Need help defining a niche

[aroman]

Hi all,

First time poster. I have a product that can be dropped shipped and truly set up to be atutomated but I have been trying to wrap my brain around which niche market I can focus on.

it is a album filled with about 20 gifts. There is no price on it and allows the receiver of it to choose whatever they want without knowing the price. There are different albums based on price and focus of gifts.

I am not sure if promotional focus will work cause these are name brand products and can't have a company name put on it. In my opinion focusing on Employee incentive takes away from the automation cause I think you generally need to provide some kind of custom frame work around it. Unless I go super niche and develop a program for a specific industry?

Any ideas?

On a side note what a great book. It's keeping me up at night thinking about creating a 4HWW!

Thanks in advance for all your help!

AR

[froldt]

I'm not sure that I understand, lemme see if I have this right:
You have a series of catalogs, with each individual catalog having a specific topic focus and price range in which it carries products. You are trying to figure out the best way to pair these catalogs with a niche market.

If I have this right, are these useful gifts or trinkets or personalized items or what? (The more details you can provide the better advice we can give you.) Since the catalogs already have a niche picked out (as evidenced by their focus) I would recommend that you take one catalog, find forums focused on the target market, and set up some sort of affiliate deal. They get a cut of the items that sell from their website in return for giving you access to the market.

[aroman]

SOrry for not being detailed enough. These are catalogs that a person could give as a gift to person. They range in price from $30 to $800. Some are general and some are specific (baby, food, cooking, travel, etc). So for example i would give you an album, you haev no idea how much it was worth, you login into a site (already built) put in the code from your album and you can select any item from it. It then ships directly to you. I am totally out of the loop. Based upon price these are not small items. Things range from blenders, to phones, mp3 player, bike, cook sets, too many things to list. All name brand items.

So I could focus on example the baby gift album with baby specific areas but its a lwer cost item and the mark up is only 20%. ($10 gross profit on each one) Not the type of big mark up numbers that Tim refers too in the book. So I would need to move a lot of them. Its still not a bad idea since the baby market is huge.

But ideally I would like to focus on some of the higher priced catalogs so I can make more selling less and not have to depend on volume.

Does that help?

THANKS AGAIN!!

[froldt]

Ok, that makes more sense now, thanks for the clearer explaination.

Having just gotten married, I think that you might be able to target a couple of different markets. Wedding showers, house warmings, moving in to college, etc. There seem to always be gifts at these events, with the chance of getting your gift returned. If, instead of offering gift cards/cash, givers could give a catalog, it might work out well. The receiver wouldn't know how much was spent on them, would still get what they need (ie: kitchen stuff for a house-warming) but have some flexibility to choose what they want without too many choices and too much hassle on their part.

Unfortunately, I feel that these are too broad of options, you need to niche down further. Of course, I don't know exactly how to do that off-hand.

[aroman]

Thanks froldt I appreciate your time. I was trying to focus on corporate accounts but maybe you have given me a different avenue. I could easily do both (when I figure out the other angle) but maybe I can do something focusing on the family gift area.

Weddings, babies, bdays. I just need to think about the marketing. I should look into affiliate marketing too. With all the baby & wedding sites out there I bet I could get a decent return on that.

THANKS!

[kamakiri]

Soooo.... You are planning on buying up inventories of the products you intend to list in the catalogs, dump them at some 'drop shipper', and then move the product as the orders come in?

[aroman]

No I don't have to buy the inventory or create the catalogs. The manufacture puts everything together and drop ships the catalogs and the whatever product the buyer chooses. I will just be pushing the people through.

[kamakiri]

Sounds like the guy who put that together was a good salesman.

[jpb209]

Just wondering what site you are refering to, sounds like a good christmas gift idea.

[aroman]

They would make great xmas gift but I not sure if that is TOO niche or seasonal. I will send you the link as soon as I get it built! You could be the first customer. ;)

[mjc613]

This sounds very similar to something that Amway used to do - or maybe still does. It's great for giving something when you don't know what the recipient wants.

I think this is a great alternative to electronic giftcards - and safer too! I picture a site where the customer can select the price they want to pay, enter the address of the recipient with a nice 3 line message, and click a paypal button. You could list the gifts available for each price and have a small picture of each card.

I see a big use for these at Xmas, but you could also push them for Mother's Day, Father's Day (Let Dad pick something something for His Day!!! He's tired of Ties!!!), Secretaries Day, etc.

Good luck!

[TimW]

I've seen these...interesting concepts. I think they're sort of along the lines of a network marketing biz, but I may be wrong.

Some of the higher-end companies who do this have a wide variety of catalogs and price ranges to choose from.

Not sure that picking one niche will be necessary, but if so, newlyweds & babies...those things happen all year....might be a good place to start.

Holidays, college graduations, etc., are seasonal, which if you focus on one holiday you'll have a rollercoaster of an income.

[aroman]

Thanks guys. A couple of you are correct about the Amway Global being a distributer for this. I am allowed to resell as long as I use a personalized satelite site that they offer and the customer does NOT have to register for anything to purchase. So I built a site around it and threw it up last night (at 2 am!). So far I have gotten 60 visitors via CPC but no sales.

I would love to get feedback from you guys on the site but I don't want to plaster the URL and have it viewed as solicitation.

How can I share?

Thanks,
Adam