Three tips for choosing a business idea

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Three tips for choosing a business idea

The business ideas we’ve covered might be easier to run when it comes to logistics, but that doesn’t make them easy. There are at least three things you should keep in mind as you consider your options, no matter what you decide to start.

1. Focusing on a niche makes marketing easier
As with any business, marketing is what unlocks your success. It’s not enough to know that there’s demand for your products—you need to figure out ways to reach the people that are most likely to buy them. You need to get the right visitors to discover your products.

Luckily, marketing is a lot easier when you're catering to a specific audience or identity (e.g. vegans, board game lovers, photographers in your city). You can produce social media content that resonates with these people or run ads that target their interests. Taking this approach also helps you project a consistent brand because you’ll have a more specific idea of who exactly you’re talking to.

Think about how you can zero in on a specific audience for your products and how the business you build can serve them. If you already have a sizeable audience (a blog, a YouTube channel, or an Instagram account), maybe you can even find a way to base your business off of that existing audience.

Additional resources:

How to Find a Product to Sell Online
How to Use Niche marketing
How to Evaluate Market Demand For Your New Product Idea

2. Pricing is about more than profit
Price your products too low and shoppers might assume they’re low quality. Price them too high, and you might scare some customers off. In any case, you’ll need to find a sweet spot that also lets you factor in the cost to acquire customers and offer discounts, especially if you plan on paying for ads.

With many of the business ideas we’ll explore in this post, you may not be shipping your products, but you still need to cover the cost of shipping. Consider your shipping costs and how they will vary in the different countries you want to serve.

Many online sellers try to bake their shipping costs into their retail price so that they can offer free shipping, or at least a reasonable flat rate. Others focus on encouraging shoppers to add more items to their cart with conditional free shipping (e.g. free shipping on orders over $50) to maximize their profit.

At the end of the day, your prices can be tweaked and you can experiment with a variety of pricing strategies until you find one that works for you.

Additional resources:

6 Tips to Develop an Ecommerce Pricing Strategy
How to Do a Break-Even Analysis
5 Ways to Increase the Average Order Value of your Online Store

3. Test, learn, and grow as you go
The pursuit of perfection can be one of the biggest hurdles in getting a business up and running. Keep in mind that nothing is set in stone.

Products can be swapped in and out fairly easily (especially when you're not stuck with stock). Your store can be redesigned. Your prices can be adjusted. You can switch to a better supplier. And you can validate all of these decisions based on the dozens of signals you have at your disposal (traffic, how much time people are spending on your site, reviews, abandoned carts, etc.).

If your idea just isn’t working out the way you planned, think about how you can pivot before you quit.

There are aspects of your business that you can always salvage if you try a different product or approach. The brand you invest time into creating and the followers you amass on social media or in your email list can be assets you repurpose for your next business idea.

Additional resources:

What are the Basics Ecommerce Metrics I need to Focus on First
The Beginner's Guide to A/B Testing
Supply without as many demands
Thanks to a combination of technology, third-party suppliers, and the ability to quickly test ideas online, it’s easier than ever to build a business and start making sales without getting caught up in sourcing products, renting space, and managing inventory.

With this approach, you can test ideas before you invest in them, or start making money on the side without all the inventory-related commitments that might stand in your way.

The online business ideas covered above can even be combined in a variety of ways to start a business that’s uniquely yours. If the idea of sourcing, storing and shipping inventory kept you from starting a business before, begin with an inventory-free, low-investment business model and grow from there.