How do you choose products for a Shopify store?

Want to open a Shopify store but not sure which products to choose? Don't worry. In this article we'll cover everything you need to know about Shopify, along with five guidelines that will help you choose the best and most profitable products for your store.

Shopify: a short introduction

Shopify is an online store platform developed by a Canadian company of the same name, founded in 2006. Its founders recognized the enormous potential in the field, and so they initiated the building of an online platform for creating and managing online stores, meant for anyone and everyone, with the aim of making ecommerce accessible without demanding a lot of resources or in-depth expertise.

So… where's the magic?

In the past, opening an online store took many demanding steps. To build a store website, an ordinary person had to hire professionals skilled in web design and development, digital marketing, SEO and more. Beyond that, the future store owner had to set up and implement payment processing infrastructure - the biggest blow when building an online store. This is exactly where the magic lies: Shopify removes all of these requirements for anyone who wants to set up an online store. All you need is internet access, an idea, and the ability to pay a flexible, personalized monthly fee.

How does it work?

When opening a store on Shopify, the store owner goes through a few simple, accessible steps. In the first step, you sign up for Shopify and enter the store owner's details. In the second step, you make a few simple operational decisions. In the third step, you choose the store's design from ready-made themes that Shopify provides. In the fifth step, you decide on your preferred payment setup. In the sixth and final step, you enter the store's address. Is that it? Well, no. The sharp-eyed among you will notice that we skipped one important step: in the fourth step comes the juicy part - choosing the products.

An introduction to choosing products on Shopify

For those of us who don't want to make money from the store, the product selection step can be quick and sloppy. You can check it off by uploading products with no strategic planning, photographing them on your apartment floor with your phone, copying content and copywriting from Google, and that's it - you're done. For the more dedicated among us, who want to do the process properly and maximize the profits and output of the online store they build, we've prepared a detailed guide to choosing products on Shopify.

I want to make money. What do I need to do?

To go through product selection the right way, in a way that will pay off for those who follow it, you first need to understand the importance of planning a sales strategy. The basis for that understanding is very simple and comes down to one central question: how can you, as store owners, turn the people browsing your site into paying customers? To answer it, we'll explain how to focus on a few guidelines when choosing products. Here are 5 of them:

1. Niche

The first guideline to consider is choosing the niche of the store you'll open. A niche is the theme that ties your products together and describes what your store does. There are broad niches (for example: fashion, sports, tools) and specific niches (for example: women's lingerie, surfing gear, art supplies for painters). It's best to choose a niche you understand deeply, or alternatively, to do in-depth research into the stores operating in that niche. Once you've chosen your niche, we'll move on to the next guideline.

2. Target audience

After you've chosen your store's niche comes the second guideline - defining the target audience your store will address. To understand who you're selling to and the right way to sell to them, do research aimed at building a deep understanding of your target audience. Try to understand the audience's shopping habits, its demographic breakdown (age, gender, location and so on), and the like. This research can include asking acquaintances face to face, running online surveys, going over competing stores that sell in the same niche, and looking through relevant social networks and pages (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X (formerly Twitter) and so on). Once you know your target audience well, move on to the next guideline. 

3. Competitor research

Now that you know your target audience and understand your niche, it's time to research your competitors in depth. Go to the stores you'll be competing with and start studying the products they promote, based on the following points: What products do they sell? What is their price range? How much do they invest in marketing and branding? How many products do they have in their store? Once you've gathered the relevant data, move on to the next guideline.

4. Marketing feasibility

By now, you've established the general direction of the products that are right for your store. At this stage, go over all the products you've chosen and start working out how you can market them best. A product's marketing feasibility (the likelihood that you'll manage to sell it) depends on its costs, how hard it is to brand, how many competitors are marketing it, and the combination of all these factors. When choosing a product, aim for the following: choose a product that is easy to photograph, easy to brand, can be sold at a sensible price, and isn't available to buy online in lots of places. Have a product like that? Great - chances are it will be a Best Seller.

5. Organizing into categories

This is the last guideline you'll need to consider in order to choose the best products for your online store. Once you have a list of products, start organizing them by category. Creating different clusters, each holding groups of products of the same type, price and so on, will make marketing easier on your side and, on the customer's side, make all the products relevant to them simpler and easier to find.