How to Find a Niche for Your First Shopify Store

Finding a niche for your first Shopify store is always a daunting task, as it’s the general theme that your store is going to revolve around and can directly relate to your income.

As the years march on, niche selection gets a little bit trickier, as there is quite a bit of market saturation. However, with a little bit of consideration and planning, you can easily infiltrate even the most saturated niches and get a piece of the pie.

There are several things you want to take into consideration before selecting a niche.

The first major thing that you want to consider is your own passion. What do you really like to buy or sell?

For me, and this isn’t my niche but I’m using this as an example, I really enjoy men’s fashion. It’s a hobby I pursue in my day to day life and I could talk about it forever. 

Therefore, if I were to start a store selling men’s fashion, I’d have a very easy time talking about it, researching it, and selling it because I’m passionate and knowledgeable about the topic. 

When you’re actually invested in your niche, you’ll be able to put a lot more work towards it without burning out because it’s not something you’re totally unpassionate about.

Do you like jewelry? Find a subcategory of jewelry and sell that. Are you really into golf? Seriously consider a niche golf site. Any niche can sell if you know how to sell it.

Now, obviously you don’t just want to spring on the first passion you can think of. When you think of something you’d like to sell, you also need to make sure that there’s a demand for it and that it’ll actually sell, and there are several ways you can go about this.

So, once you’ve thought of a passion area that you wouldn’t mind selling in, it’s time to do some research. There are several areas you’ll want to check out.

First of all, head on over to Amazon and search for your niche to see what comes up. If there’s a lot of items pertaining to your niche with a decent amount of orders, it may mean that it’s a good idea to sell the items as there’s a customer base that’ll buy it.

Additionally, check out AliExpress and do the exact same thing. This is also a good thing to do because you’ll be able to make sure that there are enough items related to your niche to be able to fill your website with them.

Sort by orders and see just how popular the items are, and you’ll have a very good idea about whether or not people are looking to buy items within your niche. 

Finally, and I’ve used this strategy a lot, you can type this phrase into Google: “site:myshopify.com ‘niche’” and insert whatever niche you’re thinking about pursuing into the space that says ‘niche’. This will then bring up a lot of Shopify sites that are selling this specific niche.

So, if we insert golf into that spot, I’ll be able to see if there are a lot of stores selling golf items as well as get an idea as to how well those stores in my niche are actually put together.

Additionally, check out the individual websites. Are they selling a lot of different items? Are their social media accounts popular, indicating that there’s a large customer base? 

Just do some research and see if there’s a lot of people already making good money with this niche. If you do decide on this niche, you now have a website to totally copy if you wish, and that’ll save you a lot of time and testing.

If you're brand new to eCommerce and need to do some experimenting before fully committing to an idea, you can make a general store first and fill it with a bunch of different items.

Obviously you don’t want too much variety in your items, but enough variety to populate it with several related niches at once is key.

I would recommend creating what I call a "general niche store", which is a general store that still focuses on one particular niche, such as beauty or outdoors.

This will allow you to test different niches and see if there’s one that sells really well and stands out from the rest.

Once you find this niche, you’ll be able to make an entirely new store focused solely around this niche, and you won’t have to worry about it succeeding as much because you already have proof that you can sell within this niche.

You don’t even have to switch away from a general store when you find a niche.

However, I would highly recommend that you do so, because of the fact that it’s a lot easier to brand and market a general store as the customer base is a lot more focused on one area instead of a broad market.

You can learn more about branding in this blog post!

Additionally, and I need to include this because a lot of people don't understand this - you need to make sure that your store's niche has the ability to solve a problem.

While this isn't the point of this article, it's very important to note that you'll have a much higher chance of success if you are solving a problem for the customer with your product.

Simply presenting products that are mildly nice and interesting usually won't give you the results that you're looking for.

You need to give people a reason to buy from you, so take that into consideration when picking your overall niche.