What are good Shopify niches?

A good niche is one where you can combine your personal strengths with your personal interests, in a defensible way. What do I mean by that?

Any niche on Shopify is big enough for you to make substantial money. The only question is in which niche can you stand out and do so sustainably. To do so sustainably, it needs to be very difficult to copy your store. And to be very difficult to copy, you need to bring a personal edge to your product, store and general strategy.

That being said, now to the answer you were probably hoping to hear (kinda). Let me give you attractive business traits and then some examples of niches that fit those.

You want to have a niche that has:

• High margins (gross margins >70% min)

• Recurring revenue (ideally subscription model)

• Easy to ship (including packaging, storage and high value per cubic meter)

• Asset light (not much capital tied up in your inventory)

• Ability to be unique and defensible

Let’s take an example of the supplements niche, which in my opinion is vastly oversaturated (but more on that later). On paper it fulfils all those criteria:

• It has high margins, since to produce small pills is usually quite cheap

• It is a consumable and usually has a subscription model 

• Small vitamin pills are light, easy to package & ship

• You can create unique formulations for your specific supplement, making it unique and hard to copy

• Because of that you can have high pricing power and avoid typical cashflow issues

Ok this all sounds great, so what's the problem? The problem is that we are not the first to realise this, resulting in massive amounts of competition to enter and then saturate the market!

Now I’m not saying there isn’t still an opportunity in that niche (or any other niche) but the basic rules of economics dictate that the best niches also have the highest competition (all else equal). 

So I would like to go full circle and reiterate that the best niche is one where you can add YOUR personal edge to it, otherwise you will become a drop in the ocean of competition.

I wish you the best of success!