Welcome to YourMarketingPodcast. This is Series One – How to Start a Successful eCommerce Business in Less than 30 Days. In this step-by-step guide, you will learn how to quickly launch an eCommerce store and start seeing those sales roll in! And here’s your host…Ishani DePillo.

Hello, hello. This is Ishani DePillo. Welcome to the 2nd podcast of the series “How to Start a Successful eCommerce Business in Less than 30 Days. I’m so happy to have you.

We had such a great start to the podcast. In the first podcast, we covered how to best identify a product to sell. The podcast was full of great tips for discovering a product to sell. You could trend-hunt or use your own passions and interests to come up with a product to sell. If you haven’t heard it yet and you are struggling to still come up with a product to sell, I highly recommend starting with that podcast first and coming back to listen to this one.

Okay, so hopefully, you already have a product idea in mind for your eCommerce store, maybe even a couple of different ideas that you’re contemplating? 

And that’s awesome, because today’s podcast, the second podcast in the series, is all about evaluating your product’s demand, competition, and profitability.

I am going to show you how to assess the true demand of your product idea, how to strategically (and discreetly) spy on your competition, and how to crunch those numbers to ensure your product is going to be profitable.

Profits are really important not only because you need to make money, but it also helps you grow your brand to make even more money. And while money isn’t everything, it does give you the freedom to do what you love to do. Whatever that may mean to you. Anyway, as I mentioned, I will be addressing product demand, competitors, and profitability all of this in this podcast. It’s a LOT so bear with me and let’s dive in.

Skip to 2:16 Let’s get started with the first concept: product demand. 

How many people actually want your product? 

What is the current demand out there for a similar product? 

What can you expect in the future? 

 Those are some tough questions to answer. Especially if you don’t know how or where to find the answers.

Thankfully there are a couple of helpful tools out there to find the product demand:

The first one that we are going to look at is the Google Keyword Planner. It’s a free tool and super easy to use. But there’s a catch: In order to use the Google Keyword Planner, you will NEED to have a Google Ads account. You just have to enter information about yourself and your business, and you’re in. When you do a search related to your product on Google Keyword Planner you will see monthly search volume for your keywords. Ideally, the higher the search volume, the better. Because that means your product already has demand… meaning that people are actively looking for the product. Anything over a thousand is generally worth exploring in my opinion.

Another product by Google, that could help you identify product demand is  Google Trends. This is also a free tool and it will show you how much your product has been “trending” for the last few years. You can see whether the interest for your product has grown over time using Google Trends. It’s very helpful in making sure your product is on the rise, rather than on a downturn.

The two tools that I mentioned by Google are Free, but we also use a paid service called Ahrefs. Let me spell that for you, it’s – A-H-R-E-F-S.com. This tool is pretty affordable and they are currently offering a 7-day trial for $7. And you can use their Keyword Explorer to find searches related to your product, and then get the search volume. We have an SEO expert here, Chris Casarez, who recommends Ahrefs as his first choice when it comes to SEO tools:

“I’m a huge believer in Ahrefs. I’ve been using that for years. It’s got pretty much everything that I need. Now, it’s not