Top 10 Ways To Identify Your Dropship Niche In 2021

Dropship niche selection is a moment for any eCommerce business. It is the most crucial decision to make when you start your store. Any online eCommerce business starts with one particular niche and build their brand name. Later they expand their business into a multi-niche platform.

In this blog, I am going to explain 11 smart steps that will make you confident about your dropship niche selection.

If you are new to this dropship business then you need to first understand what is dropshipping?

I am sharing a checklist that will help you identifying your dropship niche.

Checklist for choosing the best dropship niche in 2021.

So without any delay, I am sharing my way of identifying a profitable dropshop niche in 2021.

1. Understand Demand-Supply Chain With Aliexpress.
2. Identify the niche popularity with aliexpress Order numbers.
3. Find the number of trusted vendors for your dropship niche.
4. Figure out the pricing aspect of your dropship niche product with big marketplaces.
5. Understand your niche trends in google trends.
6. Identify your dropshipping niche demands on the search engines.
7. Find the level of competition in your drosphip niche.
8. Explore keywords difficulty in your niche.
9. Understand the search engine ranking of your niche related keywords.
10. Use social media metrics to identify the dropship niche fan base.

Let Us discuss these 10 checklist points in detail so that it can help us get more confident about our niche.

1. Understand Demand-Supply Chain With Aliexpress.

This is your first step in identifying the best dropship niche. So what you need to do here?

Follow these steps.

1. Visit Aliexpress website.
2. Enter the niche keyword related to your dropship products in the search bar.
3. Filter your product by selecting ‘Free Shipping’ and ‘4 star and above rating’

You will get a list of all the products after this filtering is applied. Now, how to judge this as a profitable best dropshipping niche?

If you found that your filtered list has more than 2000+ products then this niche is probably a good one to start with. If it is less than 500 then you may not be targetting the right niche.

Let us go ahead if you found more than 2000+ products after filtering. The next steps will make you more confident about your niche.

2. Understand Your Niche Popularity.

There may be many vendors who would be producing your choice of products in bulk and selling on aliexpress. Selling on aliexpress and getting sold on aliexpress needs to be identified.

Their are millions of products listed on aliexpress but not all get sold so frequently due to low popularity or lack of awareness.

So, you need to follow the steps below to identify your dropship niche popularity.

1. After you have completed the product filtering as guided in 1st checklist, sort the products by the number of orders.
2. Now focus on the total number of orders for the first 10 products after sorting.

What is the total number of orders?

If the total number of orders are more than 20K+ orders then get happy with this result. Your niche has super power of popularity.

If this number is less than 5000, this dropship niche is a bad choice for you. You need to restart your niche research again from 1st checklist.

If your number is more than 5K+ then go for the 3rd checklist below.

3. Find the number of trusted vendors for your dropship niche.

After you have succesfully completed the 1st two checklist test, its time to go more deep in identifying the best dropshipping niche.

Follow the below step again;

1. Look at the same top 10 product that you filtered in the step above.
2. Find the ratings of the seller of these vendors.
3. Calculate the average rating of these top 10 vendors found from filtering.

What average rating did you found?

If your average rating is above 98% then you are again one step ahead in selecting your dropship niche.

If it’s below 95%. Don’t try this niche. Why?

You will face a lot of issue doing business with low rating vendors as

1. Their delivery is too slow.
2. Their wait time for processing request is too high. Can be more than a week after placing an order.
3. They don’t follow dropshipping rules properly like hiding the vendor details or sending promotional playcard with products.
4. Sending defective items.

So, always choose vendors with rating above 95%.

Let’s go to 4th checklist in selecting our profitable niche.

4. Pricing Aspect Of Your Dropship Niche Product

Dropshipping business is famous for its profit margin. If you are not making a good profit by offering a price better than big market places then getting Good ROI becomes difficult.

The ROI can varry from niche to niche. Some niche give high sales with less ROI while less sales still High ROI. Some niche works on only high ticket products and even few sales makes this niche a billion dollar niche.

So, it is essential to identify the profit margins before selecting your niche.

So lets’ find out. Keep in mind that you have to pass the above 4 checklist test before proceeding in this step.

1. Take out the most popular product from that 10 filtered product.
2. Compare the pricing of the same product on 5-6 different market places apart from aliexpress.
3. Calculate the price average of all those stores and compare them with aliexpress pricing.

Now, is the price margin more than 3 times? Its again a good news for you as your niche is highly profitable.

Make sure that this price difference is not less than 2 times the price on aliexpress else you will have to restart your dropship niche research.

5. Check your niche and product trends.

You can sell any trendy product and make good money. But what if the trend ends? No trend no sale or may be low sales. So, it is very important to select a dropship niche that has evergreen trend.

To identify a trending or forever trending niche or product, you can use google. Google has an amazing trend identifying tool called as Google trends.

Follow these steps to find your trend analytics.

