Transcription
You may have heard of something called Etsy Drop Shipping, which is how these shops make over $155,000 a month. My name is Alec, and I personally run a few different shops that all make me around $20,000 a month and even more during the holidays, completely remote from my laptop, without ever having to buy inventory up front or fulfill these orders myself.
The first step to growing one of these shops is to choose a niche, which is basically just a category to sell products in. By choosing a niche, you'll be able to target specific customers with your products who are more likely to buy from you. Then, all of your products will sort of feed each other, which will lead to a lot more sales.
Now, there are thousands of niches that you could choose from, which makes it really difficult, especially in the beginning. But that's the reason I'm making this video—to save people from picking the wrong niche. So, if you're a beginner just getting started or you want to open a new Etsy Drop Shipping shop to make some side income, these are the niches to absolutely avoid and the best ones to start with. I'm not just going to give you a list of niches, but also the framework for how to think through the niches for your business into the future.
Is it niche or niche? Niche.
The first niche to absolutely avoid at all costs is selling T-shirts, mugs, posters, and stickers all in one shop. A general store tries to sell all kinds of products that target all kinds of niches, so it might sell T-shirts and phone cases and stickers, all with different style designs that target different customer interests. This will never work as well as a shop that's more focused because you'll never get good at selling to one specific type of customer, and your shop will honestly just look like a mess.
Would it make sense for a salesman to come knock on your door and try to sell you solar panels, life insurance, and pest control all at the same time? You would be even less likely to buy the first thing that he offered. When you try to sell everything to everyone, you sell nothing.
There's really only two ways to start a successful Etsy Drop Shipping business. Now, this is the case for Etsy, but I've also seen it work on Amazon and TikTok, where you either want to start a product niche store or a niche-based store. A general store is never going to work. If that sounds confusing, there's really only two things that you have to know: you either build your shop around selling one type of product, or you build a shop around selling one type of theme or niche design.
If you sell mugs, customers buy for the design that targets their interest, not for the mug specifically. A product niche store means you only sell one type of product. If you sell a T-shirt, then you'll make designs that target all kinds of customer interests. These interests or sub-niches might be things like Mother's Day, Father's Day, Halloween, nurse, teacher, in school—really anything that you can think of. The shop uses the product as the main niche, and then they use themes or sub-niches as the designs on the product to get it to target customers and get them to buy.
The niche-based shop is where your shop's entire theme is a niche. For example, if you sell these pet painting recreations, you can sell that type of design on many product types. This could be on phone cases, keychains, posters, shirts, or really anything that you can think of and sell as a drop-shipped product. You can see they're selling the exact same type of design and concept just on phone cases, pillows, mugs, blankets, and they've got a bunch of other products as well that follow the same pattern.
In super basic terms, you're either selling one product with a lot of different themed designs on it or one core theme of designs on a lot of different product types—just not a general shop.
The next type of shop that you should absolutely avoid is a one product, one niche shop. When you sell only one kind of product, like T-shirts, but then also only one kind of design, like anime designs, you cut out the other 99% of people who might have bought from you. The sad part is the idea of selling anime designs is a good idea, and it does work. But if you're selling apparel like this, you need to also make designs for a bunch of other sub-niches as well because when one of those products starts to sell, all of your other listings will get fed to the algorithm as well.
The most successful shops have this specific flexibility, meaning they're clear on exactly what they sell, but they're in a large enough market to make products that thousands of people would happily buy—all in a cohesive, high-quality shop that makes sense. If you have an idea for a type of design that you think you could make, like anime designs, make those designs, but then also move on to creating more designs that target even more themes. Avoid the trap of boxing yourself in too much.
Now, with that being said, while you can still sell anime designs, for example, you can see this anime sweatshirt has sold an estimated 62 times. Designs that fit the Etsy demographic better will perform better over time. To be honest with you, an anime-specific shop probably wouldn't do as well on Etsy since the Etsy buyers are typically shopping for items in a more Etsy-esque niche.
When you think about the type of shopper that's coming and looking for products to buy on Etsy, they're typically not the same person that's looking to buy an anime shirt. Now, sure, some of them are, but the majority of those shoppers are going to look for products in niches that are a certain aesthetic and quality. Again, you don't go on TikTok looking for blog posts, and you don't go on Etsy looking for a grungy T-shirt that you might expect to find on eBay.
The eBay shoppers are looking for the best deal; they're looking for the most practical offer, and the eBay shopper is okay with this streetwear off-the-rack look. This shopper is okay buying products that look like they've been in someone else's closet. Now, Etsy shoppers, on the other hand, are looking for a more handmade, meaningful product. They're looking for quality, aesthetic, vintage, or Bohemian styles. They're looking through all of these options to find something that they think is special.
