I'm going to outline my niche research process using only free tools in this article.
If you're on the market for paid tools that can fast-forward what I'll be showing you, I'd recommend either of these:
Both are subscription-based services with nominal fees that include tools which help you find high demand, low competition niches (with as little manual work possible).
My plan is to put some walkthroughs together in the near-future for both services, but I want to go on record stating that I don't think you need paid tools to succeed at print on demand.
Anyways, lets get to researching some niches!
Tools For Niche Research
There are two primary tools I use for my niche research:
- My "Search Merch" tool
- My favorite Amazon research Chrome Extension: DS Amazon Quick View
Using these two tools together allows us to search Amazon Merch listings exclusively, and monitor the best seller rank (BSR) of each listing from the search results.
It's a quick & easy way to check how well a niche is selling on Amazon... plus, Amazon tells you show many listings are indexed on the keywords we provide!
The result: we get a quick glimpse into how well a niche is selling & how stiff our competition is.
Search Merch Tool
It's not absolutely necessary to filter out non-Amazon Merch listings, but there are some good reasons to do it whenever possible:
First & foremost, by searching only Amazon Merch listings, you're able to validate keywords against Merch's content policy. If you see a good number of search results, that means your seed keywords are good to go.
Note: If you see suspiciously few results on keywords that you believe should be high-volume, be cautious. Sometimes listings get through manual review that shouldn't have.
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In the example above, I searched for "Beer Olympics" and saw 4 results... this is a massive red flag indicating to me that these keywords are NOT safe for use on Merch listings.
The next reason to search Merch only listings is that they're in a class of their own, as they're Prime eligible.
According to data from Millward Brown Digital, Amazon Prime members have a conversion rate around 74% whereas non-prime members convert around 13%.
Shoppers are able to easily filter out tons of fulfilled-by-merchant (FBM) print no demand listings by simply clicking the "Prime" checkbox on the search results page:
While it's possible for FBA t-shirt listings to exist outside of Amazon Merch, it's a pretty rare occurrence.
The last reason to use Search Merch to begin your niche research is because Amazon's search algorithm isn't that great!
It's not hard to search for "search terms" + "T-shirt" & find a bunch of results that aren't t-shirts.
Why go through the hassle of combing over them when you don't need to? Search Merch does the dirty work for you.
DS Amazon Quick View
DS Amazon Quick View injects each products BSR into the search results, making it easy to see how well it's selling.
The lower the BSR, the more sales it's getting.
My Niche Research Process
This is how I start the vast majority of my searches for new niches, and how I might approach validating a niche that I'm interesting in potentially entering.
- Navigate to the Search Merch tool (I recommend bookmarking this)
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- Enter the keywords associated with the niche you want to research
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- Click the button associated with the product type you want to search
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- In the top-left corner, Amazon will tell you how many results were indexed on those keywords, using your filters.
Niches I target will ideally have less than 500 Merch results
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- The BSR number underneath each listing is injected into the web page by DS Amazon Quick View
I look for best sellers (at the top of search results) to have a BSR in the range of 200,000 & below
I look for medium-range BSRs to be around 1,000,000 & below
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- If you see "Rank not found", the product has no sales history on Amazon.
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I recently published a blogpost where I shared the single design that took my 2nd Amazon Merch account from tier 10 straight to tier 500 eligibility.
The design was Game of Thrones related (without infringing, of course) & the primary keywords were "A Girl Has No Costume".
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This is still, in my mind, a great niche to target. It mixes Game of Thrones (seasonal trend) & Halloween (seasonal trend), but the BSRs indicate that they're also able to sell out-of-season.
A BSR around 1,000,000 will net you about 1 sale per month. It's not a lot, but if you can build a base of evergreens making you 1-2 sales a month, you will slowly but surely increase your passive income.
Amazon indicated to us that there's only 177 results which is about as good as it gets these days.
As long as you're not too aggressive in your keyword targeting (i.e. don't include "Game" "of" "thrones" anywhere), then I'd project that you'd get some sales targeting this niche.
To the contrary, if you search for overly-broad keywords like "Funny cat shirt" you get this:
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Over 5,000 results? No thank you!
This is an example of poor targeting - you need to niche down further, or risk getting indexed on page 2+ and likely never being seen by potential customers.
