Commaxis Limited – Choosing a niche for Ecommerce

As stated in a previous post, Commaxis limited is intended to be the corporate legal entity behind a selection ecommerce stores. What this means is the company is registered as Commaxis for tax and legal purposes, but the company will use brand labels to appeal to select niches within the market. For example, my first ecommerce store won’t be called Commaxis it could be called coffee treats to appeal to coffee loving niche.

Therefore, the first question: which niche should I choose?

After taking the time to research successful businesses within the community I have unearthed a process not dissembler to the creative process I’m familiar with to generate ideas and utilise statistics to assist in the decision-making process. To begin with I wrote out 20 different potential niches to choose from as a starting point.

The following are the niches that I brainstormed:

1. Cycling niche
2. Cute (Kawaii) niche
3. Dog or Cat niche
4. Photography niche
5. Parents niche
6. Backpacking/travelling niche
7. Vegan niche
8. Pro-gamer niche
9. Creepy-pasta niche
10. Sneaker lover niche
11. Food lovers niche
12. Stationary niche
13. Weight loss niche
14. Crafts niche
15. Fishing niche
16. Swimwear niche
17. Fitness niche
18. Beard grooming niche
19. Book lovers’ niche
20. Vocation niche 

After generating 20 ideas to chose from I now have a great range of options for me to consider when deciding and narrowing down my ideas. Therefore, the next step is, narrowing down 20 to 5. The criteria that I was suggested to follow to assist in this process is: 1. What niches am I personally interested in? 2. What niches are bigger than the rest? And 3. What niches are filled with people that don’t spend a lot of money?

Firstly, it’s important that I choose a niche that I like even to a small amount as I’ll be spending a lot of time researching and thinking about this subject as well as designing for the theme. If I didn’t like the subject, then It will show in my work and many of my future potential customers may be less engaged with my store and therefore products dooming myself from the beginning.

Secondly, it’s important that there are a lot of people interested in this niche, otherwise there will be no guaranteed income. You start a business to be in business therefore it is important that there are enough potential customers to keep the ship afloat.

Thirdly, there could be many people interested in this niche but if they aren’t passionate about spending money on their interest then there is a similar problem to the second important factor. No cashflow from sales means I am out of business. There’s no point developing products that are likely not to be sold.

What are my five narrowed down niches?

After taking deep consideration I have narrowed down my options from the previous 20 to a now solid 5 options. These are:

1. Cute (Kawaii) niche
2. Pro-gamer niche
3. Food lovers’ niche
4. Book lovers’ niche
5. Vocation niche 

I chose these niches as I can personally resonate and get motivated about each off these niches, I believe that these are big niches with a large potential audience, and they all have customers with disposable income that spend money on their choice of niche.

Picking a niche to test

Finally, I’ve gotten to the stage where I need to apply research and statistics to justify business decisions. Until this point, I have been using my opinion to navigate and narrow down potential market opportunity’s regarding selecting a niche for an ecommerce store creation. Now I need to use statistics to justify and measure potential making an educated decision.

The process that I am going to use to gather relevant information is to utilise the statistics available within the Facebook business manager. This information can be found whilst viewing the Audience insight tool within the Facebook business manager software. This powerful tool utilises information it has on its users to provide key information about their psychographics as well as interests.

I used this tool to identify information about broad and narrow interests relating to my niche. For example, “Kawaii & Cute” is an interest available on Facebook that can be assigned to users that interact with content relating to this subject. I can check this interest when researching psychographics to determine the amount of people living in a specific region that have this interest. When making this check for the USA the Audience Insight tool tells me there are 7 million people that have this interest assigned to them. Based on my research I determine having a niche of a minimum 1 million people is an ideal market size due to the strengths and limits of how my future sales funnel will function.

Utilising this method of research, I recorded information about each niche using various relevant assigned interests to gage the scale, proportion, and potential of each market allowing me to quantify which off the five niches is likely the best choice. Once I collected all information and made my comparisons, I concluded which niche I should pursue and test for my company’s first ecommerce store. The niche that I will be designing a store towards is the “Kawaii and Cute” Niche.

The “Kawaii and cute” niche was the biggest available market that I identified as been accessible to be tapped into regarding sales potential. There is a vast number of impulsive shoppers within this niche and I believe that my endeavours will be fruitful should I pursue construction and delivery of an ecommerce store aimed towards this niche using the available psychographic information.