Choosing What to Sell

This can be a tough one, but it gets easier if you ask yourself a few questions:

1. What’s available? You can find this out by browsing through Doba’s products, but since they have 1.5 million or so of them, that might take a while. Still, it’s a good idea to at least look at the categories and click around to see what some of your options are.
2. What do you have experience with? Do you know all about soccer, jewelry, cooking, camping? What are you an expert on? Chances are you’ll be more successful choosing something that is interesting to you, and something you’re an expert at.
3. What sells well online? This can be tough, but think it through. Ask yourself why Amazon.com started out with books, even though they are now much more than just an online bookstore. You don’t have to see a book in person to know all about it. It’s easy to ship. It’s non-perishable. It’s predictable. Lots of people buy them, and they don’t just buy one book and then they’re done with books forever. People don’t buy wedding rings as often as they buy books. People are more likely to want to experience clothes in person as opposed to books. Then again, don’t just choose the product you’re going to sell based on this one criterion alone–you have to balance it with others.
4. What does Doba have a good selection of? This may seem like a repeat of the first question, but you probably want to narrow it down before asking this question. Maybe you’ve narrowed your idea down to five categories, but in one category (soccer shoes, for example), Doba only carries three products, and in another (jewelry, for example) they have hundreds or thousands.
5. What’s a niche you can target? If you’re going to try and compete with Amazon.com, you’re doomed from the start. You can’t compete with them when it comes to selling anything and everything. But you might be able to compete with them if you choose something very, very niche and focus on it. I once read about a guy who had a company that made artificial wishbones. If I remember correctly, his revenues were around $2M per year. That’s niche. Selling jewelry is not niche. White gold jewelry is slightly more niche, but still not very niche. White gold wedding jewelry is starting to get niche. 14K white gold wedding bands for women with Celtic engravings is niche. But then again, Doba may not be that niche themselves, so again, you want to be niche, but you have to balance out all the criteria, or you might get so niche the product you want to sell doesn’t exist, or truly doesn’t have much of a market.
6. What are people looking for online? This can be fun. Use the Google Keyword Tool and search for keywords related to the product(s) you’re interested in selling. If you’re interested in selling cooking and kitchen utensils but want to get more niche, you might find out that there are ten times as many searches for knives as there are for measuring cups, and so perhaps kitchen and cooking knives becomes your niche.

And you especially want to listen to Doba’s advice on choosing a product to sell. It’s in their best interest to help you be successful, because if you make money, they make money. You can trust what they say because they have experience, and their incentives are aligned with yours.