There’s no perfect formula for choosing the product that will win the season or set the next trend. But if we weigh up a few different factors, we can get pretty close and give the product we pick a real shot at success.
What to keep in mind when hunting for your winning product
- Think about products that don’t go out of style
Always think long term: products that sell well in today’s market and will keep selling in the future. Otherwise, if you bet on something that’s trendy right now, you’ll have to stay constantly on top of every new development.
- Study your customers’ demand and buying habits
By understanding the sector you work in, your customers’ buying patterns and the demand your competitors are seeing for specific products, you can choose to set yourself apart with your own products and go after a competitive edge.
- Study the competition closely
Watch and study the competition in depth. The more you know about your sector and the businesses attracting potential customers, the better you’ll understand them. Knowing your competition is essential if you want to stand out and offer a better product. Pay attention to their prices, promotions and the strategies that are working for them.
- High-margin products
The profit margin is the difference between the wholesale price you pay for a product and the price you resell it for to your customers in the store. The bigger the difference, the bigger the profit. This lets you play with your pricing margins and fine-tune them, and stay flexible in any situation.
- Products aimed at your audience
It’s crucial to be clear about your target audience. Otherwise, you won’t have a clear picture of your ideal customers, their interests, what they do, how they communicate and so on.
Think about how much they’re willing to spend to get your products and what they usually buy. Knowing your audience is essential for building a solid marketing, advertising and price-sensitivity strategy (promotions, campaigns, etc.).
A winning product meets different needs
- A winning product either focuses on a specific segment and meets a concrete need, or, on the other hand, appeals to a large target audience.
- They say that to have a good profit margin, the product’s price should be at least around 15 euros.
- The product should have a long shelf life, or none at all.
- Purchase frequency should be four times a year or more.
Winning products to sell online
With the arrival of the internet, tools like Google Ads, Semrush or Ubersuggest let you analyze web traffic and see what people are searching for online.
To run a solid analysis, these tools can help you discover whether the product you have in mind could be your big hit in store.
- Look for keywords: Keywords are the terms people search for online. Here’s an example using Google Ads.
In the Google Ads search tool I looked up: black t-shirt, white t-shirt and blue t-shirt. It then shows me a table with the average monthly searches in Spain. As you can see, we can get a general idea of what people are searching for online.
- A product is considered good if it gets a minimum of 5,000-10,000 visits a month. We can apply these figures to an online store, but they also help us with our physical store and with choosing products.
Another tool we can use is Google Trends. The difference with Google Ads is that here it breaks down the terms you want to search by region, showing you the trend over time in a graph along with the different areas of the region you set. It lets you target your audience better and see where to run more or less aggressive campaigns.
