Are you interested in launching an online store but can’t seem to find a niche that’s not too competitive?
Choosing a niche is one of the hardest parts about launching an online store. Even niches that don’t seem that broad are becoming competitive these days.
In this post, we explain why ecommerce has become so saturated and explore ways to find hidden gems in niches you’re interested in.
Why most ecommerce niches are too competitive
One of the main reasons why ecommerce niches have become too competitive comes down to just how easy it’s become to launch an online store.
Thanks to dropshipping, an ecommerce model in which a supplier processes orders on your behalf, you don’t even need to store your own inventory or ship out orders yourself anymore.
Anyone who knows how to use a computer can get an ecommerce store up and running within the hour or by the end of the day, at the very least.
Plus, with a physical store, you only need to worry about competition in your region as well as how to get more foot traffic into your store.
With an online store, competition is global. Your store might have competitors who aren’t even in the same continent as you.
It’s also easier to get traffic to an online store thanks to the internet and digital marketing. Consumers don’t need to leave their homes in order to shop, so you only need to market them wherever they hang out online.
A less common reason why ecommerce niches are too competitive is due to the way brands target them.
By only targeting the common problems people have within a niche, you only target broad groups within that niche.
Why targeting competitive niches is not a good idea
You may have your heart set on a niche and are pretty confident you can find success within it so long as you work really hard on your marketing strategy and play the long game.
While you’re certainly free to do whatever you like with your own time and money, if you want to find success in as little time as possible, you’re better off staying away from competitive niches and spending that time and money finding a niche that’s less saturated instead.
Most competitive niches target broad topics, so their target markets end up being quite large as a result.
Think of ecommerce as all of the water on Earth. A very competitive niche is comparable to one of the four oceans. Seas represent smaller yet still competitive niches.
If you try to market yourself in one of these niches, you’ll be a clownfish in a sea full of sharks: very small and very hard to notice.
Even if you do get noticed, you need to prove to your target market that the products you sell, which are nearly identical to the products your competitors sell, are somehow different from products offered by stores that are well known and trusted in a particular niche.
It might seem counterproductive to focus on a niche that’s not as large, but you’re much more likely to find success early on if you target a shelf, ridge or trench in a specific sea instead.
Why researching your target market is the best way to find an ecommerce niche
We’ll talk about more strategies you can use to find a niche in a bit. For now, let’s focus on the most important strategy.
Remember when I said that if you target a competitive niche, you need to prove how your product differs from others? This is called your unique selling proposition, more commonly known as “USP.”
Your USP represents what differs from your brand or product from competing brands and products in your niche.
Think of Crocs in the shoe industry.
Love them or hate them, their USP is their modern take on the classic clog design.
An even better example of a brand with a strong USP is reMarkable.
reMarkable is a minimalist tablet that’s designed to mimic the feel of writing with pen and paper while giving you a way to create and store notes digitally.
The designers realized how awkward many consumers find writing and drawing on regular tablets to be as well as how cluttered they can get since they’re more or less large smartphones.
So, they came up with a tablet that replaces paper notebooks but still gives you the feeling of writing in one.
They researched a competitive niche (the tablet industry), shrunk it down, found a specific problem to solve within it, and became successful by targeting that problem.
That’s how important it is to research your target market when finding a niche.
I’ll share tips on how to conduct this research in the next section.
Related: The Largest and Fastest-Growing Ecommerce Markets in the World
How to find a non-competitive ecommerce niche
1. Create a master list of interest topics
It’s best to choose a niche that interests you in one way or another.
You’re going to be spending a lot of time on this business, especially in the beginning. If you choose something you’re passionate about, you’re more likely to survive the growing period in which you invest more than you earn.
So, set up your favorite way to take notes, and write down every topic you’re interested in, are passionate about or have experience in.
This is your master list. It gives you a starting point to work from while you conduct additional research to determine if a niche is viable and how competitive it is.
2. Use research tools to find a smaller niche
Some of the niches on your master list might be small enough already, but what if you can get them even smaller?
Find a way to turn each niche into a keyword, then fire up a keyword research tool, such as SE Ranking.
A free keyword research tool like Google Keyword Planner isn’t very useful in this scenario since it doesn’t offer specific search volume data.
So, enter a keyword like “fishing” into your chosen keyword tool, and see what data comes up.
If you’re new to keyword research, the keyword you originally enter into your tool is called a “seed keyword.” There’s a chance your seed keyword is non-competitive enough to be a decent ecommerce niche to target.
Look at its search volume and SEO difficulty:
- Search volume – The number of times a keyword is searched on Google every month on average
- SEO difficulty – How difficult it would be to rank for a keyword on Google. This is sometimes called “keyword difficulty”
High search volume indicates a keyword that has a high level of interest. High SEO difficulty indicates a keyword that’s very difficult to rank for if you’re not an established brand with a lot of authority.