1. Visit Google Trends Website.
2. Enter the niche or product name in the search option.
3. Choose filters if you want to check trends for any particular region or a given time frame.
4. Consider choosing a time frame of 12 months.
5. Now see if the graph is going up or down.

What result did you get?

If it goes Up or horizontal then you can go with your niche. But if the graph goes down then restart from 1st checklist with a new dropship niche again.

If you are successful till here then go to the next checklist to get more confident about your profitable dropshipping niche.

6. SEO: Identify your dropshipping niche demands on the search engines.

For this, you can use any SEO tool like Semrush to identify the keywords for which you can start a dropship store.

• Enter the potential keywords that people may be searching on google, related to your product. For example ‘Buy panda’
• Find the volume of keywords related to your product or niche associated keywords using Semrush.

What results did you get here?

If the volume search is more than 10K then potentially this is a good product to get on your online dropship store.

If this volume is below 1K then you should restart your product or niche research.

Now go to next checklist and get further more sure about your dropship niche selection.

7. Find the level of competition in your dropship niche.

Identifying competitor is very important. In one of my articles, I had explained with video and blog, how you can do competitor analysis with ubersuggest.

But, it is better for now that you follow the steps mention below.

1. Go to google search.
2. Enter your query like – allinurl:niche name (for example: allinurl:panda shirt) and press “search”. 
3. This will give you results of pages with panda shirt keywords in their heading.
4. These are your actual competitor for that particular product.
5. See the total search results showing just below the google search bar.

What is that total search result number?

If it is less than 10K after following all the above checklist test then I must say, congratulations. You just hit the bulls eye.

But if that number is too large like more than 100K results then this competition is tough and your investment cost on SEO will be higher if you want your dropship business to grow on search engine results.

8. Explore keywords difficulty in your niche.

In the checklist 6, we found a way to find the volume of keywords. That means, the number of people search for product like yours. But what about the competiton in terms of getting on 1st postion if we even have 1000 compatitors that we got from checklist 7?

Well, in this checklist we will understand the keyword difficulty identification that will help us know if our niche is good to start or not.

For this, you need to use a keyword difficulty finder tool called Moz keyword explorer.

So you can follow these steps

1. Enter your keyword in the search field.
2. If you want to target selling in The US then choose “United States” and press “try free”.

The “Difficulty” parameter estimates how difficult it is for you to rank higher than the current competitors on the first page of search results.

So what results did you get?

If the difficulty value is between 0 to 30 then your niche is best to start with. If it is beyond 30 then you may have to invest more in getting at the top results of the search engine.

9. Understand the search engine ranking.

This checklist will help you to understand the real-time competition. Let us consider that you want to sell a coconut T-shirt. And you wish to get customers from google search engine.

You need to understand first, the kind of website that is getting ranked for such keywords.

Follow these steps to have a check.

1. Search ‘coconut T-shirt’ on google.
2. Check the kind of website getting ranked.
3. Evaluate if any high authority websites are taking all the top 10 results or not.

If you search results come to be occupied by high authority e-commerce website like Amazon, eBay, etc and you didn’t find any small, spammy article related website or quora or yahoo answers ranking there, then the niche is really very competitive.

Working on such a competitive niche will need more patience from your end as you cannot defeat such a website on search results overnight.

10. Use social media metrics to identify niche fan base.

After you have successfully passed all the 9 checklist tests above, this is a final call to see the fan following in your niche.

If your social media fan base for the niche is very high then it is pretty sure that you can get a lot of sales or audience from social platforms.

We will check with Instagram and Facebook to identify the fan base for your dropship niche.

Check fan base on Instagram.

To check the fan base on Instagram, you need to identify the hashtag posts related to your niche. For example, if I want to create a panda dropship store, I would search for panda hashtags or related hashtags posts on Instagram.

You can use a tool here to check that easily. Its Keywordtool.

Follow these steps.

1. Go to keywordtool
2. Type the name of the chosen niche in the search field.
3. Choose the hashtags search results.

Now check the total post gone under that hashtag. If the numbers are between 100k to 1M then this niche has huge fan base.

The niche would be good if it at least has more than 40K post.

Check fan base on Facebook.

You can identify the fan base on Facebook using the Facebook group member numbers.

Follow these steps on Facebook

1. Go to Facebook’s top search bar.
2. Enter your keyword or niche in the search bar.
3. Choose the group.
4. You will see a list of the existing groups that have this keyword in their name.
5. And the number of their members.

How many groups are their with more than 30k members?

If the number is very low then the niche doesn’t have a good fan base. Try the niche that has at least 10+ groups with more than 30k members.

This way you can identify the fan base associated with any niche in social media channels.

Conclusion.

So, friends, these were the top 10 checklist that helps any dropshippers to identify if their niche is a profitable dropship niche or not. You can use these tips and create a successful dropshipping business in 2021.

Let me know if you have success after implementing this research in your dropshipping journey. We shall be happy to hear from you.

Good luck and my best wishes from your dropshipping business.