This is the most complete guide to niche dropshipping stores on the internet.
So if you want to:
- Find profitable niches for your own store
- Learn the advantages of a niche store
- Create your own successful store
- See examples of proven high profit niches
Then you’ll love the detailed strategies in today’s guide.
Let’s get started:
What is a Niche?
A niche is a section of a larger market that’s defined by its own unique traits and characteristics.
For example, Gymshark is a premium fitness apparel brand in the larger fitness market. Gymshark offers comfortable and stylish workout clothing for people passionate about fitness. This company was valued at over $1 billion because it’s carved itself as the authority brand in this specific niche.
On the other hand, an example of a general store is Amazon. Amazon is not a niche store because it literally sells every product under the sun. They specialize in vast product selection, affordable prices, and fast shipping. Their audience is all online shoppers, whereas niche stores target specific groups of people.
You get the picture.
Niche markets focus on a unique target market, rather than marketing to everyone.
Here’s a few ways you can specify niches:
- Price – luxury, moderate, discount
- Demographics – age, income, gender, education
- Product Quality – premium, moderate, handmade
- Personality – values, interests, opinions
- Geography – country, city, neighborhood
As you can see, there’s dozens of ways to refine a market and carve out different niches.
What is a Niche Dropshipping Store?
A niche dropshipping store focuses on a certain niche and only sells products within that niche.
If you’re not familiar with dropshipping yet, please check out our dropshipping guide.
You will need to have a basic understanding of dropshipping in order to fully utilize this guide.
One important thing to note is that niche dropshipping stores are slightly different from traditional niche stores.
An example of a traditional niche store is Divvies. Divvies saw an opening in the sweets market when they realized people with allergies could not enjoy many delicious treats. For this reason, they created cookies and cupcakes that are vegan, nut-free, dairy-free, and egg-free.
Divvies recognized an issue in the larger dessert market and solved it with a brand new product.
However, niche dropshipping stores don’t have the ability to magically create a new product.
As a dropshipper, you will be sourcing your products from Aliexpress. These products are already premade and you don’t have the freedom to invent something new.
For this reason, niche dropshipping stores have to be much more creative in their marketing and branding.
Niche Store Benefits
Let’s go over the advantages of opening a niche dropshipping store.
Brand Identity
By focusing on a niche rather than a large market, niche stores have a better opportunity to build brand identity.
This brand identity will make is easier to connect with customers because you are serving their needs in a specific niche.
We categorize niche stores as specialists.
They specialize in catering to the needs of a specific group of people. People who shop at niche stores recognize this and resonate with them much more than regular stores.
With the proper marketing and product selection, niche dropshipping stores have a chance to go viral. This virality can skyrocket brand identity and attract many organic customers.
Less Competition
Since niche dropshipping stores focus on specific sub-markets, there’s less overall competition.
Competition in dropshipping comes in the form of Facebook ads. The more advertisers there are targeting your niche, the more expensive ad costs will be. If there are less stores in your specific niche, you’re competing against less people in the Facebook ads auction.
This means your advertising costs will be lower and have a higher chance of succeeding.
Laser-Focused Targeting
Furthermore, niche stores can use more targeted ads to narrow in on their audience and boost conversion rates.
The Facebook ads platform allows you to target all sorts of demographics and people.
As you can see in the image below, you are freely able to select the location, gender, age, behaviors, and specific interests when targeting consumers.
For example, if you owned a snowboarding store, you could easily choose the most popular brands as well as people interested in snowboarding.
By opening a niche store, you can take advantage of this and really narrow in on a specific audience in your ad targeting.
Loyal Customers
By focusing on a unique demographic, niche stores have the opportunity to build stronger relationships with their customers.
Loyal customers bring higher lifetime value and are more willing to shop again and recommend your store to their friends.
This type of brand loyalty offers a lot in the long-run and gives you the opportunity to build a massive brand.
Niche Store Disadvantages
There are also a few disadvantages of opening a niche dropshipping store.
Let’s discuss these.
Less Growth Protentional
A niche store’s potential growth depends entirely on the size of the market.
Smaller niche markets will obviously have less growth potential than bigger niche markets. For this reason, you will need innovative ad targeting and marketing to continue growing after hitting a plateau.
We will discuss how to estimate the size of your potential market later on this article.
However, it’s important to remember that it’s possible to be extremely profitable in smaller markets if you become an authority brand in that niche.
Dealing With Larger Brands
Another potential disadvantage for niche dropshipping stores is dealing with larger brands.
If you are able to grow your niche store and build some brand recognition, larger brands can become aware of your business. Then, they can simply mimic the products from your store and add them to their own.
