Dropshipped POD: Print on Demand Niche Research

Print on Demand Niche Research

By Ryan Hogue on May 31, 2019

Niche research is an important part of making money selling print on demand products online, as the the ideal product is in high demand with low competition.

I had multiple people reach out to my over the past week asking me about how I do niche research for my print on demand designs.

After reviewing my blog, I realized I didn't have a good single answer - whoops! Sorry about that.

While niche research is an extremely important part of being a successful print on demand seller, it should also be stated that it's not going to make or break your business.

I used to believe the contrary - that niche research was of the utmost importance.

The reason it's NOT is because if you upload even your most saturated niche designs to many different products & marketplaces, you'll start to notice that you will gain traction on some of products/markets, almost always.

You won't know what product types or marketplaces will be successful until you try. So get to uploading!

Before walking you through my primary process, I wanted to make note of a few things:

I believe the research process should be optimized for speed - don't spend too long over thinking things. Unlike Amazon FBA, we don't have to make any real monetary investment to sell print on demand goods, so we can be "looser" during the research phase.
I'll be showing you my primary research process for t-shirts - there are many approaches you can take, including using paid tools - find what works best for you
When evaluating the market, filter search results by product type. For instance, if you're researching coffee mug designs, don't evaluate the popularity of t-shirts in that niche - look at coffee mugs

Here's how I start my research process:

P.s. I don't rely on paid tools. I used Merch Informer while in the lower Amazon Merch tiers, but no longer rely on it.

My POD Niche Research Approach

My first approach to POD design research involves scanning through content on the world's #1 e-commerce website: Amazon.com

I begin my search using a page on the Merch Informer website that ilters out non-Amazon-Merch results: Click here to view »

Then I rely on Chrome web browser extensions (revealed below) to help my eyeball how well the niche is selling, & I check that against the # of results for those keywords (which Amazon makes publicaly available).

I'm going to use "July 4th" as an example, per the request of one of my loyal YouTube subscribers :)

PS. I almost never target broad niches like July 4th - I almost always target evergreen niches instead.

Here's the step-by-step walk through:

Step 1: Search

Open the Merch Informer Amazon Merch Search in your web browser

Seed it with keywords of your choosing - niching down is to your benefit - for example, searching for "july 4th nurse"

Step 2: Evaluate

Scan through the results, starting with the number of total results in the top-left corner:

1-48 of [X] results

In the example above, I searched for "4th of July nurse" which returned 137 results.

I consider 137 Amazon Merch results a very good opportunity!

Anything under 500 results is a great opportunity!

I ended up performing 4 keyword searches:

"4th of july nurse" - 137 results - GREAT

"4th of july virginia" - 177 results - GREAT

"4th of july college" - 391 results - GOOD

"4th of july college student" - 687 results - OK

I'd absolutely consider this an opportunistic sub-niche. Potentially mixing the fact that nurses might have to work on July 4th, or honor nurses that took care of American soldiers on a t-shirt.

Step 3: Validate

There's still further validation we can do with minimal effort.

Download the DS Amazon Quick View Chrome extension [FREE].

This will inject each product's Best Seller Rank (BSR) into the search results, allowing us to quickly scan over the results and see how well the top / mid / bottom listings on page 1 are moving.

As long as you see a mix of BSRs around 1,000,000 & below on page 1, then the niche is likely worth targeting (Assuming that there's also ~500 or less total results).

A BSR hovering around 1M gets about 1 sale per month, & no BSR means that the product hasn't sold yet.

While that doesn't seem like much, if you're able to launch 100 products that sell 1 a month & net a $3 royalty from each sale, you'll make an additional $300 per month.

It may not seem like a lot, but do the math... that works out to an additional $3,600/yr!

What's to stop you from scaling that 10x in future?

Before you know it, $3,600 becomes $36,000. This is entirely possible because of how easily SCALABLE the print on demand business model is!

There's no need to hire & train employees, or to buy the machinery to print the products, or worry about inventory levels, or pick pack & ship the goods.

It's all outsourced to our print on demand fulfillment partner(s)!

Most people don't get excited about the prospect of taking the time to design something that gets 1 sale per month, but keeping the right perspective is important.

If at a minimum, you can project a niche design to sell 1 per month, that's a great starting point.

The two biggest things that make or break the success of your designs are:

Exposure

The amount of exposure your product gets from Amazon's algorithm will (obviously) influence its success. The harder it is for potential customers to find your product, the less sales you make.

This is why the first thing we did was evaluate the # of listings Amazon has on the seed keywords back in step #1. Ideally, it has less than 500 Amazon Merch listings.

The more competition there is, the harder it will be for your product to rank on page 1 of search results (no customer is going to find you on page 2+).

If you're confident in the quality of your designs, you can opt to promote them on Amazon Marketing Services (AMS). The downside with this is that it's an additional workflow that (to my knowledge) can't be automated. Your time is money = you want to reduce the # of non-required manual processes.

I'd almost always rather be designing & uploading new products than spending time in AMS setting up advertising campaigns.

Often times I'll wait and see if products achieve organic success before taking the time to advertise them.

Organic success is a great indicator that advertising campaigns will be profitable.

Customer Feedback

We don't really have control of customer feedback when it comes to POD products.

ver time, good products tend to rise to the top as customer feedback serves as an indicator to Amazon's algorithm that this product converts well & is well-liked by the customer base.

The same goes for low-rated designs... except that the fact that people buy them means they're getting conversions, and even if they're low-rated, Amazon will still tend to rank them favorably (at least initially) because of their sales history.

I should also take a moment to mention that my most successful designs all started off the same way as my least successful designs.

You can research, research, research all day, but you wont know how a design/product will perform until you test the market./p>

Again, the great thing about print on demand is that you can often test the market for free - especially on Amazon: