How to Choose the Best Products to Sell Online (Beginner’s Guide)

After helping our partner brands build successful online stores, one thing became crystal clear: the products that sell best are the ones that solve real problems.

In fact, before we launch any new plugin or tool, we carefully study what our users actually need, which is why our solutions consistently deliver results.

Choosing the right products to sell online isn’t about following trends or guessing what might work. It’s about understanding your market, identifying genuine needs, and positioning your products to meet those needs effectively.

This approach has helped our partners generate millions in sales.

In this beginner’s guide, we’ll share our proven process for choosing the best products to sell online. Whether you’re just starting out or looking to expand your product line, these are the same strategies we use to identify profitable opportunities in any market.

Why Build an Online Store in the First Place?

Building an online store has lots of perks. Maybe you want to earn extra money in your free time. Or perhaps you already have a small business and want to reach more customers. If you’re feeling adventurous, you can even build a brand-new business from scratch.

Whatever your goal, an online store makes it possible and opens up lots of opportunities. Here are more reasons to start selling online:

• Reach More People: Unlike a regular brick-and-mortar store, an online store can have customers from all over the world. You can even create a multilingual website to cater to your diverse target market.
• Spend Less Money: Running an online store can save you a lot of cash. You don’t have to pay for expensive rent or utilities like you would with a physical store. Plus, you avoid costs related to store equipment, maintenance, and other overhead expenses. 
• Be Flexible: You can manage your store from anywhere with an internet connection, whether you’re at home, traveling, or on the go.
• Grow Easily: You can add new products, including digital goods, or try different things as you grow without needing a bigger space. Experimenting with trending items, seasonal products, or entirely new categories is easier, too.
• Always Open: Your store can make sales 24/7, even when you’re asleep.

How to Choose the Best Products to Sell Online

Now that you know why building an online store is a great idea, it’s time to tackle the next big step: choosing the best products to sell online. Here’s a breakdown of the steps we will cover in this guide:

Ready? Let’s get started.

1. Basics of Choosing Products to Sell in Your Ecommerce Store

Before you start looking into products that you can sell, there are some basics that you need to keep in mind. Let’s look at some of the most important ones first.

1. Choosing Your eCommerce Platform

First, you need to choose a platform that you want to use to sell your products.

Choosing the right eCommerce platform for your online store is important because it will affect your choice of products and how you do business.

WooCommerce is the most popular eCommerce solution for WordPress. It’s easy to use, and you can add it to your WordPress site to sell all kinds of products while accepting payments using multiple payment gateways.

However, many beginners also consider Shopify. Here is a brief comparison:

Feature	WooCommerce	Shopify
Pricing	Free core plugin, but you pay for hosting and premium extensions.	Monthly subscription fee, plus transaction fees on some plans.
Ease of Use	Requires some setup within WordPress, offering more control.	Very beginner-friendly with a fully hosted, guided setup.
Flexibility	Highly flexible and customizable with thousands of themes and plugins.	Less flexible, as you operate within Shopify’s closed system.

For a side-by-side comparison, see our article on Shopify vs. WooCommerce, which discusses the pros and cons of both platforms.

2. Shipping

Shipping has a huge impact on the success of an eCommerce store.

Research by the Baymard Institute found that extra costs — including shipping fees — are the leading cause of shopping cart abandonment online. This is why pricing and shipping strategy play a huge role in product selection.

You will obviously want to select products that you can ship at lower costs or for free.

You can also recover abandoned carts with a tool like OptinMonster. It uses exit-intent technology to detect when a visitor is about to leave the checkout page and then displays a targeted popup with a discount or reminder to encourage them to complete their purchase.

If you only plan to sell digital products (music, video, software, eBooks, and so on), then you don’t have to worry about shipping because the products will be downloaded by customers online, and you can track those downloads to see what sells the best using software like Easy Digital Downloads.

3. Product Sourcing and Inventory Management

When choosing products, it’s crucial to think about how you’ll get them to your customers. Your approach to product sourcing and inventory management directly impacts your startup costs, operational complexity, and overall business model.