Afterwards, the larger brand can spend more money on advertisements and start stealing away customers.
For this reason, it’s extremely important to build a strong brand identity by branding your store uniquely and offering amazing customer service.
Product Selection
Product selection is another issue that niche dropshipping stores face.
The products you can add to your store entirely depend on what’s available on Aliexpress.
You will be using Aliexpress to find all your products and suppliers.
Check out our product research guide for an in-depth look on finding dropshipping products.
However, Aliexpress has millions of product listings so you will most likely find enough products to sell in your niche.
How to Find Profitable Niches?
Now, it’s finally time to discuss how to actually find a profitable niche.
Based on our experience, there’s a few crucial things that need to come together in order to maximize your chance of success.
These are:
- Picking a niche with a moderate audience on Facebook
- Finding hot products for the niche you choose
- Creating a Shopify store with effective branding
- Testing different advertisements and finding the optimal demographic
However, even though there’s 4 different steps you need to complete, there’s 2 different ways to get started.
You can either find a variety of hot products first or choose your niche first. This depends on if you already have a niche in mind.
Let’s go over both of the methods.
Method 1) Finding Products First
If you’re starting from a complete blank slate and don’t have any specific niches in mind, we recommending finding a variety of hot products first.
Hot products are products that have a high quantity of orders, and Aliexpress makes it easy to find hot products.
If a product on Aliexpress has a high order quantity it usually means one or two things:
- Another dropshipper is having success selling the product
- Regular consumers who shop on Aliexpress are buying the product
Since both of these statements are potentially true, it means that it’s extremely possible to sell the product yourself.
Benefits Of Choosing Products Before Niche?
By finding a list of hot products first, you can start brainstorming an initial set of potential niches.
Furthermore, once you’ve completed your product research, you can start grouping related products together and choosing a niche that way.
Think about it like this.
Choosing a niche first limits the amount of available products you can pick to add to your store. If you pick the niche first, you are stuck trying to find hot products only in that niche.
By finding the products first, you have a limitless amount of potential niches to sell the product to.
Hot products are extremely important because as a dropshipper your goal is to find winning products.
What Are Winning Dropshipping Products?
Winning products are the products that contribute significantly to overall sales. Furthermore, they are the products you will use in the creative of your advertisement.
These are products that your target audience absolutely adores and sell like hotcakes.
Here are the common characteristics of winning products:
- Solves a problem
- People haven’t seen it before
- Proven to sell
- Wow factor
- Good margins
Check out our YouTube tutorial on winning products for in-depth look.
It’s common to have anywhere from 1-5 winning products on a successful niche dropshipping store. But essentially all it takes is 1 winning product for profitability, which is why choosing trending products improves your odds.
Now, let’s discuss how to find hot products on Aliexpress.
How To Find Winning Products
Step 1)
The first step is to create an Aliexpress account if you don’t have one already.
Simply go to Aliexpress, hover ‘Account’ on the top-right corner, and click ‘Join’.
You can either create an account with your email address or login with Facebook, Gmail, Twitter, etc.
Step 2)
After creating your account, we will be using the Aliexpress Dropshipper Center to find hot products.
Go to the Aliexpress Dropshipper Center.
You may be asked to fill in a few agreements before being allowed to use this tool.
The Aliexpress Dropshipper Center is an extremely convenient tool that helps you find hot products on Aliexpress.
Once you’re inside the dashboard it will look like this:
Next, click ‘Find Products to Sell’ on the left-hand side.
You will see all the filtering options that the Dropship Center has to offer to sort through different products.
Furthermore, you will see a list of different products that you can sort by orders or price.
Hover your mouse over ‘Orders’ and click ‘All Countries’.
You will see a list of the top selling products on Aliexpress.
You can now begin browsing the products and saving the one’s you find interesting.
Remember our list of winning product criteria:
- Solves a problem (eg. back brace)
- People haven’t seen it before (eg. watermelon slicer)
- Proven to sell (eg. clothing)
- Wow factor (eg. LED lighting display)
- Good margins (inexpensive price with potential high markups)
Once you see a product you think has the potential to be a winning product, click ‘Analyze’.
You will be brought to a chart that displays the product’s daily order volume.
As you can see, these no-tie shoelaces are averaging around 80 orders per day for the last 2 weeks.
We recommend only choosing products that are averaging around 50 or more orders per day.
These thermal touchscreen gloves are averaging over 60 orders per day which makes them another potential winning product.
The gloves could potentially be sold on a variety of different outdoor niche stores. For example: cycling, biking, skiing, camping, hiking, etc.
As you browse around for products, you should be able to brainstorm a list of different niches for each product you select.
