Niche store VS general store. What to choose for your affiliate business?

The hardest part of any ecommerce business is making a decision on what to sell and what type of store to open – a general store that has everything and appeals to everyone OR a niche store that typically focuses on a narrow set of products.

We know the affiliate business inside out, so we strongly urge to open a niche store and to avoid a general store. Why? Find the reasons below.     

Why choose a niche store?

• Following your interests

When starting a niche store, you have the opportunity to sell products that you are interested in. For example, if you are keen on fashion and cannot imagine your life without new clothing, you can open a store dedicated to ultra-modern clothes and accessories. The process of selecting goods for your store will be also more fascinating and fun, because you will do the things that you really like. In addition, people who sell what they like or what they are good at have significantly more chances to win loyalty of the customers, because they do things with all their heart.  

• Knowing your client

The deep knowledge of the client is 90% of success, or even more. It is a foundation on which all your business actions can be built. If you know an approximate age of your clients, their social status and preferences, it will be easier for you to develop an effective business plan for your AliExpress affiliate store. When choosing a niche store, you will get a very clear sense of people who buy products from you and what tricks you can use to enhance your sales.  

• Good opportunities for promotion

This factor is related to the previous one. If you have a niche store it will be a walk in the park to promote it in the most popular social media, because of good knowledge of your audience. You can create a Facebook group dedicated to your store and make blog posts about the advantages of some products, for example.  

• Customer loyalty

Not all people like big stores where one can find anything he or she wants. There is a great amount of customers, who prefer specialty stores, because they believe that at these stores they will find the best of the best. Basically, it’s true. The niche store owner has already done a tremendous amount of work to find the most interesting and high quality products, so the customer only has to click some buttons and make a purchase.    

Why NOT choose a general store?

• Impulse buyers

Some people are shopaholics. They like big shops, because there are many goods to look at. They do not have any shopping lists, they just buy what they like, even if they already have similar things. As a general store owner, you can focus on these people, but there is no guarantee that they will come back.     

• The amount of goods

When opening a general store, you think that your website will have an enormous amount of products and look like AliExpress, for example. However, that is not true. In order to run fast and well, AliExpress has hundreds of thousands of servers. Your affiliate website in its turn has the limited disc space on one server. Do you notice the difference? AliExpress has enough power for tons of products in contrast to your website. Of course, you can fill all your disc space with different products, but in this case your website will be very, very slow and you will lose your clients.   

• Challenges when choosing products

At first all entrepreneurs try to choose products carefully and find something special for their clients, but after a while they indiscriminately import any product they see on AliExpress. These actions turn a pretty good website into a dump. Such website won’t be popular with customers, because it’s difficult to find something good in this chaos.     

• Difficulties with promotion

It sounds a little sad, but you cannot market to everyone. When opening a general store, you cannot exactly know who your potential clients are. Are they mostly men or women? Are they working adults? What are their habits and interests? How will they respond to your advertising campaigns? There are too many questions and very few answers. That’s why you will face challenges when running a marketing campaign.   

Conclusion

If you want to run an affiliate business, it’s better to go with a niche store. First, it will be a real pleasure to run it, because you will sell products that you are interested in. Secondly, a niche store is easier to promote, because you know your clients and their needs. Thirdly, with a niche store you can easily gain the trust of clients and as a result get repeat customers. As for a general store, it is also ok, but it won’t make great profit and you will face some challenges that are hard or impossible to overcome.