How to Choose the Best Products to Sell Online (Beginner’s Guide)

One of the toughest steps when diving into eCommerce is figuring out which products to sell in your online store.

Selecting the right items can make or break your shop’s success. Many beginners find this step tiring, but it doesn’t have to be. With a clear strategy, you can confidently pick products that will attract customers and boost your sales.

Across our brands, we choose the products that we develop carefully so they still align with our goal – to help small businesses compete with the big guys. And in this beginner’s guide, we’ll walk you through the simple, step-by-step process on how to choose the best products to sell online.

Why Build an Online Store in the First Place?

Building an online store has lots of perks. Maybe you want to earn extra money in your free time. Or perhaps you already have a small business and want to reach more customers. If you’re feeling adventurous, you can even build a brand-new business from scratch.

Whatever your goal, an online store makes it possible and opens up lots of opportunities. Here are more reasons to start selling online:

• Reach More People: Unlike a regular brick-and-mortar store, an online store can have customers from all over the world. You can even create a multilingual website to cater to your diverse target market.
• Spend Less Money: Running an online store can save you a lot of cash. You don’t have to pay for expensive rent or utilities like you would with a physical store. Plus, you avoid costs related to store equipment, maintenance, and other overhead expenses. 
• Be Flexible: You can manage your store from anywhere with an internet connection, whether you’re at home, traveling, or on the go.
• Grow Easily: You can add new products, including digital goods, or try different things as you grow without needing a bigger space. Experimenting with trending items, seasonal products, or entirely new categories is easier, too.
• Always Open: Your store can make sales 24/7, even when you’re asleep.

How to Choose the Best Products to Sell Online

Now that you know why building an online store is a great idea, it’s time to tackle the next big step: choosing the best products to sell online. Here’s a breakdown of the steps we will cover in this guide:

Ready? Let’s get started.

1. Basics of Choosing Products to Sell in Your Ecommerce Store

Before you start looking into products that you can sell, there are some basics that you need to keep in mind. Let’s look at some of the most important ones first.

1. Choosing Your eCommerce Platform

First, you need to choose a platform that you want to use to sell your products.

Choosing the right eCommerce platform for your online store is important because it will affect your choice of products and how you do business.

WooCommerce is the most popular eCommerce platform in the world. It is easy to use, and you can use it to sell all kinds of products while accepting payments using multiple payment gateways.

However, WooCommerce is not the only platform out there. There are some great WooCommerce alternatives that could be better for you, depending on what you are trying to sell.

If you lack technical skills and want a quicker way to build an online store, then you may want to look into Shopify. It’s a fully hosted solution that takes care of all the technical stuff. The catch here is that you will be paying a little more, and your costs will grow as you make more sales.

For a side-by-side comparison, see our article on Shopify vs. WooCommerce, which discusses the pros and cons of both platforms.

2. Shipping

Shipping has a huge impact on the success of an eCommerce store.

A study conducted by Business Insider discovered that higher shipping costs are the #1 cause of all abandoned shopping carts online.

You will obviously want to select products that you can ship at lower costs or for free. You can also recover abandoned carts by collecting emails throughout the buying process using optin popups with a tool like OptinMonster.

If you only plan to sell digital products (music, video, software, eBooks, and so on), then you don’t have to worry about shipping because the products will be downloaded by customers online, and you can track those downloads to see what sells the best using software like Easy Digital Downloads.

3. Inventory

Do you want to manage inventory and keep products stocked? For that, you will need storage space and inventory management through your eCommerce software. Keeping products in stock will increase your business cost.

On the other hand, dropshipping solves this problem. You can select products that are shipped directly by the manufacturer or supplier.

4. Price

You’ll need to find products where you can offer a competitive price to your customers. If the product you are selling is more expensive than your competitors, then obviously, that would discourage many first-time buyers.

2. Types of Products That You Can Sell Easily

There are many different kinds of products that you can sell in your online store. Let’s narrow them down into two major sections.

1. Commoditized Products

These are products that everyone needs and are sold by many small and large stores without any difference in quality. For example, everyday products like soap, detergent, cereal, and more.

These products are made by some of the largest brands in the retail industry and are available widely with little to no difference in price.

This makes it harder for you to compete with giants like Amazon, Walmart, Target, etc. They can offer those products at lower costs, free shipping, and other perks.

This rules out a large number of products for you.

2. Niche Products

These are products that are unique or hand-made, available in limited stocks, and from specific suppliers. Think of homemade soaps, novelty t-shirts, ceramics, gift items, software, and countless other products.

