5 Places To Get Product Ideas For Your Online Business

Countless ingredients go into the recipe for a flourishing ecommerce business. You need efficient operational processes, a team of diligent and skilled professionals, a smartly-managed brand identity, an impressive level of customer service, a high-quality standard of presentation, and a pricing structure that tempts conversions — to name just a few.

There's something notable left out of that list, though, as it relates directly to the subject of this post: and that's having fantastic products. Execution is vital, of course, as you should aim to maintain a standard of quality that surpasses that of your competitors' products — whether you're having your own products created or curating selections of existing products. But before you can do that, you need to have great product ideas.

What items should you stock? You want to find options that tick all the boxes: eye-catching, appealing, relevant, and firmly profitable. In this post, we're going to set out some strong advice for how you can source some useful product ideas for your online store. Let's get started.

Reach out to online communities

Let's say you're looking to sell bridal products, and expecting them to be purchased by pregnant women, their partners, or their friends or family members trying to support them. Wouldn't it help immensely to get some input from people in those situations? Even if you have personal events to draw from, that's just one perspective, and everyone has different needs and preferences.

Thankfully, the prevalence of online communities on social platforms like Facebook and Reddit (the latter in particular) makes this kind of consultation extremely easy. Retailers already lean heavily on them to expand their audiences (you may do the same), so why not broaden the contribution to the retail process? Simply ask people what they're looking for. Provide surveys and polls that are easy to fill out. Provide a way for your customers to reach out to you. You'll soon find out which ideas have legs and which don't.

Remember, though, to take everything with a grain of salt. It's easy for someone to say that they'd buy a particular type of product if you made it available, but there's a solid chance that they wouldn't and they simply like the concept more than they'd like the reality.

Investigate long-tail search terms

When you start typing something into Google's search bar, you'll start to get autocomplete suggestions: “bridal” immediately shows “bridal shoes” and “bridal underwear”, for instance. And those subcategories are fairly obvious, but what if you keep digging deeper by extending the search terms? Typing in “bridal underwear” gives way to “bridal underwear plus size” and “bridal underwear low back”, giving you some interesting new options for your ideation.

The more you toy with relevant search terms, the more you'll learn about what people are looking for, and the rich context will really help you shape your creative process. Compare and contrast what people are looking for in search to what's currently on offer on the market. You're looking for opportunities to fill gaps or outperform existing brands, so keep that in mind.

Of course, there's a lot more to keyword research than the above — we could write several articles about this topic alone! If you'd like to optimize your website but don't fancy taking on a whole new set of skills, it's worth considering outsourcing these tasks to a professional body. An SEO agency can boost your site up the search engine results, leaving you to focus on what you do best.

Carry out some competitor analysis

Originality is overrated in most areas and industries, and ecommerce is no exception. Consider that the objective is to sell and make money, not to dazzle consumers with the innovation of your product lineup. When a manufacturer starts racking up sales for a particular type of comestible, every grocery store chain with any sense will commission a knock-off product: the demand is there, so you should absolutely meet it.

Due to this, you should look at what your competitors are selling. Go to the most popular store site in your niche and go through the full set of products. What are the top sellers? How are they priced? Take a look at the most frequent terms in their internal search functions. If there's something people keep searching for that isn't widely available (more on searching later), then there's an obvious opportunity for you to fill that gap.

Incentivize user-generated content

User-generated content, or UGC, encompasses all content relating to your brand but created by your followers (whether existing customers or prospective customers, but focus on the former). The most common form of UGC is probably a social media comment about a brand, but when retailers think about it, they think about all-important reviews. Seeing positive reviews on a product will always make a shopper more interested, after all.

But we're talking about product ideation here, so how is this relevant? It's straightforward enough: long-form reviews offer invaluable commentary on what people like and dislike about your products, and if you can identify where a product is falling short of expectations, you can come up with viable replacements (or additional products to complement it).

Review third-party supplier inventories

Dropshipping is a massively-popular part of modern ecommerce. It's a process whereby third-party suppliers offer items at set prices and stand ready to handle the entire fulfillment process: retailers mark those prices up to get their profit margins, then list the products (effectively as their own). And even if you have no interest in dropshipping, it's still handy.

This is because dropshipper inventories can tell you a lot about what products are reliably in-demand and in-production. They can also help you find gaps in the market. If you can find interest in something that's viable but nowhere to be found in supplier lineups, then you may have found a product idea that can make you a lot of money.

As for which suppliers you should check out, there are plenty out there: here's a list of some you should consider. You'll likely find that there's a lot of overlap, naturally (with many of the production facilities and products being the same), so if you only have the time to review one lineup, you'll still be able to form a solid understanding of what's on the market.

Finding great product ideas isn't easy, certainly, but there are plenty of ways to use the resources of the online world to speed things along and give you the raw material you need to pick out the gems. Use these tactics and you should move in the right direction.