This will help keep your evergreen online store topical and fresh, despite maintaining a constant theme.

As for a trending niche ecommerce store? You’ll need to get good at predicting what is going to become popular soon, or jumping on a bandwagon fast.

At the moment, a trending niche is definitely the beard care niche. Beardbrand is a British online beard care store that sells products, kits and tools for beardy men:

Image credit Beardbrand:

Beards have only started a come-back in the last few years, but as it is now a hugely popular trend, entrepreneurs have been capitalizing on this with beard care products.

As you can see, there are all sorts of things to consider when selecting your perfect ecommerce niche. Hopefully this post will have helped you to understand the important of choosing the perfect niche for your ecommerce store, and has answered some of your questions.

If you have any further questions about ecommerce niches or advice that you’d like to share with store owners just starting out, write to me in the comments below!

March 25, 2019
What You Need To Do For A Secure WooCommerce Site
The average ecommerce startup doesn’t exactly have a huge budget to spend on getting established and building up a base of loyal customers. To begin with, and often for a long time after, money is going to be very tight — that means that frugality is essential. Fortunately, the march of technology has made it possible to get a fully-functional store very cheaply.

How, exactly? Well, WordPress led the way by making it quick and easy to start a blog or a broader website without any experience or the budget to accommodate much beyond basic web hosting, and soon enough dedicated ecommerce systems started appearing to do the same for online retail — then WooCommerce came along to push WordPress ahead again.

The WooCommerce plugin is free and intuitive, making it perfectly viable to rapidly turn a standard WordPress site into an ecommerce store. But that accessibility comes at the cost of the strict security you’d get with a fully-hosted store. Ultimately, the security of a WooCommerce store will come down to the owner — so here’s what you need to do to secure yours.

Adhere to strong password procedures

It doesn’t matter how strong a security system is if you fail to adhere to all the generic password requirements that apply to all forms of digital security, such as:
- Using strong passwords. Don’t settle for the 6-letter name of your childhood dog. You won’t need to hit 30 alphanumeric characters — just hit 8-10 characters at a minimum and avoid using full words that can easily be guessed or brute forced. Try a password generator if you need some assistance.
- Keeping passwords secret. It’s useless having a strong password if you readily mention it to acquaintances, leave it written on a post-it note above your office monitor, or protect it in a password vault which itself has a weak password.
- Changing passwords semi-regularly. The longer you have a password, the more vulnerable it becomes to brute force attacks. Change your passwords on occasion (it doesn’t need to be too frequent) and you’ll avoid this danger.
- Finding and removing any forgotten password vulnerabilities. Because legitimate mistakes do happen, systems need ways to get around forgotten passwords, often using verification details to confirm identity. If you rely heavily on your Mother’s middle name (something anyone could find), then you’re risking the safety of your entire system.
Failing to have secure passwords is simply reckless, and generally a waste of time, effort and resources put towards strong internal security.

Follow all software updates

Systems almost never ship with flawless security. Over time, people have the opportunity to look more closely at how they work, prodding and testing them to see how they respond to different approaches — and sooner or later some vulnerabilities will be found. When this happens, the software developer first needs to become aware of it, and then they need to produce and release a patch to remove those vulnerabilities.

But even if this happens very quickly (so quickly that hackers don’t have enough time to take advantage of the vulnerabilities before the update is released), it can’t fully address the problem because updates are almost never mandated. Within a closed CMS that works through the cloud, updates can be fixed, but a local WordPress installation will only update when you allow it, or when you tell it to.

As such, if you leave a WooCommerce store unaddressed for several months, you’ll inevitably return to the admin dashboard to find that there are numerous updates available. And if your store is doing a lot of business, you may be highly reluctant to install updates, knowing that it will cause disruption to your operations and lose you revenue.

Now, not all updates are urgent, but you must install any and all essential security updates. How can you tell? Read the update notes, and follow any relevant news. You’ll be able to see which updates are vital and which are optional, than act accordingly.

Don’t allow unnecessary system access

Even if someone has great intentions, they can still cause enormous damage with admin access, so it isn’t something you should ever just give out without a lot of thought. You can’t always get away with being the only person in your business with admin access, of course — there may be times when you need to enjoy some vacation days, or have other things you need to deal with besides the regular business operations.

The key is to simply make sure that you trust someone fully and believe in their competence before you grant them admin access. They need to not only be reliable but also have a strong understanding of what they can and can’t do. Otherwise, they could get lost on the dashboard and end up accidentally deleting your entire product range (make sure you protect it).

Think of your WooCommerce store as an asset that you need to protect because it’s your livelihood, your passion project, and a potential target for investment. Website valuation is a complex process, yes, but one part that’s extremely simple is security assessment — if your system has several unnecessary admins, how will possible investors, partners or suppliers view the state of your business?

