Understanding Competition

A short excerpt from the Sell Niches Bundle

The seemingly logical approach most new sellers take when it’s time to research their competition is looking for that special product other retailers are not hip to yet—a product that no one else is selling. After all, low competition means not many people are selling it, right? Then when they hop on various search engines or auction sites and find that there ARE a number of other people already selling that product, its back to the drawing board looking for something else to sell that has low or no competition.

This type of thinking is a good way to get started on the wrong foot. Instead of diving in and looking to see how many people are selling a product, the first questions you really need to understand are:

• Are there products with no competition?
• What is considered low competition?
• What constitutes high competition?

Are there products with No Competition?

Looking for a product that no one else is selling so that you have no competition gives new sellers an unhealthy tunnel vision during their research. The reality is, a product will not survive in the market if there are not multiple retailers selling it. Instead of looking at competition from a retailer’s perspective, let’s start by looking at it from a supply chain perspective…

Let’s say the wholesaler buys 5,000 chairs from a manufacturer. They’ve got to get those chairs out of their warehouse and sold to the public as fast as possible…so they can cover costs, make a profit, order more chairs from the Manufacturer and repeat the process. In order for a product to survive in the market, wholesalers and manufacturers need MANY retailers selling that product. Without multiple retailers there wouldn’t be enough sales to support production and distribution costs. Without multiple retailers the supply chain breaks. Actually the supply chain goes bankrupt because it can’t afford its own operating costs.

Through the process of deduction, it’s obvious that many retailers can all be selling the same product and still make sales.

• If retailers are not making money…then that means they are not making sales.
• If they are not making sales… then that means wholesalers are not making money.
• If wholesalers are not making money… then manufacturers don’t make money.
• If nobody is making money the product goes out of production.

Multiple retailers selling the same product is a natural and very necessary part of the supply chain cycle. When you understand this then you understand that there can obviously be many retailers selling the same product and every retailer is making money.

Realizing that just about any product you pick to sell will have other retailers already selling it is a good first step in understanding competition. But even though competition is a natural thing to expect you do have to be able to measure whether or not there’s too much. You need to know how to analyze the current competition to determine if you can truly compete.

Let’s take a look at how to do your competition research, step-by-step…Read the full Competition Research Lesson in your copy of the Sell Niches Bundle.

Competition Research Sheets

The main point in the above excerpt is that every product you research WILL have competition. So you don’t want to get trapped trying to find products to sell that don’t have any competitors because unless you are developing the product yourself, you will have competition…and if you do want to develop your own product YOU would want multiple retailers selling it too!

The trick with competition research is understanding how to gauge whether or not you can compete as a new seller. Competition research is an important part of finding a good niche market to start selling in. In the Sell Niches Bundle we cover a lot of detail on how to fully research your competitors to determine whether or not they are a retailer you need to be concerned with (and even how to learn from them.) The competition section of our Research Sheets they are setup to allow you to organize your competition research for multiple retailers and up to 3 different online markets. You can always do more later on, but for doing a quick study of the current market, looking at multiple retailers from 3 different markets gives you a good idea of what to expect for that product online.

Once your competition research is gathered, the Sell Niches Research Sheets will automatically use that information (along with all of the other research you’ve entered for Demand, Your Costs and etc..) to Summarize all of your research into one big summary sheet that displays your profit potential, cheapest ad costs, demand and more so that you can see clean, well organized display of your research which makes comparing product research so much easier.

What we found out…

We began by opening up our Sell Niches Research Sheet we started for “Unique Dining Tables” and then clicked on the Competition Tab along the bottom. This brought up our Competition Research entry Sheet which contains entry fields designed to make organizing our competition research much easier. It allows you to quickly enter relevant competition research such as retail prices, shipping costs and even the ‘quality’ of your competitors you find.

Shown here is the Summary Sheet that was automatically generated based on the research we entered into our research sheets. We researched 3 different places online (Google, Bing and Yahoo) and gathered information on 6 competitors in each location. Once completed, the Sell Niches Research Sheet summarizes the information into a nice chart like the one seen here and automatically shows what the average prices were and even indicates which market might be the most profitable to start selling in.

Bing is showing an average retail price for these dining tables than Google and Amazon. That means Bing might actually be a more profitable market to sell in for dropshipping, because the average retailer is able to sell it for a higher price.