In the last lesson I gave you some homework. I told you to find 20 product ideas using sites like Amazon wish and Google trends that met the five criteria for winning products. By now you've collected those 20 product ideas in the product research spreadsheet. Now I'm going to show you how to narrow that list of product ideas, to the five products that you're going to sell in your online store. The way to do this is actually by adding three narrowing criteria columns to the product research spreadsheet. I'll show you exactly how to do that. The first criteria that you can use to cross products off your list is passion. And in this case, it's passion for the products your going to sell.
Generally speaking, if you're passionate about a product, you're going to be much better at selling it. That's because you're going to know what problem the product solves. You're going to know why it stands out. And you're going to know what matters to the customers that you're selling to having passion for a product also really helps because as you're building your first online store, things are going to get challenging. If you're passionate about what you're selling, that's going to help you move past those challenges and keep building that successful store. So as the first step to narrowing down your list of ideas, take a look at your products and decide which ones you would actually be passionate about selling. Even though I've been using car accessories.
As an example, in the past couple of lessons, I'm actually not very passionate about automotive accessories. So I personally wouldn't indicate that I'm passionate about them on the product research spreadsheet. I'm actually a total liability behind the wheel. I don't even know I don't parallel park. I perpendicular park in schools zones, so I should not be selling automotive accessories. The next thing you need to do to narrow down your list of product ideas is check to see if any of them violate Facebook's advertising policies.
Later on in this course, you're going to use Facebook to advertise your products, but you can't do that. If your products violate Facebook's policies, Facebook has some pretty strict policies about what you can and can't advertise. For example, you can't run ads for weapons, tobacco products, drug paraphernalia, or counterfeit items. Now lots of restrictions that Facebook has are actually common sense. And you probably weren't thinking about selling weapons in the first place.
However, not everything is so obvious. I left a link to Facebook's advertising policies below this lesson, and I really encourage you to just take a look at them and make sure you familiarize yourself with the policies. So in your spreadsheet, create another column and know whether your products comply with Facebook's advertising policies. Looking at this example, spreadsheet, I see one problematic product. It's this vape pen adapter. This could possibly violate Facebook's rules against drug related products.
And quite frankly, I don't want to build a store around it and find out that it does. So I'm just going to take it off my list now. Okay. Let's talk about high risk products. When I talk about high risk, I'm talking about any product that could potentially cause harm to customers. Primarily these fall into two categories, makeup and skincare items and accessories and toys for very young children. There's a small, small chance, but still a chance that makeup and skincare items could irritate customers' skin. And likewise, there's a small, small, small chance, but there's still a chance that accessories for young children could come loose and cause harm to the children. If anything like that happens, customers are not going to go to your suppliers with their complaint.
They're going to go to you. That is not a risk you want to take. It's easy to avoid this problem by avoiding high risk products in the first place. So in your spreadsheet create a column to note products that are safe. I'm a little worried about this product. It's a baby pacifier and it's sold really well. But in my worst case scenario mind, I'm wondering if maybe the pacifier could come loose and potentially harm the child. The same goes for these colored lenses.
I'm not too keen on the idea of a customer putting something in their eye that I don't know whether it's perfectly safe for them or not. So I'm just not going to sell these colored lenses. At this point, you may have eliminated quite a few products from your list. If you remove products that you're not passionate about, that could violate Facebook ad policies, or that could be high risk, you'll likely end up with just a few products. Now, what you want to do is take a look at the remaining products.
Are there any trends here? Specifically, do you see any patterns in terms of the categories that these products belong to? If so, you're starting to see the niche of your store take shape. For example, once I apply these filters on my spreadsheet, I start to see a niche or to take shape. There are a couple of products that seem like they could fit into a kind of women's hiking accessories store. And then there are a couple of products that could fit into a cycling accessories store. Which one I going to choose? Actually, I like the cycling niche because I have personal experience with cycling accessories. After the COVID-19 pandemic, I'd stopped using public transportation and I started cycling to work instead, but I'm a new cycler.
And so I found that there were all kinds of accessories that I wanted to make my cycling commute more comfortable. I feel like I could use this experience to better market these products to customers. Can I be real? I saw that bike seat cushion, and I was like, my butt needs this. That is a bumpy commute by all means, if you see a real life connection between niches that are starting to take shape and your personal experiences go with that niche, that's going to make it so much easier for you to describe these products and how they help solve problems later on, as you build your store and create your ads.
If your list has a couple of products in the same categories, but not quite five, that's fine. Go back to the brainstorming phase and keep brainstorming till you get five great products that you can add to your store. And in fact, that's your homework now that you know how to narrow down your product ideas, go ahead and do the same with your own product list to find the five products that you want to get started with as you build your first online store. Once you have those five products ready, join me in the next lesson, I'm going to introduce you to a site called Aliexpress that will quite frankly blow your mind.
