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Taking Advantage of Big Business Research for Small Business Profit
By businessbroad | December 23, 2007
As a small business owner, you probably can’t afford to do the kind of research that large companies are able to do, and when you try to draw conclusions from your own data, you may find that it’s not statistically significant. If you’re not familiar with that term, it just means that you don’t always have enough data to make a strong conclusion that will hold up when applied over many more instances.
When it comes to choosing products for your store, it can be tough to figure out what will sell BEFORE you dump hundreds or thousands of dollars into inventory. Unlike big companies, you don’t have thousands of sales worth of data to help you decide what your customers want. All the same, you can use their information to help you figure it out.
To start, you’ll want to figure out what stores are most like yours. If you sell gadgets, you might select stores like ThinkGeek and X-Treme Geek and Kleargear.
Once you’ve found similar stores, you’ll want to browse their sites carefully. Pay attention to which items they’ve featured on their homepage and main section pages. Also note the items in the “Best Sellers”, “Most Popular”, and “What’s New” kind of sections. The items in those sections are likely to be a combination of their consistent top sellers and best hopes for the upcoming season.
Of course, you’ll also want to try to figure out what they’ve selected that doesn’t work as well. The “Clearance” section should help you out there.
That’s not to say that all sale and clearance items are poor performers. There’s a difference between a golf store that runs a promotion on Ogio bags vs. the same golf store putting last season’s prank gadget into the Clearance section until it sells out. Do your best to differentiate.
You can also get additional information from Amazon.com, as they rank every item on the site. Just look up the item you’re interested in and see how it fits in relative to other items. Obviously, the comparison will be somewhat lacking since Amazon is a general merchant instead of a specific store like what you may be, but it’s great for confirming your hunches.
Finally, you can seek out a keyword tool like WordTracker (commercial) or the free keyword tools from Yahoo! and Google AdWords. Wordtracker and Yahoo! provide actual numbers of searches from the previous month, which makes it easy to get a general idea of the interest level in a product or product type. Using only the free tools from Yahoo! and Google, I have had great success in choosing products that will be hot sellers. Just remember, though, that high interest doesn’t mean a whole lot if the product isn’t a fit for your customers.
There’s a pretty good chance that you’ll never be a retail giant like Amazon or Wal-Mart, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t take advantage of their hard work. If you have any similar ideas, please feel free to share in the comments!
Topics: Tricks of the Trade |
December 29th, 2007 at 6:12 am
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