It’s already a challenge to start a store – now you have to choose which type. In this blog post, we break down the two main stores – Niche and General – and tell you which is best to open.
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It’s a beginners big dilemma: “Should I go general or niche?”
And (admittedly), we don’t make choosing any easier for you.
In one ear you have us, Wholesale Ted, talking about building a niche store in multiple, multiple … pretty much every video.
In the other, you have expert dropshipper Adrian Morrison, whispering into your ear in our collaborations to open general stores.
Both are great. Both make money. And both are definitely profitable.
But finding a deal breaker isn’t all that easy. Each store has their own pros and cons that might appeal to some and make others shy away.
I want help you find a deal-breaker.
To do this, we have to break down the pros and cons of each to help you decide which store is best for you.
What is a general store?
A general store is one where you sell items based on a general topic. For example: As a general store owner, you might build a store around pets.
But not just one pet – ALL kinds of pets. Dogs, fish, cats, hamsters, rabbits, snakes etc.
When you target loads of pets, you target a broader audience. And with a bigger audience to market to, its easy to see general stores get more customers than a niche store would.
Besides that, they also have two MAJOR advantages:
- They make the most money
- They are less work in the long-term
With a bigger audience general stores have the upper hand of having more potential customers. With so many more customers, you can obviously make a lot of money from one single store.
This is the opposite to niche stores, where a store would be focused on a single pet. For a niche store to make up a general store, you’d probably have to make 10 different stores.
General stores also connect the missing link niche stores don’t have: Access to a lot of products.
This is especially truthful when it comes to Facebook ads. You won’t go dry in finding a winning product because you simply have access to a boatload of them.
This is more important than you think. When running ads to your store, it’s impossible to have a winning product to stay evergreen. There comes a time that ad gets saturated and stops making you money. And in many cases, stores can go from chugging thousands of dollars in sales per day to zero.
The workaround solution? Test, test, test. Having more winners under your belt offer immediate recovery in these situations.
This is something that Aidan Booth actually talked about in our video, How to Make a Million Dollars in a Year. On that video, he shared with us his blueprint for how he uses virtual assistants to automate this testing process for him, so he can keep finding more and more winning items.
It’s this advantage of general stores that expose a grey area in niche stores. As your store is narrowed down into one niche, your product selection becomes more limited. This means you’ll only have a handful of products to test, and only a pinch of ‘winners’ you can use for Facebook ads.
The solution for this would be building multiple niche stores. As opposed to a general store where you have one store for a bunch of pets, you’ll need to create a single store for each pet niche. With that, there obviously comes an extensive amount of time required to do this – and some people just can’t afford to. The truth is that building up new niche stores from scratch rather than just adding products into your existing store is going to be more work.
All of this means, that with a general store, you can earn far more from your one, single store, since you have way more customers to reach out to. And long-term, it’s going to require less work to test new products and find winning items.
I know what you’re thinking: If niche stores make less money and have a limited selection of items – why should we build one?
There are two reasons in particular, which we’ll explain in the next part.
What is a niche store?
A niche store is when you store targeted at a specific niche. For example: a store targeted at cats where you can sell items like cat coffee mugs and spoons.
And this niche model is the blueprint we religiously teach on our YouTube channel and premium dropshipping course – The Dropship Club.
There’s many reasons why we love this model, but the major two are:
- They make beginners money faster
- They are easier for beginners to convert sales
A niche store has the power of branding. Take the obsessive cat lover – the one that spoils their cats like it’s their last kid. It’d be like gold for them to find a cat dedicated store that fed their obsession.
They’d feel crazy if they did not add at least a few goodies to their cart before leaving the page. It’s this power – the power of branding – that is able trigger those emotional buttons that have the right customers clamoring to give you their money.
Branding does two important things: it builds a connection between you and prospective customers, plus it builds trust as well. When you’ve built both, making sales becomes much less of an effort.
And with the ability to brand your store, you also the another advantage of making upsells and cross-sales.
A general store doesn’t have much ability to do this. When a cat owner comes to a pet site, they’re going to see a lot of items that are not relevant to them on the store. They don’t have a fish, dog or hamster – so they don’t care about these items. So when they click on your homepage, and see these categories teased, it’s not going to be much enticing.
On the other hand, if they were to click on your homepage, and see that all of the items in the categories being teased were about cats, they’d have a tough time choosing what items NOT to add to checkout.
And it makes it much easier to do follow-up marketing with emails and social media. Because every time you send out a newsletter, promoting an item… you know that whatever it is, it’ll be relevant to all of your customers.
So you’ll get a much higher conversion of people not only purchasing the items you promote in your follow-up campaigns, but they’ll be more likely to pay attention to them in the future, since they know that you will be selling items relevant to their interests.
What this all means then is that beginners tend to have success and find winning items faster when they start with niche stores.
Which is better?
Ultimately, it comes down to this: scaling your business from 5-figures a month to over 6-figures a month is going to be much easier using the general store strategy.
But, scaling your business from no dollars a month to 5-figures a month is going to be much easier using the niche store strategy. Each has their own pros and cons. You have to pick which option is the best for you.
Whichever route you pick, you’ll need a solid strategy first. That’s why I want to offer you a free gift.
Six steps to building a six-figure Dropship store
In it, I’ve included:
- How just one “winning item” can earn $10k/month. Yep. A lot of people don’t realize this… but most stores make the majority of their money from just a handful of items!
- The right way to choose AliExpress suppliers. Picking the right AliExpress dropshipper is crucial to drastically reduce things like refunds. Learn how to pick the right suppliers.
- Why long shipping times DON’T matter. A lot of people are scared to start Dropshipping because of “long” shipping times. You’ll learn why this doesn’t matter inside.
- Why their stores take 2 hours a day to manage. You’ll learn how they utilize apps like Oberlin to make their stores semi-automated… making managing orders super simple!