It’s 2024, and the competition in the e-commerce market is fiercer than ever. However, e-commerce remains the top choice for ordinary people to start a business because of its low entry barriers, flexible investment, and quick and sizable returns. Many people are eager to know what sells best online nowadays. Let’s delve.
What makes products profitable, especially for small businesses?
The profitable products I’m discussing today are not specific items that guarantee success just by selling them. The same product may bring profits to others but not necessarily to you. Therefore, don’t believe in so-called 100% winning products, otherwise, there wouldn’t be any unsuccessful businesses in this world.
Every e-commerce seller has his or her own advantages. For example, some excel in online marketing, while others are highly familiar with the needs of a specific niche audience. Some have substantial financial resources, and others excel in supply chain management. These are all factors you might overlook.
The products I’m sharing today are examples that small businesses can learn from, either about marketing skills or product selection strategies. After serving so many e-commerce sellers, let’s first summarize some common characteristics of successful and profitable products.
1. Lightweight and easy to transport
Logistics costs are one of the significant costs in e-commerce, which includes international shipping from China supplies to your warehouse and fulfillment fees. In practice, these fees can be more expensive than the product value costs.
Last year, we helped an Amazon FBA seller source pet training toy sets. He wanted to enhance the consumer experience by adding more accessories. While the cost of these accessories wasn’t high, the finished product kits ended up being quite heavy and big, resulting in Amazon’s fulfillment fees eating up half of his profits.
Products that are small in size, light in weight, easy to package, and transport can effectively reduce logistics costs and increase overall profit margins.
2. Promoting repeat purchases
Products conducive to repeat purchases typically refer to those that consumers need to replace or repurchase regularly. For example, once consumers purchase a mobile phone, they don’t need to buy another one in the short term. When it malfunctions, consumers are more inclined to choose repair rather than immediate replacement.
In contrast, small home items and tools typically require repeated purchases, such as electric salt and pepper grinder sets, kitchen rotating storage racks, and entryway key storage craft ornaments.
3. Strong social media shareability
Some of our clients excel in social media marketing, utilizing platforms ranging from traditional ones like Pinterest, Instagram, and YouTube, to the currently popular TikTok short videos.
With a certain number of followers, they select products that are highly suitable for social media, such as small stress-relief toys, women’s accessories, makeup tools, pet clothing, DIY painting kits, desktop organizers, creative kitchen gadgets, etc. These products are affordable as well as visually and functionally interesting to attract consumer attention or evoke emotional resonance.
4. Easy to modify products
Never try to make a unique product. Never invest too much at first. Many of our clients’ failures tell us these words.
For newbies and small businesses, simple changes on the existing product are enough, like printing private logos, custom packaging, and bundle products for differentiation. Yes, many of our clients have earned a lot of money by bundling products.
One thing is that many of our clients are not familiar with product manufacturing and often perceive some products as “high-tech,” assuming that production costs are high. However, this is not the truth.
Take diabetic socks for example. Their manufacturing process is akin to regular cotton socks, differing mainly in weight, pattern printing technology, etc., which adds $0.7-$0.8 to the cost.
So, if you come across novel and interesting products, don’t assume they are necessarily high-tech products. Be sure to share your ideas with us. With years of experience in product sourcing and customization, we can analyze the costs from the manufacturing chain and tell you.
Next, I’ll share 5 profitable product examples that have been successfully replicated in real business. For each one, I’ll analyze its success from the entire supply chain perspective, focusing especially on product selection and marketing.
Funny knitted dolls
A good business example is The Woobles, founded in June 2020 and selling knitted dolls. Such knitted doll material kits are cheap in China, around $1.4 for a 4-inch knitted doll. However, at The Woobles, they are priced at tens of dollars and continue to be beloved by consumers. Similarweb shows that the website had up to 6 million visits from January to March 2024.
Some key points of their success that are worth learning from include:
Precise target audiences: Their main target consumer groups are handmade enthusiasts and beginners interested in learning crafts from scratch. For instance, they introduced beginner-friendly products and tutorials to lower the difficulty level and address the issue of many people giving up on knitting attempts due to the high difficulty.
Social media-oriented products: The most successful point is YouTube and Facebook video marketing, boasting 100k+ followers. For DIY knitted doll products that require how-to-make tutorials, social media videos going hot is the key to driving product sales.
Crystal healing products
A regular crystal bracelet is retailed at $1-2 on Etsy. But when labeled with meanings such as “wealth,” “love,” “good luck,” “health,” etc., it can be sold for $10+ and several tens of dollars. These “inspirational” crystal products resonate with people and effectively meet certain psychological expectations. This psychological expectation is hard to regulate within a specific price range. Prices from tens to hundreds of dollars are feasible, easy to generate profits.
According to Google Trends, over the past 12 months, the search interest in “Crystal healing” has consistently remained between 75 and 100. Particularly, users in the UK, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, and the USA show significant interest in crystal healing. Additionally, many crystal enthusiasts share related videos on TikTok, with 6.5 million posts tagged with “#Crystalhealing”. This market is huge and profitable.
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Buddha & Karma
Buddha&Karma, a Singaporean e-commerce, specializes in selling various spiritual accessories. Similarweb shows the site has 850K visits from January to March 2024, with organic search traffic increasing, as shown below.
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Each bracelet, necklace, and other accessories are tagged with certain tags such as health, career success, wealth, happiness, positivity, etc. These provide people with spiritual strength and relieve anxiety and worries. Buddha&Karma also offers a custom option to choose whether the product needs to be infused with spiritual energy, increasing sales.
