Not that, you know, the five criteria of winning products, it's time to brainstorm 20 product ideas. Don't freak out. You're not going to add all 20 products to your store. What you want to do here is just get a lot of ideas on the table or on the spreadsheet. Once you have those ideas, I'll walk you through how to narrow that list down to the five products that will look really great in your first online store. With that said, the first place that you want to start looking for these product ideas are big eCommerce websites. Think of places like Amazon wish, Etsy and eBay.
A great place to look for ideas is to head to the best seller lists of these websites. That's because these stores have massive amounts of data about what's selling well, and you can use that data to find great product ideas. Now I know you're probably going to say, why would I look on these sites? Aren't I competing with them again, because you're looking for products that fit these criteria, that customers didn't wake up thinking they even wanted.
You're only racing to get in front of those customers first. These products are selling well because customers want them. But just because these products are selling well on Amazon wish or Etsy doesn't mean that you can't get in front of these customers with great ads and get the sales yourself. Let me show you how to get ideas from these best seller lists. By heading to Amazon, to get to the Amazon best seller list or any of the best seller lists that I'll mention, click the links below this lesson.
You can also Google Amazon best seller list, and that will take you right where you need to go. The Amazon bestseller list is updated hourly, which is great because you're getting the most up to date data about what customers want. This list is also broken down by category there's toys and games, there's electronics, and there's a lot more categories. As you keep browsing. I recommend that you browse categories that you yourself are familiar with. So if you shop in a certain category, go to that category for ideas first and foremost.
Let's say that you like automotive accessories, click the automotive category, and see what's a best seller there. I recommend this tactic because as a car enthusiast, you'll be better able to tell which of the products on the list actually solve a problem for other car owners or which products stand out. You'll also be able to tell which of the products on this list you've already seen in stores. In other words, when you're familiar with a category, you're better able to go through the list of criteria for any given product and decide whether that product meets those criteria.
As you find products that seem to meet most of that criteria, add them to your product research spreadsheet. They don't have to meet all of the criteria, but the more, the better, for example, say you find this car trash bag intriguing, add it to your list. Along with the link to where you found it, then decide for yourself whether it meets the five product criteria. You can always do a little bit more research by going to the product page and digging deeper so that you can fill out that product research spreadsheet to the best of your abilities. Now, I would you not to sell this product?
That's because this is a brand name product. In other words, customers buy products from this brand because they trust the brand. You cannot legally sell brand name products in your store. So just don't add them to your product research list. The same goes for any products, with any trademarks or copyrights associated with them. So products that reference TV shows, movies, Netflix shows famous books, all of those be a little bit iffy, and I recommend you just don't bother with them in the first place.
Let me show you another place to look for product ideas. I'm going to go to a site called wish and you can also find a link to wish below this lesson. Now just like on Amazon, you can simply scroll through wish to see what catches your eye and actually would you look at that? There's the car trashcan that we just saw on Amazon. That's great, but you're here for new ideas to generate some new ideas, go back to those first products you might have found on Amazon and think about the problems they solve or the general categories that they fall within.
For example, a car trash can definitely solves a trash problem, but it also solves a storage problem. So what you could do here is search for the term car storage. You'll see that searching for that term gives you lots of new results and new product ideas that you can add to your product research spreadsheet. I think you get the idea here. You can and should go to other eCommerce site bestseller lists to generate more and more product ideas, but I'll leave that for you to do on your own.
I have included a lot more links to other eCommerce sites below this video lesson. So make sure to check that out. Right now I want to show you one other cool way to find product ideas. What you want to do is head to a site called Google trends, and of course I've left a link to Google trends below Google trends is really cool. Honestly, I spend like hours just looking at Google trends, cause I love to see what people are searching for and how it's trending.
Google trends shows you search volume trends over time for a given search term in a given geography. So for example, I could enter the term car storage and Google trends will give me a result that lets me know how many people have been searching for car storage in the United States in the past 12 months. This is really cool stuff. But what you actually want to do here is scroll down. You're looking for a section called related queries and related topics.
This is where you find new product ideas. For example, look here, you've got overhead car storage. And if you're not sure what that is, head back to Amazon or one of the other eCommerce sites and search that term to see product examples that fit with that search term, for example, here, you can see that a related search query for overhead car storage has been trending looking at it, my concern with this product is that customers would need to research it before buying it because they would want to know if that overhead storage fit on their car. So that doesn't fit one of our important criteria for winning product.
Another product idea that I'm seeing here though on Google trends is the car seat gap storage box. See, I love this product because customers clearly don't know what to call this thing. I barely got out. Car seat, got storage box. I'm sure customers aren't calling that, which means that customers don't know how to search for this on eCommerce sites, which means that the savvy entrepreneur can make up a really cool name and start selling this direct to customers. I love it.
If you enter this search term on Amazon, you get some pretty good products in the search results. Now that you have a few ways to brainstorm go nuts. I've stuck to one product category throughout this lesson, but I encourage you to try a lot of different categories that meet your interests. If you like cycling, look for a cycling accessories. If you like cooking, look for kitchen accessories and check out the links below this lesson for more places to find great product ideas.
Your homework is to use what you've learned in this lesson to generate 20 product ideas and put them on your product research spreadsheet. Once you've done that, join me in the next lesson and I'll show you how to narrow that list of 20 to the five products that you're going to add to your first online store.