The thermal gloves are a perfect example of the type of products you should search for because there are dozens of different niches that you could sell them to.
This cushioned pet bed seems like an interesting potential product for a pet niche store.
However, since the average daily order volume is only around 35, we would most likely skip this one and find different products.
You can also browse through the best selling products of different categories.
This can also help you pinpoint a specific niche.
Be sure to save the product page link of every potential product you find. We recommend finding anywhere from 10-30 different products before choosing your niche.
If you find an amazing product and are able to choose your niche while doing product research, simply shift your focus into only finding products for that niche.
Type the niche into the search bar and look for hot products within that niche.
Things To Avoid When Finding Products
As you’re looking for your products, there’s a few important things to remember.
First of all, avoid branded and knock-off products.
You may see fake Apple Airpods or Adidas joggers when browsing Aliexpress.
Never sell these types of products as a dropshipper. It’s illegal and your store will inevitably fail.
Niche Research
After you’ve compiled your list of hot Aliexpress products, the next step is to ultimately choose your niche.
Try grouping together the related products within your list.
For example: if you found a winter jacket, thermal gloves, and scarf, you could group them within the winter clothing category.
Then, you could get into more specific niches like skiing, hiking, camping, biking, and travel.
Next, you can head over to Facebook Audience Insights.
If you’re unfamiliar, Audience Insights is a tool within Facebook’s ad manager that helps you find audience sizes.
Choose ‘Everyone on Facebook’.
For example: here are the demographic results if you choose only the United States, age 18-any, all genders, and type in camping for ‘Interests’.
You can see that the audience size for these filters is 35-40 million people. That means that you can ultimately target up to 40 million people in the camping niche in the United States.
If you click ‘Page Likes’, you can see the top brands within the niche on Facebook.
Begin typing in the different niches in the ‘Interests’ filter. We recommend choosing a niche that has more than 2 million people in the audience.
5-10 million+ would be most ideal.
Once you’ve solidified your niche, we recommend going back into Aliexpress and finding even more hot products within that niche.
Method 2) Choosing Niche First
The other method is choosing your niche first and then finding hot products for that niche.
This method is mainly for dropshippers that already have a niche in mind and want to conduct research to ensure that Facebook ad targeting is possible.
With your niche in mind, head over to Facebook’s Audience Insights tool.
Facebook Audience Insights allows you to see the demographic breakdown of all the users interested in your specific niche.
For example: if you wanted to start a snowboarding niche store, simply type in snowboarding in ‘Interests’. Furthermore, choose the location, age, and gender of the people you plan on advertising to.
As you can see, there’s 8-9 million users that are age 18+, live in the United States, and interested in snowboarding.
Any niche with more than a few million audience size a good niche to make a store for.
Now that your niche pick is solidified, it’s time to find some products.
Scroll up to the ‘How To Find Winning Products’ section of this article and follow along.
Essentially, you will be using the Aliexpress Dropshipper Center to find hot selling products. Simply type in related keywords to your niche and scan for products according to our criteria.
Step 3) Shopify Store Creation
With your niche and products ready to go, it’s time to create your Shopify store!
Check out our YouTube tutorial for an in-depth look on creating your first Shopify store.
The Shopify store creation entails these steps:
- Opening a Shopify store
- Creating a brand name
- Buying a URL
- Importing your products from Aliexpress
- Editing and publishing your products
- Designing your website
- Running Facebooks ads
- Fulfilling orders
For a text guide, check out our Aliexpress dropshipping guide and Shopify setup guide.
Step 4) Advertisements
After creating your Shopify niche dropshipping store, the next step is to start running Facebook advertisements.
Facebook ads are an entirely different topic on their own, so check out our YouTube course below.
If you’ve never run Facebook ads before, you’ll want to get familiar with the interface and how the algorithm works.
Furthermore, it may take a bit testing, trial and error, and patience before you’re able to fully understand the platform.
For a text version, check out our Facebook ads tutorial and low budget method.
Examples of Successful Niche Dropshipping Stores
To give you an idea on successful niches, we’ll give you list of audiences we’ve had success selling to and creating stores for.
Feel free to create a dropshipping store for any of these niches and giving it a shot.
Remember to find a few trending products for the specific niche and then adding in supplementary products as well to fill up your catalog.
Raving
Hunting
Boating
Men’s Fitness
Fishing
Wrapping Up
So that’s it for our guide to niche dropshipping stores in 2022.
Now we’d love to hear your thoughts and questions.
Are you having success finding products and creating your niche store?
Do you need more help getting started?
Either way, let us know by leaving a comment below.
