You've come to the right place if you are looking for e-commerce business ideas that you can actually build a success store around. As the internet takes over trade and commerce, the opportunities available to the average person to join the e-commerce revolution are increasing at an exponential rate. Every time the internet disrupts an industry, a host of opportunities open up for people in that industry’s value chain to move their operations online. In fact, in most cases, entirely new industries are created as various service providers ride the wave of the successful disruption. The growth of services such as Vugo and Surge as a result of Uber’s disruption of the taxi industry is a great example of this reality.

The opportunities to sell products and services online have never been as many as they are now. You don’t even have to be in a sexy disruptive industry. You can be in the most boring business ever and still make a lot of money online. So, how do you get good e-commerce business ideas that can actually make you money? Below are some of the places you can look to get inspiration.

Online Trends

Trends inform some of the popular e-commerce business ideas that seem to come out of nowhere yet get massive attention once they pop up. If you are tuned to the internet or pop culture, you can catch trends early, build a business around the trend and ride the wave of the trend’s popularity as it goes mainstream. Most online trends are very community-centric. If you weren’t in the gaming community, for instance, the chances of you being one of the first few people to appreciate the reality that Fortnite was going to be hugely popular is almost zero. Your best bet, therefore, is to focus on the trends in the communities you care about and understand.

Offline Stores Closing Down

Recently, Toys "R" Us ran into some troubles and closed several stores. The stores are clearing their stock and are selling toys at massive discounts. As I am writing this, prices are now at 50 to 70% off. That’s insane. We all know that the demand for the toys didn’t decline and that they can still fetch their normal price elsewhere. If you were looking to start an e-commerce store targeting kids, this was the perfect time to get in the game. You could have bought perfectly good toys for a fraction of the cost and had the opportunity to flip them online at their usual price.

Many brick and mortar stores close down every year as consumers move online. Most of the stores are local small businesses and they rarely make the national news. If you pay attention to your local scene, though, you will know which stores are clearing their stock. Such an opportunity is all you need to start an online business but you will have to pay attention to what is going around you to be able to spot such e-commerce business ideas.

Product Review Pages

Part of building a great business is fulfilling a need other businesses are currently not meeting. If you are open to building a product from scratch, product review pages are a goldmine for the various ways improvements can be made to otherwise decent products with great demand.

Amazon is a great place to find customer reviews from verified purchasers. Don’t pay much attention to the 5-star reviews or the 1-star reviews. The two groups of reviews won’t give you objective insights into how a product can be improved. Those who use a product and like it but give a 3 or 4-star review will probably leave a note about what they liked and didn’t like. It is your job to figure out if the gaps in customer expectations can be filled and if you can profit by doing so.

Spy on Competitors

If you have already decided on a niche, you can tell who your competitors are going to be. If you want an edge, you want to do more of the things that get them good results and less of the things that get them bad results. Not all e-commerce business ideas you work on need to be brand new. You can see success by just doing what other people are doing if your execution is better.

Considering the Pareto Principle, in an e-commerce store offering several products, just a handful of products bring about 80% of the store’s revenues. How do you figure out which products are making your competitors big money? There are internet tools such as Spyfu that allow you to monitor the keywords that drive the most traffic to a website, the most popular pages, and the keywords they spend most of their advertising dollars on when running PPC campaigns.

SEO Insights

Your search traffic data can be a goldmine if you know where to look. It is not always the case that your first e-commerce endeavor is a big hit. You will probably have to make some tweaks to your original idea to make it work.     

One of the best places to go when looking for information on what your visitors actually want is your SEO data. The keywords your users type on Google to find you and the pages they check out the most can give you insights into how to rebrand your products and write copy as well as the additional products you need to add to your store.

 

E-commerce Business Ideas That Are Likely to Succeed if Executed Well

Niche Communities’ Fashion Merchandise

Of the basic human needs, clothing seems to be the easiest thing to sell online. A great number of people don’t just wear clothes for their primary utility of covering up. They wear fashion pieces that speak to them and allow them to express their interests and feelings. Since people care about different things, selling the same fashion pieces to all people isn’t going to work.

The beauty of the internet is that there is a corner of the internet for pretty much every interest. You will find poker players, sports fans, gamers, hunters, activists, students, and pretty much any group you can think off in close-knit communities of forums, social media groups, and dedicated websites. Selling targeted fashion items to any of these communities is going to be easier than competing with the big brands for the general market. Selling uniquely designed apparel to niche communities is one of those e-commerce business ideas that is never going to go out of style.

Partner with Someone with a Platform to Sell Fashion Merchandise

You may have noticed that many popular bloggers and YouTubers sell hoodies, t-shirts, caps, and other simple fashion items. Most of them outsource the production, sales, and distribution of their fashion business to other people.

If you can buy and customize clothes, you should consider partnering with someone with a sizeable platform to sell merchandise. It will be a perfect partnership as you will be availing the goods to sell while they bring an audience that is ready to buy. Finding someone to partner with is as simple as hitting up your favorite YouTubers who don’t sell any merchandise of their own.

Selling Performance Optimization Products

Diet pills, sleeping pills, focus supplements, vitamin supplements, and other performance optimization products are big business today. There are several e-commerce stores on the net offering these products. The truth is, while the branding of one store may be different from another, the formula of most of the products they offer is pretty much the same. Those who win do so because of excellence in branding and marketing. A good marketer can easily enter this space and build a decent e-commerce business for themselves in no time.

Beauty and Lifestyle

The amount of money spent on beauty products every year is staggering. Ultimately, women buy more beauty products than men. That’s where the money is. With the advent of Instagram, it has never been easier to build a following around a beauty and lifestyle product online. When starting out, something as simple as getting shoutouts from popular beautiful girls on Instagram can help you get the momentum you need.

Gain First Mover Advantage on an Imported Product

Being one of the first people to sell a given product in the country is a tremendous advantage. For the first few months or years, your margins will be incredible and you will have the market all to yourself before competitors flood it.

The process usually looks like this:

• You discover a product and start importing it. Your margins are good and competition is non-existent.
• After some time, competitors start offering the same product. The number of products you sell reduces as you now have to share the market with others.
• As more competitors join the game, you will need more marketing dollars to get attention. This eats into your margins.
• In the end, you will be selling few products at even lower margins.

Most people starting e-commerce stores join the game towards the end. The people who make the most money are those who move early and start offering the product locally before others do.

Third-Party Facilitator of E-commerce

In a gold rush, you can make as much or even more money as miners by supplying the products they need to mine. In the world of e-commerce right now, lots of people are making money facilitating the moves and transactions that make e-commerce possible. The value you add can be payment processing, wishlist curation services, distribution, e-commerce website maintenance, or anything that adds value to either buyers or sellers. There's a big ecosystem supporting online commerce. If you choose to go this route, the number e-commerce business ideas you can pursue are practically limitless. Your job is to figure out where your talents lie and how they can be used to help people in the industry.