If you've been searching for a video on how to pick the perfect Shopify business idea, you're in the right place.
By the end of this blog post, you'll have all the knowledge you need to pick the best Shopify business idea for you and move forward with creating your Shopify store.
Choose Your Shopify Store's Niche
In my opinion the best kind of Shopify business idea can be found at the intersection between what you know and what the market wants a solution for.
To put it simply, the idea has to be something that fills a need in the market and something you have a personal interest in.
With that in mind here is a definition of what a Niche is below ⬇️
Once you find an idea that you have interest in and that the market wants, that's your Shopify Store's niche
Now I could have just told you to pick a profitable Niche like fashion or home and kitchen products but profitability is only one half of what you want in a great Shopify business idea.
The other half is that the idea needs to be something that you have interest in or have some knowledge on.
You'll find a lot of videos online that say that you don't need to like something to be able to make money from it. And while that's true I find that the most difficult part of this whole process has to do with consistency.
If you're working on something you actually like or already know about, you're way more likely to keep working on it and not quit at the start when things aren't working out yet.
Starting a Shopify business is already really tough so make it easier on yourself by picking something that you know or have interest in already.
But remember in order for it to be a great idea it has to be something that you know the market actually needs.
Why Picking a Niche Matters: Clothing Store Example
For example let's say you're really passionate about clothing and you want to start a clothing brand.
Unless you have an idea to meet a need that's not currently being met in the clothing industry and you've done the research to know for sure that it's a real problem people want solved, it might not be the best idea to just start a random clothing store.
Now if you're someone that has a big following online, starting a clothing store could work out for you but if you're not you'll need to figure out a way to overcome the competition from the thousands of other Shopify clothing stores that exist on the market today.
So if you can't figure out a way to differentiate your clothing store from the other clothing stores by solving a problem your customers have, chances are that business probably won't be successful.
Okay so now that we understand that, let's talk about how you can figure out what the market actually wants.
3 Free Tools to Use For Shopify Store Market Research
The key to figuring out what the market actually wants is to do something called market research.
I found this wonderful blog post about niche researching tools for affiliate marketing but honestly a lot of the tools mentioned can be useful for us as well.
The blog mentioned 3 free tools that you can use to figure out if any of your current interests or knowledge fits with what the market wants.
And those tools are:
I'm going to run through an example of how you can use these tools to figure out if your niche has a market demand for it.
For the example we're going to imagine that I just love animals and want to start a Shopify store in the pet niche.
Using Google Trends to Do Market Research
Google Trends is a tool you can use to track popularity of a search term on Google.
You can look up broad search terms and get very specific and see how the traffic for that term has changed over the years.
Using this tool you can figure out if a niche is very popular amongst people that use Google, which is pretty much everyone.
You can even track the term's popularity over the course of the last few years to see if it's something that has been trending or if it's something that people have always been interested in or if the interest for it has been decreasing.
So we're going to start off by looking at the broad search term pets.
If I type in pets, by default I see the current search traffic for the term in the United States over the past 30 days.
Now what's cool about Google Trends is you can go in and you can adjust the default settings to whatever location you want and set the interest over time filter to look at any period of time you want.
I think a good rule of thumb is to probably look at the interest over the past 5 years.
Even if the search term is not viral and exploding with search traffic if it's trending in the positive direction that's usually a good sign.
What's also cool about this tool is that you can scroll to the bottom and take a look at where it says related topics and related queries.
You'll notice that some Search terms and related topics will have the word breakout next to them which implies that that search term is exploding in traffic.
At this point you can take a look at the related topics and see which one catches your eye.
When I did this I found a breakout topic called Dog Grooming
I figured this could be a pretty good niche because a lot of people love their pets and want to take care of them and I could potentially build a Shopify store around physical products and digital products to help people groom their dogs.
I also set the filters on Google Trends to look at the interest over time for dog grooming over the last 5 years and also check the filter for interest on web search and on YouTube.
In all cases the term dog grooming seems to be trending upwards so I know I can move forward to the next step.
Finding Pain Points in Your Niche with Answer Socrates
Now that I have a sub Niche inside of the broad pets category I can move on to using Answer Socrates.
Answer Socrates is a tool you can use to find commonly asked questions about different things on the internet.
This is really good for identifying keywords that people use when searching up things regarding this niche.
You can use these keywords to figure out what kind of content people want and what their pain points are regarding your niche.
Figuring out the pain points of people in this niche is super important so you don't want to skip this.
Either way once you understand what all the problems and pain points are, all you would need to do is create or offer products to solve these pain points.
You can also create content that answers a lot of the questions that they have asked which will help you to build a brand and build trust in this niche.
Take Your Market Research to the Next Level Using Sub Reddit Stats
Subreddit Stats is a great tool you can use to find trending Reddit sub communities for your chosen Shopify store business idea.
You've probably heard of Reddit before but if you haven't,
You can pretty much find a subreddit Community for almost anything, so it is the perfect tool for us to figure out if our idea has a audience for it and what problems they are facing.
When using subreddit stats you want to follow these steps:
- First you're going to find the name of the subreddit for your chosen Niche or topic --- in my case, Dog Grooming
- Then type in the name of the subreddit into subreddit stats
- Lastly you'll just see if the data for that subreddit shows a growing subscribers, posts per day, comments per day
If the subreddit for your Niche seems to be growing, that's a good sign that there is a lot of market demand for that niche.
And as you can see when I did this for the dog grooming subreddit, the number of subscribers, the number of posts per day and comments per day were all going up.
That told me that the dog grooming Niche might not be a bad idea for a Shopify store.
And keep in mind even if your Niche is super competitive, as long as you can solve problems people have in that niche and answer the questions that they have with the content you create, you can make money in that niche.
For now don't even worry about competing with other Shopify stores in the niche, just focus on trying to provide Solutions to the pain points people have in the niche and being as consistent as possible.
Bonus Content: 3 Niches That Are Always Profitable
When I was doing research on Shopify niches I came across this YouTube video that spoke about 3 Recession Proof niches that you can start a business in regardless of how good or bad the economy is doing.
The 3 Recession Proof Niches are:
- Health
- Wealth
- Relationships
Now these are all three broad categories but if you were to pick a sub Niche inside one of these three categories, there's a good chance you'll always have customers.
These three categories are known as Evergreen niches which means there will always be a need for products and services in them.
So if you have no idea what to pick and one of these three interests you, please feel free to pick one.
But if you do pick one you're going to want to drill down into a sub niche so that you don't make your offerings too broad.
Free Gift: Get a Copy of My Perfect Shopify Business Idea Checklist
Click the link below to get a free copy of my pdf checklist that you can use to help you pick a profitable Shopify Business Idea
Hope you enjoyed this post and see you on the next one