Since these products are not widely available, they give you a competitive advantage.

There are even unique platforms like Etsy stores where you can find small vendors who make beautiful products and would love to partner up with other stores.

You can also find suppliers abroad using websites like AliExpress or Alibaba.com. These suppliers can make those niche products to your specifications and deliver them to you.

Niche products are available in almost any product category imaginable. You’ll find tons of unique ideas as you do your product research.

3. Doing Product Research On Your Own

Don’t guess about selecting products to sell online. You can back it up with data so that you know there is a demand for these products and customers are looking for them.

The first tool you are going to use for your research is Amazon.

It’s the world’s largest eCommerce store, with thousands of products. Luckily, it’s also a treasure trove of free data that you can scrape to help make your decisions.

Not only is their search engine full of autocomplete suggestions, but their product categories can be used to find niche products that are popular with a smaller set of consumers.

Let’s suppose you wanted to sell kid’s toys.

You can narrow down your search to very specific toy categories such as ‘clay & dough’ or ‘craft kits.’

Then, you can switch to the ‘Bestsellers’ view to see the top-performing products in each category on Amazon.

This excludes the most popular products that are available everywhere and have high competition, but it includes items popular enough that you could keep in stock and most likely sell.

Semrush is another great tool that you can use to gather data from competitors or any eCommerce store you want.

It shows you where those eCommerce stores are getting most of their traffic, which products they are promoting through paid advertisements, what their most viewed products are, and more.

It also shows your competitor’s product listing ads from Google. You can see their best-performing product listing ads, keywords, and other data.

Here are some other tools you can use to gather product data from other websites:

• Ahrefs – A powerful competitor research tool that will show what’s popular on your competitors’ websites.
• AdPlexity – A popular eCommerce research tool that helps you collect eCommerce data from across the web, from competitors, or any other website.
• AmazeOwl – It is an Amazon product research tool that is available as a free desktop application.

4. Use Customer Personas to Find Product Ideas

A customer persona is a fictional profile of an ideal customer that you want to target.

You can create this profile by answering simple questions about an ideal buyer. This is your target audience, and personifying them helps you understand them better when you are doing product research.

If you have an existing store, then you can use eCommerce tracking in Google Analytics to build an ideal buyer persona.

If you are just starting out, you’ll want to use your best guess to build a customer persona. This exercise helps you understand your customers’ needs, questions, and what kind of products they would like to buy.

To learn more about buyer persona, then you can see this guide on creating a concrete buyer persona with ready-made templates and examples.

5. Find Products You are Passionate About

As career advisors say, ‘Choose a job you love, and you’ll never have to work a day in your life.’

Similarly, choosing products you are passionate about helps you sell them more effectively.

These could be products that you personally love and passionately recommend to your family and friends. Why not recommend and sell them to others online?

It could also be products related to a hobby or activity you are passionate about. Nothing drives more passion when you build something useful and want others to use it. Following your passion allows you to look deeply into products and find ideas that offer real value to your customers.

6. Use Post-Purchase Surveys

If you already have a WordPress blog, website, or online store, then post-purchase surveys could be a way to gain valuable insight into how to improve user experience and discover what customers are looking for.

As a business owner, it’s a good idea to have a pulse on what your most loyal customers want from you. You can ask these questions in your survey:

• What products do you like the most from us and why?
• What other types of products would you be interested in seeing in our online store?
• Are there any complementary products you would like to see offered alongside this product?
• What problems are you facing currently? For example, if you sell skincare products or outdoor gear products, you can tailor the products you sell to solve the issues they face.

To create these post-purchase survey forms, you can use a plugin like WPForms. There are already ready-made templates for surveys, meaning you don’t have to start from scratch. Just drag and drop the questions you want to ask, and you’ll have a form ready to send to your email list in minutes!

For more details, simply read our full tutorial on how to easily create post-purchase surveys in WooCommerce.

Bonus: Selling a Single Product Online

When you think about selling online, you might imagine having tons of different items. But you don’t have to do that. You could just sell one product in your online store.

This way, it’s easier to manage because you don’t have to handle a bunch of inventory or update your website for each item. Plus, it’s cheaper. You won’t need a ton of resources or expensive hosting.

Focusing on one product lets you become an expert in that area, helping you cater to your audience better. It also makes creating marketing campaigns easier and more effective.

For more details, you can read our guide on how to sell a single product online with WordPress.

We hope this article helped you learn how to choose the best products to sell online. You may also want to see our article on tips to grow your business online without spending a lot of money or the best WooCommerce plugins for WordPress.

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