Tips to Picking a Product for Your Ecommerce Business

There are tons of people out on social media giving business advice. Some of it is good advice, but most of it isn’t good. In this new series watch CapForge’s owner react to different advice videos. He’s an expert in all things business and has 20+ years of experience under his belt. Some of the things he reacts to might even surprise you!

CapForge Founder and Owner Matt Remuzzi reacts to business advice being shared on the internet. In this video, he reacts to how you should be picking products to sell for your eCommerce business. 

Video Transcript: 

Business Advice Video:

Here’s how you can find out what business to start in 2024. Head over to Google Trends

and check out the shopping trends of this year. See what has been the most popular item in 2023 and you can also see what has been the most searched item in 2023. In addition to Google Trends, Shopify have also released a forecast of what they believe is gonna be the best-selling products of 2024. Interest critics have released their 2024 forecast, it gives you a detailed idea of what is going to be popular next year including themes, trends colors, and products. Finally, check out Amazon’s Best Sellers 2023. It’s all divided up into categories so you can see which products have sold the best in which category which will give you a good idea of what products and what categories are going to do well in 2024.

Matt’s Reaction:

Okay, so this is a suggestion on how to figure out what to sell in 2024 by looking at what sold in 2023 and looking at trends and current best sellers. The problem with that is and I’ve talked about it in other videos is it’s a product-first approach. This sweater was trendy and cool in 2023 it’ll probably still be trendy and cool in 2024 so that’s the kind of sweater you should sell. The problem is you’re trying to find the product and then find people who wanna buy it. I think the much better approach is to first figure out who your customers are gonna be and what they’re interested in and then figure out what you wanna sell based on who the customers are. So if you know you’re gonna sell to people with affinity for fly fishing then you figure out what products they want, what products they’re currently buying, what they don’t like about some of those products, and what you can improve on or curate as products that would be best for them or whatever it is. And build a product list based on the audience not just trying to be oh silvers in or reds in or greens in or sweaters are in or sweaters are out or whatever and trying to hop on these trends.

There’s giant giant companies already aware of these trends already selling millions of dollars worth of these goods and you as an independent seller trying to me too these products you’re gonna have a very hard time. They can sell them for less than you can even buy them for and they have huge ad campaigns and huge ads budgets that you can’t compete with. So what you would be better off doing is not trying to be what’s trendy and cool but trying to figure out a niche category that you can sell into. Where you understand the customer first and then figure out from there by knowing who the customer is that you’re going after what they would be interested in and then figuring out where you can source those products and not only source them but how you can potentially improve them, make them a little better, make them more attractive to your customers that you already know what they’re looking for and want and build it from the customer side, not the product side. And it’s very difficult to jump on to popular trends and try to get a little tiny slice of that market profitably. It’s much better to build your own audience and sell to them and you got the control. You know what they want you’re selling them stuff they’ve already told you they’re interested in and you’re not competing with those giant brands. You built a relationship with your customers that ensures that you’re gonna get their money. They’re gonna buy from you cause they trust you. They know you and you know them. That to me is the right way to build an e-commerce business not by checking Google Trends.