It doesn’t matter if you’re a brand new Shopify seller beginning your research or an experienced one, It is a hard research process to see which product categories to sell in Shopify.
With a wide range of products and categories to choose from, how do you narrow down your research and find the best niche to focus on? Which product categories have the most or least competition? The highest profit margins? The most opportunity to grow your product offerings? Let’s dig deeper together.
Which categories can you sell on Shopify?
Literally, there’s no limit to how many categories you can have, Shopify doesn’t have a category section, however for the products you have, you can create different “collections” as noted by Shopify itself.
We at Shopgram have done a comprehensive analysis of these products and have tried to classify different categories as other e-commerce platforms such as Amazon.
Shopify’s most popular categories
When selling or dropshipping on Shopify, or any other platform designed for vendors, it’s crucial to know where and what your consumers and customers are purchasing. You surely aren’t interested in opening a muscle auto dealership near a crowded Whole Foods, do you?
The same goes for Shopify and any other e-commerce platform. If you have or create a product in a niche or category that very few people shop in, you may not get the result that you intended to have. We did some analysis and we’ll look at the most popular categories to sell as a Shopify store.
We have crawled more than 700K Shopify stores, extracted their products and categorized them into these categories. Here are the results alongside the percentage of shops selling these products:
1- Clothing (27.7%)
2- Jewelry & Watches (12.5%)
3- Home & Garden (12.4%)
4- Fashion Accessories (5.5%)
5- Health & Beauty (4.5%)
6- Accessories (3.7%)
7- Toys & Hobbies (3.4%)
8- Shoes (2.9%)
9- Books (2.8%)
10- Food & Beverages (2.3%)
11- Other Categories (22.3%)
Feel free to analyze these product categories, the number of products in each of these categories and see whether that product category is too competitive or is ripe for profits.
You don’t want to open a super awesome shop in a category that’s saturated with competitors and other vendors or you may want to avoid some categories which are too untouched, maybe there’s a reason behind it?
However, while these broad categories may be very popular and full of other suppliers and vendors, we’ll explain how your Shopify store can stand out among others.
What are the main differences among Shopify product categories?
1. Profit Margins: Which Shopify product categories usually have the highest profit margins?
Profit margins are highly dependent on how much your production costs are, or in case you are dropshipping, the supplier prices. (Feel free to a simple Shopify profit margin calculation on Shopify here)
Let’s start with the “Vegan Collagen Capsules” which are being sold for $24.97 right now on a Shopify store. If you buy this product from a wholesaler for $14 a bottle, you are doing around 75% profit margin and according to Amazon seller data, on average a 17-26% profit margin is the average amount for this category, So it’s super crucial to know about your market, the prices the products are going for right now and how much effort, marketing and sales other Shopify stores are making.
Profitability is a critical consideration when selling on Shopify, but keep an open mind to find the true best opportunity.
Some categories may be more profitable than others, but every category has profitable sub-categories within it.
2. Sales: What are the average monthly sales for Amazon product categories?
Shopify stores across nearly every category have average monthly sales in the range of $1,00-250,000 and more!
We can not find the exact number of sales each category makes (Duh!), but Amazon sellers have a nice report which could be used to get some insights like 14% of Amazon of Sellers are not profitable and 22% have exceeded $1 million in lifetime sales while 42% are yet to make their first 100k.
3. Number of products: How many products does a Shopify store have?
Is there a correlation between the number of products sold and the number of categories a Shopify store has?
Most category-specific Shopify stores focus on a specific niche or category and try to expand the number of products they have on that niche (horizontal expansion) others will try to create different Shopify categories (Collections) and try to expand their product diversity (Vertical expansion)
However, the advice to starters is always to start on one niche and then try to expand if possible (Never forget Amazon started as a bookstore!)
You can see all the products being sold on Shopify listed here to get some good insights.
How you can find a less competitive category to sell in
1. Shopgram (CLOSED)
Shopgram is a solution to research into complete details and analytics surrounding Shopify.
Shopgram Insights is zen heaven for Shopify data analysts. From there you can see which product categories have the highest number of products and which one are less competitive.
2. Google trends
Google Trends is a great free way to keep an eye on what customers are interested in and buying. Checking Google trends around your product keyphrases is a good way to generate some insights into how much people are looking for that specific product. For example, are fancy pet leashes trending? You might want to explore this as a sales opportunity.
Simply type in a broad keyword into Google Trends and it will show you the popularity of that topic and if it is trending up or trending down. You can also view related topics, demographics, and related queries which you can use for keyword research.
After you’re done with Trends, you can just grab those, came to Shopgram and see how it compares to other categories, see the detailed pricing of competitors and all the significant Shopify stores in different regions and countries.
3. Amazon Forums
Most eCommerce platforms publish reports and have full-on guides for their new sellers such as Amazon. Now you may have come to Shopify because Shopify gives you a wider range of abilities and you can expand your business on Shopify easily whereas, on Amazon, you’ll always remain just a seller. But you can always find great info on their forums and see what products are generating the highest amount of talks or even get some data into products you may be eying to sell but can’t find a great place to see other vendors
Time to get selling
These are some of the most popular categories on Shopify in 2021, but there are so many other changing factors that can affect the growth of a Shopify store. Finding hot product categories is only one of the success factors. The real hassle is always how to get more sales or which ad platform to use.
As you can see from the data, there are profitable sellers in every category on Shopify, which means finding a category or market with limited competition won’t be easy. But it will be worth it!