Fastest Growing Online Product Categories
On December 28th, comScore Networks released its estimates of consumer online non-travel (retail) spending at U.S. sites for the 2006 holiday season through Tuesday, December 26.
According to the press release, “total online retail spending reached $23.11 billion, marking a 26-percent increase versus the corresponding days in 2005. Sales during the week prior to Christmas (December 18 – December 22, 2006) rose 38 percent versus the corresponding week in 2005. Importantly, year-to-date non-travel e-commerce spending surpassed the $100 billion mark for the first time ever on Saturday, December 23, 2006“.
If you are looking for a new niche market to work on in 2007, here are the fastest growing online product categories…
If you think those niches are completely saturated with competition and therefore not worth your time or effort, think again.
You can survey your potential competition and then do it better. Go narrower and deeper within the category, sell higher quality goods, or offer better prices. Most importantly, brand yourself in a unique way that makes YOU and your affiliate site memorable in your visitors’ minds.
Don’t run scared from big markets – take advantage of them!
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Rosalind Gardner is a Super Affiliate blogger, author, speaker, and Internet marketing consultant.
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When I read through the chart, I just feel that I will have a hard time trying to make money from those hot market. But you are right, maybe there are some small niche market still available in the category market. It is all about your idea and how you approach the market. Thanks for the information.
Interesting post. However, looking at the markets highlighted in the chart, they are so oversubscribed to by affiliates. The fact that the growth has already occured could be interpreted as a trend that is well on it’s way to finished.
The market to get into is one at the beginning of it’s upsurge. I guess that will need a crystal ball to predict
Looking at these categories, I’m wondering whether the report looked at information products at all? For instance, it’s a little stunning that books would not have made it on the list somewhere.
To the point that one reader made, it is certainly worth asking whether “niche marketing” has perhaps seen its heyday. By simple logic, you can only slice a market pie so thin before you’re down to splitting individual cherries, and it seems to me that the increasing difficulty of identifying viable niches is one of those “early warning signs” that should be heeded.
What you hope, of course, is to find a niche that is underserved, dissatisfied, identifiable, reachable and willing to spend money to scratch their itch. Hopefully, they’re being ignored by the “big players” in that market. Of course, the underlying assumptions are:
1. That YOU can scratch the itch.
2. And…that you can do so at a price point that turns a profit.
3. And…that you can defend your position against the inevitable competitors.
Niche market position is very difficult to defend because most of the vertical market-defensive moves (like segmenting!) are not available to you. It might only take someone with a little more PPC money, some good list connections, and knowledge of some basic Web marketing techniques to knock you off your perch.
…and all of this assumes you have truly identified a niche in the first place, of course.
A better model going forward might be what I call “fusion” marketing. This is a concept taken from genetic engineering (fusion proteins), and a primitive form of fusion can be found on the Web, called a “mashup”. A mashup takes different bits of functionality from multiple sources to create an integrated information product, i.e. a “personalized” home page.
If you take the average Netizen, you could call his desire for local weather to be a “niche demand”, his desire for local news to be another “niche demand”, his desire for RSS feeds about his favorite sport to be another “niche demand”, etc. What a mashup does is NOT to hack up the Netizen even further into smaller and smaller niche demands, but to FUSE a number of his demands into ONE product.
Now, this might look like niche marketing in reverse, or putting Humpty Dumpty back together again, but it’s really much more than that, and it’s worth thinking very deeply about.