GENERAL vs. NICHE Aliexpress Shopify Store… (Should You Build a Niche or General Store?)

Niche store vs General store? Learn which store is better to open!
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It’s the million-dollar question: Which store is better to open – a niche or general store?

The short answer is: Neither!

Both stores have their pros and cons. Let’s examine both models so you can see which store is right for you. Starting with General stores.

*GENERAL STORES*

General stores have two big advantages. 1) they make the most money and 2) they’re less hassle to run in the long-term!

General stores can easily make more money because you have more potential customers for your store. For example: If you build a store around pets, you’d have access to a whole wide range of customers. Making it easier to make a lot more money from one single store.

Compare that to a niche store built around a single type of pet – like dogs. It’s easy to see how narrow your market gets. And the narrower it gets, the less buyers to your store.

General stores also have access to a lot more products – a huge advantage over niche stores. This gives you more room to find winning items for your store. That way, if a current item you’re advertising becomes saturated by competition, you have other proven items to easily swap in.

With niche stores though, it can get a little complicated. If you build a store too niche, you can run out of products to test because you’ve tested them all already.

The easy workaround solution would be to build multiple niche stores. But now you’ve run into another problem: how much TIME will that take?

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.

But I know what you’re thinking: “Sarah – why on earth do you recommend niche stores?!”

Great question. Allow me to explain …

*NICHE STORES*

Niche stores are a great option for two reasons. 1) they make beginners money faster and 2) they’re easier for beginners to convert sales.
Niche stores make beginners money faster because you can firstly brand your store around your niche.

Imagine a cat owner comes into a store – and everything screams “We LOVE cats” at them. The logo, the name, and even the About Page talking passionately about cats.

Wouldn’t it be harder for cat lovers NOT to love a store like this?

That’s the power of strong branding. It gives your site a personality. Something General stores inevitably have a hard time doing in the early stages.

Branding also lets you tap into a power every store needs to be successful: TRUST.

When you can use your branding to connect between you and prospective customers before even talking to them, making sales becomes a lot easier.

And what do you get when you have customers that trust you? Higher conversion rates! In other words, the easier it will be to make sales.

Niche stores let you tap into even more money with upsells and cross-sells.

Think about it: When a cat owner comes to your pet site, they’re going to see a lot of items that aren’t relevant to them on the store. They don’t have a fish. They don’t care about those items. They don’t have a dog. They don’t want to buy dog-related items. So, when they click on your homepage, and see these categories teased… that is not going to be very 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’ll be way more excited.

This makes it 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.

What this all means then is that beginners tend to have success and find winning items faster when they start with niche stores.

At Wholesale Ted, we’re big advocates of building niche stores because we know that for many of you out there you’re just beginning – and that’s okay!

And for beginners, it’s usually a better option to take the ‘path of least resistance’, which niche stores easily have.

So 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 have their own pros and cons. You have to pick which option is the best for you.

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