Traditional Inventory Management

This involves purchasing products in bulk, storing them (in a warehouse, garage, or dedicated space), and then shipping them to customers yourself.

While it offers more control over product quality and branding, it requires significant upfront capital for inventory and storage, as well as time for packing and shipping.

You’ll need a powerful eCommerce solution to track stock levels, manage returns, and prevent overselling.

Dropshipping

Dropshipping is a fulfillment method where you don’t keep products in stock. Instead, when a customer places an order, you purchase the item from a third-party supplier (manufacturer, wholesaler, or another retailer) who then ships it directly to the customer.

• ✅Pros: Low startup costs (no inventory to buy upfront), wide product selection, flexibility to test new products easily.
• ❌Cons: Lower profit margins, less control over shipping times and product quality, high competition.

Dropshipping is ideal for beginners who want to validate product ideas without significant financial risk.

Print-on-Demand (POD)

Similar to dropshipping, Print-on-Demand allows you to sell custom-designed products (like T-shirts, mugs, phone cases, posters) without holding any inventory.

When an order comes in, a POD service prints your design on the product and ships it directly to the customer.

• ✅Pros: Creative freedom to design unique products, no inventory management, easy to scale.
• ❌Cons: Profit margins can vary, quality control depends on the POD provider, limited product types.

POD is excellent for artists, designers, or anyone wanting to build a brand around custom merchandise.

Consider which model best fits your budget, time commitment, and desired level of control

4. Pricing Strategy and Profit Margins

Choosing a product isn’t just about what to sell, but also how much you can sell it for and still make a profit. A robust pricing strategy is fundamental to your online store’s long-term viability.

Understand Your Costs

Before setting a price, you must know your total costs. This includes:

• Cost of Goods Sold (COGS): The direct cost of producing or acquiring your product (e.g., raw materials, manufacturing, wholesale price).
• Shipping Costs: Both inbound (from supplier to you, if applicable) and outbound (from you to customer).
• Marketing & Advertising: The cost to promote your product.
• Platform Fees: eCommerce platform subscriptions, transaction fees, payment gateway fees.
• Overhead: Any other business expenses (e.g., website hosting, software subscriptions, packaging).

Determine Your Desired Profit Margin

Once you know your costs, decide on a healthy profit margin. This is the percentage of revenue you want to keep after all costs are covered.

Aim for a margin that sustains your business and allows for growth. Different product categories will have different typical profit margins, so research industry benchmarks.

• Value-Based Pricing: Price your product based on its perceived value to the customer, especially for unique or niche items.
• Competitive Pricing: Research how competitors price similar products. While you need to be competitive, avoid undercutting everyone, as this can lead to unsustainable margins.
• Psychological Pricing: Using strategies like ending prices with .99 or offering bundles.

Remember, a product might have high demand, but if you can’t sell it at a price that covers your costs and yields a healthy profit, it’s not the best product for your store.

For more information, check out our guide on eCommerce pricing model.

Quick Product Evaluation Checklist

Before investing time or money into a product idea, it’s important to evaluate whether it has the right balance of demand, profitability, competition, and growth potential.

Even if a product looks promising at first, it may not be sustainable in the long run. That’s why successful online sellers often use a simple evaluation framework before launching a new product.

You can use the checklist below to quickly determine whether a product is worth pursuing:

Criteria	What It Means
Proven demand	People are already searching for or buying this type of product.
Manageable competition	You are not competing directly with dominant players in the market.
Healthy profit margins	The selling price comfortably covers costs and still leaves room for profit.
Scalability	You can easily increase supply or expand variations as demand grows.

If a product checks most of these boxes, then it’s usually a strong candidate for your online store.

2. Types of Products That You Can Sell Easily

The products you can sell online generally fall into two main categories: commoditized products and niche products. Understanding the difference is key to your strategy.

1. Commoditized Products

Commoditized products are essential, high-demand items sold by many retailers with little difference in quality. Think of everyday goods like soap, office supplies, or standard clothing.