Because you’re looking for a niche and not a keyword to target with a blog post or product page, look for keywords that have at least a few thousand searches each but a low SEO difficulty, specifically 40 or lower, but the lower the better.
Here’s SE Ranking’s grading scale, according to their own documentation:
- 0 to 9 – Ranking for this keyword is surefire
- 10 to 19 – Effortless
- 20 to 29 – Elementary
- 30 to 39 – Easy
- 40 to 54 – Doable
- 55 to 74 – Difficult
- 75 to 89 – Challenging
- 90 to 100 – Impossible
Look at the keyword’s CPC and competition scores as well:
- CPC (cost per click) – The amount of money advertisers are spending on a keyword per click in Google Ads
- Competition – How much advertising competition a keyword has on Google
High CPC and competition scores indicate a keyword that has a lot of advertising bids from multiple competitors. Avoid such keywords.
Here’s how SE Ranking grades competition:
- 0 to 0.3 – Low advertising competition
- 0.3 to 0.7 – Average competition
- 0.7 to 1 – High competition
To recap, to find a non-competitive niche with a keyword research tool, choose a keyword that has…
- …a search volume of at least a few thousand searches every month,
- a low SEO difficulty score,
- and a low competition score.
If your seed keyword is too competitive, go through its ideas list in your chosen keyword tool. This is a list of keyword ideas the tool suggests based off of your seed keyword.
You can also use ChatGPT to find related keywords for a given niche by asking it “what are niches in the [niche] industry?”
3. Identify upcoming trends
Consider if there are any growing trends you can capitalize on early before they go viral in your niche.
Enter broad versions of your niche on Google’s News tab as well as in Google Trends. Browse subreddits and forums related to your niche as well.
You may be able to spot techniques and even products some members of your niche are using that have yet to gain a wider recognition.
These are potential niches and products you can focus on.
4. Research your target market
As promised, let’s talk about researching your target market.
Your target market represents the individuals who are interested in and most likely to buy products related to your niche.
Researching your target market refers to a practice in which you use multiple methods to uncover interests your market has and, more importantly, pain points they experience.
The practice is known as “audience research” when it refers to researching a blog or social media audience.
Here are a few ways you can research your target market:
- Browse subreddits and forums related to your niche
- Survey and interview members of your target market
- Interview influencers in your target market
What you’re looking for are problems your target market talks about.
You should also examine the way they do your niche, as in techniques they use, product types they use, and specific products they use.
These represent different ways you can break a broad niche down into smaller niches.
If you’re still researching multiple niches, do this for every niche on your list.
5. Research your competition
Your research should expand into product and competition research.
Find the most popular products and stores in your niche, and conduct thorough research on each one.
This includes reading through reviews of them, including reviews that are posted as blog and social media posts, using them yourself, and even interviewing real-life customers who use them.
What you’re looking for are problems these products are not solving.
These problems may represent niche groups within the broad niche you want to target.
This is what reMarkable did with their original tablet. They targeted a niche group of tablet users who missed the feeling of writing and drawing on real paper.
6. Choose an ecommerce model
The ecommerce model you choose will greatly affect the niche you choose.
For example, if you want to use the dropshipping or white labeling ecommerce models, you’ll be limited to niches that suppliers in these industries offer products for.
If you choose to store your own inventory and process your own orders, you’ll have more options to choose from since you’ll be able to sell any product from any niche in your store.
The most amount of freedom comes from developing your own product, but this also requires a lot more time and money spent, not to mention the amount of skill it requires.
7. Define your USP
Again, your unique selling point (USP) is the feature that sets your store apart from other stores.
When choosing a niche, try to answer this question:
What will your store offer in this niche that other stores that already exist in it do not?
If you can’t answer this question, your niche may be too broad.
An example would be choosing to target the ice fishing niche by only selling ice fishing gear as opposed to other sporting goods stores who sell all sorts of fishing gear.
8. Check if your niche is profitable
Lastly, see how viable your niche is.
Research stores that sell products in your niche, including dropshipping suppliers like AliExpress, and department stores like Amazon, Target and Walmart.
Along with price, pay attention to the number of reviews products have from multiple sources as well as how much they’re talked about on social media. This will give you an idea of how popular products in your niche are.
Google Trends will let you know how much interest your niche has had over time, which is good to know since you may want to steer clear of niches that may be dying.
Google Trends has around 20 years worth of data from Google to work with.
Final thoughts
Most ecommerce niches are too competitive.
If you launch a store around those, you’ll waste time and money. Even worse, it might put you off ecommerce for good.
There are definitely people that quit the ecommerce space because they’ve chosen the wrong niche.
Instead, focus on the less competitive niches using the process I discussed above.
This will give your store the best chance for success.
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