Carefully vet your other plugins

It’s very unlikely that you’ll have the WooCommerce plugin installed in isolation. You’ll probably have themes installed, as well as speed plugins, SEO plugins, image optimizers, review plugins, and numerous other extensions. One of WordPress’s greatest strengths is its flexibility, but it comes at a cost — every fresh plugin you install provides a new point of vulnerability, and has the potential to cause conflict with another plugin.

To avoid any security issues, try to keep your plugin array to a minimum. Only have a plugin active (or even installed) if it’s adding something meaningful to the store. Check up on the developers and confirm that they’re trustworthy: do they update regularly? Post about relevant industry topics? Tell you about compatibility with other plugins and systems? The whole point of SecurityNinja is to ensure that WordPress sites are kept safe, and it’s reflected throughout the content of this website.

And remember that every plugin will need updates, so if you have concerns about updating the basic system, consider that it’s risky to update 20 plugins at the same time — if something goes wrong, you need to disable and reenable the plugins one by one to find the culprit. Keep your set of plugins limited to the high-quality essentials and your security will be far stronger.

WooCommerce is a fantastic ecommerce CMS, particularly for small-to-medium businesses, but its great versatility also constitutes a security concern. Follow these steps, proceed carefully, and listen to security experts — everything should be fine.
March 19, 2019
How To Select The Best Hosting For Your Ecommerce Store
It’s no use having a fantastic ecommerce store if the hosting isn’t up to par. You might as well work on an impressive indoor art installation and then lock the doors and shutter the windows so no one can actually see it. Your store host makes sure that everything works as it should — that people can reach your store and order through it without experiencing any major delays.

But it isn’t as simple as choosing from a set of web hosts ranked on a simple linear scale, because each has its advantages and disadvantages. You must think carefully about what your particular store needs: what platform it uses, what speed it demands, and what level of support you’ll likely need from a host.

Here are some tips for choosing the optimal host for your ecommerce store:

Find a hosting provider that suits your store’s platform

While many hosting providers — most, in fact — will gladly (and competently) host a website using any functional platform, it’s common for any given hosting provider to adopt a strong focus on one specific platform. The practical consequences of this vary, but if a host mentions a preference for a certain platform, you can reasonably infer several things:
- They’re familiar with its unique challenges.
- They can make the setup process straightforward.
- They have some understanding of how the platform is updated.
- They can meaningfully predict its resource demands.
This is important because you’re always going to encounter some issues with your CMS of choice, no matter how polished it may be (and no matter how many resources its creator can bring to bear). When that happens, you can of course try to resolve them yourself, or seek support from the wider online community — but being able to go directly to your web host will save you a lot of time and effort.

For example, SiteGround is a very popular host that places a lot of emphasis on its use for WordPress (and WooCommerce) websites. In fact, it has committed so strongly to that angle that WordPress.org actually recommends it specifically. If you’re interested in using WooCommerce for your store, then, you’d get excellent results with SiteGround.

Read plenty of varied reviews

Critical reviews from expert sites aren’t likely to prove sufficient when you’re trying to get an idea of what you can expect from using a hosting service. They’re exceptionally useful in general, of course — consider the nature of this site! — but they don’t tell the whole story.

In many cases, for instance, a hosting service will offer a critic an extended trial of a service, and have the opportunity to allocate extra resources to ensure that everything performs optimally. This leads to the resulting review reflecting an experience that has little in common with the service provided to the average user.

Similarly, consumer reviews aren’t always particularly useful. Conventional users can’t be relied upon to do much research before they offer their thoughts — an unsatisfied customer might bemoan the lack of a particular feature that’s actually present in the system (having simply missed it), or slate the company for its pricing despite comparable services being no cheaper.

What’s truly important is that you form your own impression in the end: one that’s as well-rounded as possible. Only then will you be able to make a fully-informed decision about which hosting provider to choose.

Carefully consider support packages

You may find a hosting provider that boasts a great amount of relevant expertise, but simply having that expertise won’t do much if they prove unable (or unwilling) to share it with you. And when things go wrong, you need to know that you can get some assistance in a timely fashion. Savvy advice that only arrives a week after your site stopped working won’t help much.

Very often, beginners to ecommerce don’t give too much thought to support requests, assuming that they’ll be able to figure things out as they go. This is a mistake. The quality, nature and convenience of your hosting support will prove vital. Once you’ve established a solid shortlist of viable contenders, narrow them down using support as the primary factor.

At a minimum, consider each of the following:
- Their active support hours.
- How quickly they can respond to requests.
- The channels they provide (e.g. email, telephone, live chat).
- How they come across in conversation.
- What limitations (if any) they place on their support services.
You might find that a support package that sounds good actually has small print stating that the company can decide to stop providing support if it feels that you’ve placed too many requests. Do you want to risk needing assistance during a time of crisis but seeing a fair-use policy cited as a justification for leaving you in the lurch?

Wrapping up, following this process — lining up hosts that cater to your platform, filtering them using reviews, then filtering them down to optimal candidates based on support provision — should leave you in a strong position to decide. Commit time to the matter now so you can proceed with confidence that your store will prove robust.
March 11, 2019