These are often mass-produced by large brands, making it difficult for new stores to compete on price with giants like Amazon or Walmart.

2. Niche Products

Niche products serve a specific customer segment or interest. These can be unique, handmade, or specialized items with limited availability, such as custom-made jewelry, artisanal foods, or software for a particular industry.

Because they aren’t widely available, niche products give you a competitive advantage and a better chance to build a loyal customer base.

Feature	Commoditized Products	Niche Products
Competition Level	Very High	Low to Medium
Price Sensitivity	High (customers seek the lowest price)	Low (customers value uniqueness)
Potential for Branding	Low (market is dominated by established brands)	High (opportunity to build a unique brand)

You can find niche product suppliers on platforms like Etsy, where independent creators sell their goods.

You can also source products from international suppliers on sites like AliExpress or Alibaba.com.

Popular Product Ideas for Beginners to Sell Online

If you’re wondering what you can actually start selling, here are some proven product types that consistently perform well

• Digital Products: These include eBooks, online courses, templates, and software tools. They are highly profitable because there is no inventory or shipping involved.
• Print-on-Demand Products: Custom-designed items like t-shirts, mugs, phone cases, and posters. These work well for niche audiences and creative brands.
• Beauty & Skincare Products: Skincare, grooming, and wellness items are always in demand and often lead to repeat purchases.
• Pet Products: Pet owners are highly engaged buyers, which makes toys, accessories, and grooming products strong sellers.
• Niche Apparel: Instead of general clothing, focus on interest-based clothing like fitness, gaming, travel, or hobby-specific designs.
• Home & Lifestyle Products: Kitchen tools, organizers, and home décor items that solve everyday problems or improve convenience.

For more ideas, you may want to look at the following guides:

• Profitable Ecommerce Business Ideas for WordPress (Expert Pick)
• Best Homemade Things to Make and Sell Online (Expert Pick)
• Easy Side Hustle Ideas to Make Money Online

3. Doing Product Research On Your Own

Don’t guess when selecting products to sell online. You need to back up your decisions with data so that you know there is a demand for these products and customers are looking for them.

The first tool you should use for your research is Amazon.

It’s the world’s largest eCommerce store, with thousands of products. Luckily, it’s also a treasure trove of free data that you can gather to help make your decisions.

Not only is their search engine full of autocomplete suggestions, but their product categories can be used to find niche products that are popular with a smaller set of consumers.

Let’s imagine you wanted to sell kid’s toys.

You could narrow down your search to very specific toy categories such as ‘clay & dough’ or ‘craft kits.’

Then, you could switch to the ‘Bestsellers’ view to see the top-performing products in each category on Amazon.

This helps you find proven sellers in a less competitive niche. You can also get great ideas by reading the 3 and 4-star reviews for these items to see what improvements customers are looking for.

This excludes the most popular products that are available everywhere and have high competition, but it includes items popular enough that you could keep in stock and most likely sell.

Semrush is another great tool that you can use to gather data from competitors or any eCommerce store you want.

With it, you can discover a competitor’s top traffic sources, their most popular products, and the specific ads they are running.

It also shows your competitor’s product listing ads from Google. You can see their best-performing product listing ads, keywords, and other data.

Here are some other tools you can use to gather product data from other websites:

• Ahrefs: A powerful competitor research tool used to see what’s popular on other websites.
• AdPlexity: An eCommerce research tool that helps you collect data from across the web.

Keep in mind that many of the more powerful tools like Semrush and Ahrefs are premium subscription services. However, they often offer free trials, which are a great way to get started.

Spot Trending and Seasonal Products

Beyond researching existing demand, it’s also important to identify emerging trends before they become saturated.

You can use tools like Google Trends to see whether interest in a product is rising or declining over time. This helps you spot seasonal spikes (like holiday décor or summer gear) as well as long-term growing categories.

Social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Pinterest are also powerful indicators of trending products, especially in categories like fashion, beauty, and home décor.

These products can help you generate quick sales during peak interest periods, while evergreen products provide more stable long-term revenue.

