Who’s Battling for Your Niche?

Merchants just coming online for the first time have hopefully dissuaded themselves from setting up their store to target all markets such “UltraGigaMegaCorp—we sell everything” or “AllNouns.com—books, videos, and anything with a UPC on it”. Merchants just starting out typically cannot offer the range of products and at a same or lower price point to match the giants of retail.

So how do you get an edge on the guys that seem to sell two of everything? Pick one section of one aisle of the big box stores and carry as many products in that specific category. In essence, find an underserved niche in the market, and be the one place to go for products in that niche.

So what’s a niche?

Niches are getting smaller and smaller these days. Pet clothing may have been a niche a few years ago, but now to find a niche you may need to specialize in pet costumes, dog sweaters, or high-end pet couture.

Advantages of niches

Going after a niche has several advantages:

• Potentially less competition than going against large retailers in crowded markets: obviously you don’t want to get so specialized in your niche that there are no customers willing to buy your products (Bedazzled Kashmir Monogrammed Sweaters for Chihuahuas may be an underserved niche but there may only be so many Chihuahua owners willing to dress their pooches in such finery). Cry out Chihuahua owners if I am wrong on this note.
• Shoppers likely to be passionate and engaged within a niche: If you serve a specific niche that is very targeted, it may be easier to target these buyers by posting to forums, buying ads in newsletters, or other forms of outreach. Groups tend to form around these specialized topics—perhaps one of the best uses of the Internet is in allowing and actively fostering such groups that may never reach critical mass if bounded by geography. Make it your mission for every group, mailing list, forum, or gathering of such communities to mention your store as the one-stop shop for that niche.
• Potentially easier to target with natural and sponsored search tactics: Since you are going after a niche, your keywords and key phrases can tend to be more specific, which may mean they are less competitive in terms of natural search ranking (and less costly for sponsored search ads.

Finding a niche

Luckily there are some tools available to help you research and find a niche, other than using search engines and checking the number of results against various queries. Here are a few to help you along the way:

• SEO Tools™—Keyword Difficulty Checker: Allows you to see the difficulty (expressed as a percentage) to rank in the first page of search results.
• NicheWatch.com: Allows you to perform a competitive analysis of the technical factors of the top sites for keywords and keyphrases so you can determine the changes to make to your own pages to outperform sites in terms of search engine optimization in your niche.

So get busy doing research to find your niche and soon you could find the next BIG idea in ecommerce starts with something quite small.

Paul Boisvert
Yahoo Small Business

Lessons from the Ecommerce Behemoths—Williams-Sonoma®

I was browsing the lnternet Retailer™ Magazine Top 500 list and I saw Williams-Sonoma®. Not that this was surprising given the recognizable brand names (Pottery Barn®, Pottery Barn Kids®, and of course Williams-Sonoma to name a few). What caught my attention was I had just read another article on the Internet Retailer website about Williams-Sonoma that said first quarter 2006 sales grew at over 30% and Williams Sonoma was ranked 19th overall in the top 500. Obviously, Williams-Sonoma is doing something right with their sites, because you can’t taste their yummy olive oils online like you can in their retail stores.

So while I don’t think anyone from Williams-Sonoma is going to reveal the secret sauce they use to rack up big sales growth, you’ll have to settle for a few observations I made while looking at their williams-sonoma store. And of course their high-quality catalogs are certainly a big reason behind the strong sales, but baring the major investment that would be for Yahoo! merchants, I’ll stick with changes you can make to your online store to play with the big dogs of ecommerce.

Williams-Sonoma Home page: sign ups and sign posts

Things that work about the page:

• Holiday promotion that links to page with items catered to the holidays (currently Father’s day is shown)
• Email signup field that doesn’t even take users off the page when submitted

You can include HTML with images that link to a special section page which you set up for holidays that you wish to run holiday promotions. To collect email addresses, you can sign up for Campaigner™ powered by Got (see the Email Marketing link in your Store Manager for more details), or you can add HTML and a special script to collect email addresses from interested shoppers. Be sure to include in your privacy policy how you will use email addresses provided by visitors.

Williams-Sonoma section page: seasonal section page for new items

Things that work about this page:

• One easy location for returning shoppers to find new items
• Section link listed at the top of the section navigation to shoppers see it first. Note the features and offers page listed directly below.

You can create a new section to display new or seasonal items and add this section at the top of your navigation links where shoppers are most likely to look.

Williams-Sonoma Gift Ideas section

When you are buying a gift you typically have someone in mind, the reason why you are buying the gift, and a rough idea of how much you want to spend. The section navigation presented in the Gift Ideas area of the site mirrors this by categorizing products thematically by the recipient, by the holiday, and also by the dollar amount. Yahoo! merchants can use custom RTML to perform such groupings with each publish.

However, merchants that do not wish to get into RTML changes can also group products in this manner by downloading their product info to a spreadsheet, sorting items in various manners (price, type of gift, type of recipient) and then uploading their product info to include new thematic sections with all product ids from the various sorts and categories. Learn more about database uploads.

Do you see other things you like about Williams-Sonoma that I didn’t add here? If so, add your comments below.

Paul Boisvert
Yahoo! Small Business

Note: Internet Retailer™ Magazine is a property of Vertical Web Media. Williams-Sonoma®, Pottery Barn®, and Pottery Barn Kids® are registered trademarks of Williams-Sonoma, Inc.