If you’re an entrepreneur, then regardless of whether you’re about to start a business or you’re a seasoned ecommerce seller, you need product ideas. Now just finding one great product idea isn’t enough. Even if your initial products are successful, your competitors will be hot on your heels. So, success is often in context with your ability to find amazing product ideas to sell online.
But how exactly can one generate good product ideas? Where can entrepreneurs find inspiration? In this blog, you’ll learn about the ten best sources of new product ideas to set yourself a solid foundation for business success. Let’s get started quickly.
Table of Contents
Your Life
The first door you should seek to find ideas is your life. If possible, begin with the ideas you already have.
Maybe you have a specific wishlist of products saved as notes on your phone, laptop or scribbled in your diary. And random ideas always keep arriving (shower thoughts, anyone?), but you miss them unintentionally.
Even if you’ve dismissed these ideas at some point, it’s worth revisiting them from time to time.
Now, a blurry product idea won’t magically transform into an amazing one. But, unexpected ideas can often be developed into brilliant use-cases. Additionally, skimming through your existing product ideas may always spark a new one.
Once you’ve checked your existing ideas, peek into your life for inspiration:
- Pen down the problems you currently face in your lives? How could a product answer those problems?
- Find your passion and interests. Look for monetizing those using products or services. How could you add value to your audience’s lives?
Online Consumer Marketplaces
Constantly wandering around online consumer marketplaces to check what’s popular, or up-and-coming could give you some profitable product ideas. For example, numerous marketplaces provide lists of top products that you can use for inspiration. Here are the top online consumer marketplaces to check out:
- Etsy is a marketplace that sells a huge variety of products to shop for. It might look like Etsy only hosts handmade and vintage items, but modern shoppers know it’s much more than that. It’s a fantastic platform serving interesting and exclusive products.
- Walmart has an online store featuring a diverse collection too.
- Amazon is the most popular and the largest internet retailer in the world
- eBay is another well-known online auction marketplace with primary users in the consumers selling to consumers (C2C) space.
Discovery Websites and Product Trends
We suppose by now you have researched enough for general product ideas in the marketplaces. It’s high time you start looking for ideas in product trend platforms.
What do these websites do? Well, they track modern consumer trends and the latest product ideas putting the fire in the market right now.
- Trend Hunter: Most popular and verified data-driven insights showing consumer demands, trends, and product ideas.
- PSFK: Serves insights on customer experiences.
- TrendWatching: Overall summary reports of researches on consumer demands and behaviours.
How can we leave behind consumer blogs that can give out the most unpredictable business ideas?
Customer Reviews
No doubt online customer reviews actually produce the best solutions to the existing demands and issues.
For instance, check out an online marketplace for product reviews, customer complaints, suggestions and issues. Find the answer to these questions:
- What does the audience love about the product?
- What are the problems people are currently facing?
- Do you have any ideas for improving the product?
Social Media Platforms
Numerous ways to utilize social media remain undiscovered by most users. Small online businesses can really benefit a lot from optimal social media research.
Tips – Try searching for common hashtags like “#wishlist” and “#buy” or hashtags in a particular product category or niche, such as “#comfycasuals.” Additionally, search for users and businesses that customize products.
Check out the various social media platforms with huge marketing potential and ways to utilize these for discovering new product ideas.
- Instagram tops the list for producing product ideas. Priorly, try searching relatable hashtags, browse through posts for brilliant eye-catching products or campaigns. And closely follow the Instagram Shopping feature. Analyze the product-promotion posts that are going popular enough and are liked by people.
- Pinterest is flooded with interesting images of products. the platform makes it so easy to find something exciting from a pool of posts as they are just images. Try scrolling through collections customized for your audience. Keep saving the posts if you find them useful in any way.
- You probably already know Facebook is the giant social media network platform globally. Ideas and products will undoubtedly be there, you still need to put a bit of effort to discover them. Try joining niched Facebook groups and keep growing your network.
- Twitter has the most active users, its advanced search option can be a great source for finding product ideas. The social platform is popular for interesting public conversations and that can help you find your next million-dollar product idea!
Search Engines
Utilizing search engines to find product ideas is the first thing we usually do while researching online. Take a look at the three tools you can use to optimize your product research.
- Google’s Keyword Planner tells you how many people look for certain keywords on a regular basis. The Keyword Planner by Google is immensely useful in suggesting trending customer demands and product niches.
- Google Trends facilitates you to find trending products. You can access the data that suggests which search keywords are trending in a particular geographic region.
- Google Search: How can you forget Google, the search engine that always suggests much more relevant results than you actually search for. It’s almost like Google knows you and remembers your needs more than you do yourself.
Top Influencers
Once you finalize the industry or niche you would be running a business in, various tools can always help you discover the best influencers in your niche.
One of the most underrated research tactics is to follow the relevant people on social media. Once we do that, so many facts get uncovered as the content produced by leading influencers is always motivating.
Some tools you can leverage to find the leading creators in your industry are:
- FollowerWonk
- AllTop
Reknown Publications
Lifestyle publications functioning in your niche suggest a lot about the evolving consumer demands and latest trends. Try to analyze articles and posters in these publications.
Look out for the popular articles which people are discussing on social media, then find out what’s so engaging and captivating about them.
Online Surveys
Surveys give you deep insights into your target audience. Frame te most common and pushing roadblocks/issues faced by modern consumers. Additionally, find out which current solutions they love, why are those products liked so much and how can you improve their lives. Use this information when you brainstorm your e-commerce business ideas.
Some online tools you can utilize for this purpose:
- Google Forms
- SurveyMonkey
- SurveyGizmo
- Zoho Survey
- Typeform
Competitors
Finally, you can always learn a lot from competitors and popular brands in your niche or industry.
Discover which products are selling extensively by utilizing online tools like JungleScout and the Facebook Ads Library – if a competitor is running numerous ads consistently for the same product, it’s likely very profitable.
Once you find a product that is selling fast, focus on researching why it’s popular, and start planning how you can deliver something even more fantastic.
If you’re wondering how to come up with product ideas, we hope one of the above-discussed ways helps you find inspiration.
Don’t block your research until you find a great product idea. research optimally and try to improve so that you’re always one step ahead of the competition.