A balanced mix of both can help you grow your online store more sustainably.

4. Use Customer Personas to Find Product Ideas

A customer persona is a fictional profile of an ideal customer that you want to target.

You can create this profile by answering simple questions about an ideal buyer. This is your target audience, and personifying them helps you understand them better when you are doing product research.

If you have an existing store, then you can use eCommerce tracking in Google Analytics to build an ideal buyer persona.

For instance, you can look at the Demographics and Interests reports. These will show you valuable data like the age, gender, and hobbies of your current customers, which can help you create a detailed persona.

If you are just starting out, you’ll want to use your best guess to build a customer persona. This exercise helps you understand your customers’ needs, questions, and what kind of products they would like to buy.

To learn more about buyer persona, then you can see this guide on creating a concrete buyer persona with ready-made templates and examples.

5. Find Products You are Passionate About

As career advisors say, ‘Choose a job you love, and you’ll never have to work a day in your life.’

Similarly, choosing products you are passionate about helps you sell them more effectively.

These could be products that you personally love and passionately recommend to your family and friends. Why not recommend and sell them to others online?

It could also be products related to a hobby or activity you are passionate about. Nothing drives more passion when you build something useful and want others to use it. Following your passion allows you to look deeply into products and find ideas that offer real value to your customers.

6. Use Post-Purchase Surveys

If you already have a WordPress blog, website, or online store, then post-purchase surveys could be a way to gain valuable insight into how to improve user experience and discover what customers are looking for.

As a business owner, it’s a good idea to have a pulse on what your most loyal customers want from you. You can ask these questions in your survey:

• What was the main problem you hoped to solve by purchasing our product?
• What products do you like the most from us and why?
• What other types of products would you be interested in seeing in our online store?
• Are there any complementary products you would like to see offered alongside this product?
• What problems are you facing currently? For example, if you sell skincare products or outdoor gear products, you can tailor the products you sell to solve the issues they face.

To create these post-purchase survey forms, you can use WPForms. There are already ready-made templates for surveys, meaning you don’t have to start from scratch.

At WPBeginner, we’ve used it to create our annual survey, and it’s worked great for us. To learn more, see our WPForms review.

Just drag and drop the questions you want to ask, and you’ll have a form ready to send to your email list in minutes!

For more details, simply read our full tutorial on how to easily create post-purchase surveys in WooCommerce.

Bonus: Selling a Single Product Online

When you think about selling online, you might imagine having tons of different items. But you don’t have to do that. You could just sell one product in your online store.

This way, it’s easier to manage because you don’t have to handle a bunch of inventory or update your website for each item. Plus, it’s cheaper. You won’t need a ton of resources or expensive hosting.

Focusing on one product lets you become an expert in that area, helping you cater to your audience better. It also makes creating marketing campaigns easier and more effective.

For more details, you can read our guide on how to sell a single product online with WordPress.

Frequently Asked Questions About Selling a Product Online

Here are some questions that our readers have frequently asked about selling products online:

How to pick a product to sell online?

You can pick a product to sell online by looking at demand, competition, and profit margins. The best products usually solve a clear problem or follow a strong market trend.

What are the 5 C’s in selling products online?

The 5 C’s in selling products are Customer, Company, Competition, Collaborators, and Context. These help you understand the market and make better selling decisions.

Which items sell fast online or in WordPress stores?

Items that sell fast online usually include trending products, digital downloads, and problem-solving tools. In WordPress stores, niche products with clear demand often perform best.

For more information, you can see our guide on profitable eCommerce business ideas for WordPress.

What makes a product go viral online?

A product goes viral when it is highly shareable, emotionally appealing, or solves a common problem in a unique way. Strong social media exposure and influencer promotion also increase virality.

How to market a product online effectively?

You can market a product by using SEO, social media, email marketing, and paid ads. The most effective strategy usually combines multiple channels to reach the right audience consistently.

We hope this article helped you learn how to choose the best products to sell online. You may also want to see our guide on eCommerce pricing model – how to easily price a product and our list of profitable eCommerce business ideas.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.