If I could give you a list of every niche that would or wouldn't work on Etsy, then I'd give it to you. But the best that I can do is to give you the framework for how to think about niches. Personally, I think the best way to think about it is this: go to the Etsy homepage and imagine your product popping up in one of these image slots. If it's completely out of place, then you need to rethink the niche that it's targeting. Obscure memes, anime designs, and products that look like they belong on eBay should just stay on eBay.
Try and think about the person that's buying the product and ask yourself if they'd be shopping on Etsy. But especially early on, it's much harder. Your time is just better spent making products that Etsy customers want to buy.
Now, the next niche I would absolutely avoid is any product or niche that's going to make it harder for you to make a lot of products. When you look at the top shops, they've posted hundreds, if not thousands, of listings for sale. If your niche prevents you from making a lot of products, then you're setting yourself up for failure from the beginning. If you're selling T-shirts but you only want to make one type of design, like a gardening design, you're going to lower the amount of listings that you can make since there's only so many gardening T-shirts that you can post.
But let's say you chose to sell in the pet niche and you wanted to sell AI-generated pet posters. This might seem like a really small niche at first, but you could essentially make infinite listings. You could start by making dog portraits with all different kinds of backgrounds. You could do police officers, astronauts, pirates, doctors, firemen—you get the point. But then what if you didn't just do dogs? What if you also offered cats, rabbits, and guinea pigs? That already gives us four times the amount of listings. What if for each type of animal we offered these specific breeds? So for each dog painting, we also offered Corgi, bulldog, pug—you get the point. Each time we get more specific, we actually multiply the number of listings that we can make, and customers that find their exact product that they want are going to buy immediately.
Avoiding small niches means you're not going to box yourself into only selling to one interest group. You need a lot of listings to succeed, and this is exactly how you do it. By the way, this works for basically everything. You can take each idea that you have, make a different style design depending on the specific person you're targeting, and then you can make each of those designs in a different font. Again, you can see how this basically gives you infinite designs. Posting listings in your shop is how you give it life, and if your niche prevents you from posting a lot of listings, then you'll have a really hard time growing this to a full-time income.
Now, some beginners think that instead of following the typical guru advice, they'll make a brand around something that they're interested in and they'll sell products with a branded logo on it. This never works. It took me a while to even find this shop because nobody's searching for a brand that they've never heard of. The traffic on Etsy isn't looking to buy the next Nike T-shirt before they become Nike. If they want an athletic shirt or some kind of funny T-shirt to wear at the gym, they're going to look for that.
Starting a full brand will take a lot more than an Etsy shop. You'll want to build up a following on social media and build it over years. Etsy Drop Shipping is about getting sales today, which is why the brand idea fails. Plus, it's always easier to get sales early on and then transition into owning a brand down the line once you have reviews and sales history.
Now, the next niche I would strongly suggest avoiding is a non-scalable niche. If you want the freedom that can come with owning a digital business like this, where you can pick up and go travel the world, then you need to have a scalable product. The product that you're selling has to either scale by allowing you to sell more items without taking up more time, such as selling digital or print-on-demand products, or it has to scale by price. Meaning, if you're selling a custom product, you're able to make a lot more money per order since your time is required to fulfill each order.
If you're selling these custom pet portraits that we've looked at in several videos, you can scale up the amount that you're charging for each order since there's a high perceived value, and it takes your time to fulfill each order. If you're selling a print-on-demand T-shirt or a mug, you can scale up and sell as many units as you want since it doesn't take your time to fulfill those orders. You just don't really want to be selling a product like a custom T-shirt where it still takes your time to fulfill, but you don't get paid as much as you could for something that was fully custom.
Something like a custom T-shirt or a mug is fine at first to help you grow your shop, but I wouldn't recommend building an entire business around it because it won't scale that well. I would just use it as a tool early on to get those initial sales and get the ball rolling.
Now, the absolute hands-down best niche to sell in is the niche that's hottest right now. There's no better way to get sales than to sell in a hot market. There's a story about a professor who asks his students where they would put their hot dog stand for maximum success. Some students say that you should put it in a high-traffic area or a location with little to no competition, but the answer is wherever the crowd is the hungriest. The demand set by the customer is more important than anything else. With enough demand, you can sell any product with any design.
Products that were recently posted for sale that are already selling well are the absolute best niches to go after. I hope this helps, and if it did, subscribe.