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The wholesale price of such crystal bracelets is around $1 in China, with the cheapest ones at $0.2 per piece. In Yiwu International Trade City District 1, there are numerous wholesale suppliers offering a wide variety of cheap crystal accessories. We assist clients in sourcing and customizing crystal stones, crystal bracelets, and other accessories, as well as providing custom handwritten instructions and packaging, all at affordable prices.
Yiwu International Trade City
Custom nail stickers
Compared to regular press-on nails, nail stickers are targeted at consumers who dislike the feeling of wearing traditional press-on nails. Since nail stickers are just stickers, they have minimal presence and can be trimmed to fit the shape of the nails.
This type of small, lightweight, low-cost items has a high repurchase rate. Generally, e-commerce sellers select designs from the existing styles offered by Chinese suppliers, then customize unique patterns or add rhinestones, etc.
Such customization costs are very low. We have helped sellers customize many nail stickers in China, priced around $0.6-$1.4 per set (10 units), with an order quantity of several thousand. The higher the quantity, the lower the price.
The selling point for such product type is the creativity of patterns and designs, offering high profit margins.
ManiMe
ManiMe, founded in 2017, is best known for its nail stickers, which can sell for $15 each. To ensure that products are visually appealing, ManiMe collaborates with designers to create stylish nail sticker designs. SimilarWeb shows that the website had 230k visits from January to March 2024. In the Beauty and Cosmetics industry, ManiMe has gained some recognition, ranking around #2500.
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Attractive designs on nail stickers are crucial. As a beginner with a limited budget, I recommend browsing social media platforms, especially TikTok, Instagram, and Pinterest, where sharing of nail art designs is highly active. Not only can you find trending nail art pattern ideas, but you can also gain insights into consumer preferences. Then, you can combine these elements and incorporate cultural elements such as the constellation culture favored by Western women.
Additionally, this type of products are easy and suitable for social media marketing. When browsing Pinterest, Instagram, etc., people see something nice and affordable, and they just place an order directly.
Pay attention to integrating TikTok unboxing video marketing. Just like ManiMe, they collaborated with influencers of all scales, from top-tier to smaller ones, to create many unboxing videos, tutorials on using nail stickers, etc. For niche brands, smaller influencers offer better cost-effectiveness, suitable for beginners and businesses in the growth stage.
Niche pet items
The pet category has always maintained a large and stable market. For beginners and small sellers, it’s not advisable to choose general pet supplies, as the competition is intense. Many big sellers have products with thousands of reviews, making it impossible to compete. I recommend you to focus on specific pet groups, such as pet birds, pet chickens, and other small pet supplies.
Spark Paws
Spark Paws is a US e-commerce platform selling apparel for bulldogs, with organic traffic reaching 200k+.
Things we can learn from Spark Paws’ success:
Choose a niche based on thorough market research.
Since 2022, bulldogs have surpassed Labradors and Golden Retrievers to become the most popular pet dog in the US. Spark Paws smartly tapped into the bulldog clothing market. By focusing on this niche market, Spark Paws effectively avoids much of the competition. Its competitors are smaller, which indicates that there is still huge development room in this sufficiently segmented niche.
Offer pet and owner matching sets.
Many bulldog owners are young people. Spark Paws has launched matching outfits for pets and their owners, known as – Bulldog pet-parent matching outfits, as shown below. This caters to the trend of young people treating their pets as fur babies and showcasing their personalities. Such bundled offerings resonate with consumers, who are willing to make a purchase. For e-commerce sellers, selling 2 items simultaneously boosts sales.
Pet apparel sellers can definitely leverage this bundled sales approach. For example, we help Amazon sellers customize a variety of pet and owner outfits and bundle products in our warehouse while inspecting quality.
Pictures are from Pinterest, not our clients’.
Creative water bottle
Still remember the Stanley water bottle that exploded on the internet in 2023? The water bottle market is vast but highly competitive. Choosing a niche within the water bottle market is an effective strategy. For example, focusing on water bottles associated with fitness or outdoor activities can attract fitness enthusiasts and outdoor adventurers.
GetRingo
GetRingo, founded in 2023, sells water bottles that magnetically hold a phone, for $50 each. Its success lies in a simple yet innovative improvement – adding a magnetic ring to the cup, instantly transforming it into a phone holder. This product improvement addresses the specific needs of fitness enthusiasts. For example, they can place their phones on the cup during workouts, convenient for following workout tutorials.
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At the very beginning, GetRingo relies on paid traffic. As popularity grows, they gradually shift towards organic traffic. The flagship product “magsafe water bottle” and keywords associated with the brand are generating good organic traffic in the US.
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The bottom line
In short, profitable products vary from person to person. As I mentioned earlier, when choosing a product, you need to consider what resources you have. For example, if you’re skilled in marketing or livestreaming, then your choice of product will be different from others, such as nail stickers. If you have ample funds, you can opt for products with certain thresholds and higher unit prices, and your strategy will be different accordingly. Note that product selection strategies vary among different businesses, and there is no one-size-fits-all answer.
Subscribe to our Monthly Report for more profitable product ideas. As a leading Chinese sourcing company, we pick up the most popular items from 1,000+ orders by our clients to help you find your winning product.
Be sure to contact us to source your desired products at the most competitive prices. Our main services encompass finding high-quality suppliers, sampling, monitoring bulk production progress, quality control, and arranging shipment to your place. Additionally, we can help you bundle, label, and package products, and provide product photography at affordable prices.
Very instructive
An inspiring write-up
Thanks for sharing