I’ve heard it time and time again. It’s just too hard to sell in a saturated niche. Everything is saturated.
If this is you, you are looking at selling online in completely the wrong way. You can sell in saturated niches, businesses do it everyday. You just need to know the right things to do to stand out from the competition and sell more than your competitors.
Just a heads up! This blog post may contain affiliate links. That means if you make a purchase through one of those links, at no additional cost to you, I may make a commission from your purchase, which helps me provide this content to you!
What is a saturated niche?
An saturated niche is a market segment in which there is a larger number of similar products available to buy than there are buyers to purchase them. In other words, there is a much greater supply than there is demand.
If you are an online seller or Etsy seller, you have probably heard the term saturated or oversaturated niche thrown around quite a lot. It just means that once you slice the pie, there isn’t much left for each seller.
Saturated markets occur when numerous sellers are create products that are exactly the same and very similar. Usually, there isn’t any one thing that makes these products stand out from the competition versus another similar product.
How do you stand out in a saturated niche?
As the e-commerce world expands exponentially, you need to find ways to stand out from the competition.
Four ways to stand out in a saturated market.
First, let’s look at this from a competition standpoint.
Sell products with less competition
In a nut shell, competition is any business or product that is similar to yours and sell to your same target buyer.
Ideally, you want to be the only one who sells to your target customers, and you want lots of customers. But that isn’t usually the situation.
Here’s a simple example of how competition affects your potential sales.
10 people sell Product A, and there are 100 buyers.
How much of the pie would you get? You still have a fairly large slice, right?
Ignoring all the complicated factors, simple math. You’d get 10 sales. 1/10th of the total market.
Now consider if 10000 people sell Product A.
The slice is so much smaller. You’re share of the market is tiny by comparison. 1/10000th. You most likely wouldn’t get a single sale.
Would you rather be 1 of 10 or 1 of 10000?
The goal here is to look for products to sell that have low competition. This may mean that you look at a smaller niche within a niche.
Niching down
Think about this…
You want to see t-shirts. Look for a smaller segment of the total t-shirt market. This is what we call niching down. Picking a smaller niche within a larger one.
Many sellers have huge success with micro niches.
Are there thousands of people selling pet t-shirts? Teacher t-shirts? Funny cat t-shirts? Funny engineer t-shirts?
Are you going to try to sell to every single person that wants to wear t-shirts? No. You’ll look to sell to a specific buyer within the t-shirt loving community.
You may chose to sell dog lovers. This many be a smaller group of buyers, but the competition is much smaller as well. When you niche down, you also find buyers that are perfect for your pet-friendly designs. You weed out all the “not-interested” buyers. Doubtful that the tattooed up biker is going to want your t-shirt. It’s possible but not likely.
Serving up perfect products to just the right buyer in a less competitive niche will ensure you slice of the pie is as large as possible.
Next, create products with higher demand.
Make products with higher demand
Let’s look at this from the other side.
You make product xyz. There are only 10 of you that make it.
You have 1000 searches per month for that product. Simple math, forget the algorithms and all that. Simple division.
You should sell 100 of those. That’s your slice.
Now consider if there are 100000 searches per month for that product. Again, simple math.
You would expect to sell 10000 of that item.
Another way to chose products to sell is by looking at the perceived value.
Don’t forget to join my FREE Etsy Seller Success Facebook Group!
You need be aware though, that higher demand niches will usually have higher competition. So, try to find the right balance.
Sell products with a higher perceived value
When someone lands on a search page and sees 2 products. One is $12 and one is $24. Which one would you buy?
Most people would say the cheaper one.
Well, you aren’t wrong. But you are excluding a huge buyer segment.
Those that want to buy fewer things but of higher quality.
So many sellers want to sell as much as humanly possible. I’ve taken the exact opposite approach with one of our stores. I want to sell on the higher perceived value products to fewer buyers.
There are several reasons for that.
- You don’t have to sell as many products to make more in revenue and profit
- The time investment usually isn’t significantly larger than selling cheap products
- Not as many people can make and create this product easily so there are less sellers
True, there would be less buyers potentially, but with so fewer sellers, I’m not really worried about that.
As we’ve been discussing, selling in an oversaturated niche is a surefire way to burnout quickly and not make any money.
Check out these 13 ways to avoid burnout next.
You will constantly be trying to get your products seen among a huge sea of sellers and product listings.
Try looking for your own blue ocean instead.
Create products that no one else can make
What is a blue ocean strategy?
The term blue ocean was created by Chan Kim & Renée Mauborgne. It refers to a method of creating additional market space for your products and services and making your competition inconsequential.
Essentially, it’s a way to make your products stand out from the competition because you won’t have any. In turn, making your product one of a few (lower supply) sellable to a large buyer pool (higher demand).
If you want to learn more about the Blue Ocean Strategy, I highly recommend the book.
If you’d like to see some of my free trainings, yep, FREE, you can check them out on my YouTube channel. I cover topics about online business, selling on Etsy and Shopify, digital design, marketing and loads more.
You can also see my top 10 business books to read here.
