Today is day 1 of the Build A Niche Store Rebuild series.
In this series, I am going to be taking a
step-by-step approach to getting my Build A Niche Store, or BANS, seen, visited and making daily sales.
Today’s topic: Identifying The Highest Ticket Store Categories
I will be using the free version of Terapeak to see which of these small kitchen appliance categories will make the highest per sale commission. These will be the categories I will fully optimize. The rest of the categories will be minimally optimized.
Don’t worry. I will explain in detail what I mean by fully and minimally optimized when I get to that step. Today, I just need to identify the biggest earning store categories.
The best thing to do when picking out a niche for your BANS site is to do your research and focus your efforts on as narrow a niche as possible. I did not sharpen the focus of my store enough when I set it up so my Terapeak list will be much longer than yours should be. It should still serve well as an example.
Let’s do an example. The first category that appears in my store alphabetically is blenders. I’ll go to the Terapeak site, click on Free Tools on the top menu, click on Free Research in the left-hand column of the page and I’m ready to rock and roll.
I will mention here that Terapeak costs $24.95/month or $197.95/year which gives you the ability to save all of your searches and email or export them to Excel and I’m sure many other features that would be useful to you if you were going to build and optimize several sites.
My goal in this series is to show you the least expensive way to get started. You can invest in these tools once your stores start showing sales.
The research page that comes up is where you’ll be spending the majority of your time right now. I’ll enter blender in the search because blenders will only bring up results for that term. This would only be helpful if you were actually listing items on ebay and wanted to know how other sellers listed their products. For our exercise, we will always search on the singular form of a product category.
I have selected the “Enter Category ID” from the Categories drop-down menu and used 20667 from the admin panel in my BANS store. You should also use the 30 day option because it is the longest time frame you can search for free.
Editor’s Note: It has been brought to my attention that Terapeak no longer gives the 30-day time frame option for free. 14 days, however, should still give you good data for the relative comparison.
Here is what the result page looks like. Click on the graphic to open a full-sized screen capture in a new window.
As you can see, there’s plenty of information to make a decision as to a store category’s income potential.
What you’ll need to do is either create a spreadsheet and input this data or you can do like I did and simply write down the results. Make sure to use all of the data it gives you because it’s ALL useful in your final analysis
For now, go through all of your store categories and record the data that Terapeak returns for you.
We will analyze that data in the next installment of the Build A Niche Store Rebuild series.
Best,
[tags]BANS,build a niche store,build,niche,store[/tags]
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