What sells online?24 February 2005
If your business is looking to sell online for the first time, or to diversify the retail website you already have, how can you assess the market and find out what's popular at the moment?
Research has shown that the following products sell well on the Internet:
- Groceries - think of the home order and delivery service offered by all the leading supermarkets, but also think of small, specialised, online food shops catering to specific consumers such as foreign food fans, organic devotees or vegetarians.
- Drinks - the beauty of selling drinks over the Internet is that the products have a long shelf life, bottles are fairly easy to pack up and transport, and in most cases, alcoholic drinks are a high added value product. Offering consumers an easy way to buy rare, specialised or imported alcohol is a particularly successful niche.
- Books and music - these launched the Internet shopping boom, and small businesses can take advantage of the market for second-hand or specialised goods.
- Jewellery - this sells well online because it can easily be presented attractively, costs very little to deliver, and is falling in price as suppliers tap overseas markets.
There are a number of practical resources that can help you keep up with what's hot in the world of e-tailing. Looking at popular search terms used on the major search engines and on leading online retailers' websites is a good place to start.
- Google has a service called Zeitgeist, which lists most popular terms in various categories. You can also get this information from it's UK site.
- Ask Jeeves offers similar information and can give you details about a changing selection of industry sectors, such as cars or computer game brands.
- eBay is an excellent indicator of what's selling online, and eBay Pulse shows popular searches and most watched items. You can select which categories to concentrate on, and restrict the charts to individual products. From DVD players to baby bouncers, Pulse can tell you what potential customers are really interested in.
When this type of information is collected and analysed over time it can give you an excellent picture of how and when to launch the product you're considering into the online marketplace. What's more, not many online businesses are using this sort of information yet, so it can give you a real competitive advantage.
