How To Find a Product to Sell Online: 11 Methods (2026)

If you want to start an ecommerce business, you need to find a product to sell online. But choosing a product you personally love isn’t enough to guarantee a profit. 

Early on in the process, you’ll need to validate your product idea. By determining the needs or a gap in the market, you reduce your risk.

Serial entrepreneur and dropshipping educator AC Hampton discovered this the hard way. “When I first started, I was trying to sell a bunch of products that I thought looked cool, or that I liked, or that I bought, or I would buy, or a friend would buy. And it just never worked for me,” AC says. 

“The moment I started using data, I started taking my opinion out of it, and I started looking for just true demand in the market, that’s when everything changed for me.”

In this article, learn about the different product research methods real founders use to identify winning product opportunities for their online businesses.

Focus on customer needs

• Solve a customer pain point
• Appeal to niche interests
• Address an underserved market
• Improve an existing product

Taking a customer-centric approach to product research means finding out what your target audience wants and then giving it to them, rather than choosing a product first and trying to find an audience for it later. 

Here’s how to find a product to sell online by focusing on the customer:

Solve a customer pain point 

Many products aim to solve an existing problem or customer pain point. When assessing demand for a product, pay attention to the challenges customers face with current products. Social media and customer review sites are excellent sources for these insights.

Solving a pain point doesn’t always mean inventing something entirely new. Sometimes you’ll identify gaps in your competitors’ product design or patterns of poor customer service in an industry.

Consider how you can improve an existing idea to address common frustrations. Gloria Hwang did this when she built her brand, Thousand. She discovered many cyclists avoided helmets because they didn’t like how they looked. Her brand focused on combining style with safety to reinvent an everyday product.

“If you can make a helmet people actually want to wear, you can help save lives,” Gloria says on an episode of Shopify Masters.

Appeal to niche interests

When people are passionate about a hobby or interest, they may be more willing to spend money on products that match their needs. A 2025 Shopify survey found that niche or specialty products—those outside the top 100 product categories—now represent almost 55% of Shopify sales. 

Appealing to niche interests involves deep understanding of your target market. Comic book store Revenge Of uses a combination of in-person events and online community-building through Discord and social media to dial in on the products their customers want to see.

“Since we work in such a niche, passion-based, fandom-based world, we’re able to tap in with customers,” Cofounder Joe Myers says on Shopify Masters. “It’s a really exciting way to be able to take a thing that you already know there’s an audience that’s passionate about it and be able to engage them online and through ecom.”

Address an underserved market

Underserved markets can include entire demographics overlooked by current brands. Identifying these gaps can help you find products customers want but can’t easily find.

For example, makeup brand Human Beauty launched accessible and inclusive cosmetics after Founder and CEO Millie Flemington-Clare, who was born with rare genetic condition cystinosis, noticed a gap in the market for makeup products suited to people with disabilities.

Human Beauty’s cosmetics are sensory-friendly, use anti-roll packaging, and include QR codes linked to audio descriptions for makeup palettes. 

Improve an existing product

One way to identify a profitable product is to look at what’s already popular, then make a small improvement. This is what AC teaches his dropshipping students, inspired by fashion designer Virgil Abloh’s 3% rule: Take 97% of what’s already working, and innovate on the remaining 3%.

“I’m not trying to go into a brand new market, OK? I’m not here to try to reinvent the wheel. I like to find out what is working for others and allow it to work for me,” AC says.

He recommends looking at customer reviews on Amazon and comments on popular ads. They show you exactly where existing products fall short, such as quality issues or confusing features.

Use personal experience

In 2025, 57% of established merchants surveyed by Shopify reported using personal experience—as customers, former business owners, or industry professionals—to validate their business idea.* Here are some ways to use what you know and care about to inform the types of products you sell:

Create a product you want to see

Developing a product because it’s something you personally want isn’t the most data-driven approach, but you’ll have the benefit of being passionate enough to see your product idea through.

Dan Demsky got the idea for Unbound Merino after learning about the benefits of merino wool for travel: It’s lightweight, so it takes up less room in a suitcase, and has anti-odor properties, meaning less washing. But the merino clothing available at the time was too outdoorsy for everyday wear.

Because a simple merino wool T-shirt was something he badly wanted for himself, Dan decided he was comfortable assuming the entrepreneurial risk of pursuing this business idea.

“This is the way I looked at it: This thing’s either going to work and will have made our dream business, or it won’t and I’ll have a box of prototype T-shirts that I wanted anyway. This is a win-win,” Dan says on Shopify Masters. The risk paid off: Within a few years, Unbound Merino’s total lifetime revenue approached $100 million.

Consider your professional experience

Your past work experience can be a shortcut to a strong product idea if you have deep experience within an industry.

That’s what happened with RetroSupply. Founder Dustin Lee transitioned from running a freelance web design business to selling vintage-inspired fonts and design assets for graphic designers and illustrators. By turning his industry knowledge into digital products, he created a scalable passive income stream.

Conduct market research

• Spot trends before they emerge
• Find product opportunities in keywords
• Try social media tools
• Analyze international markets
• Use dropshipping tools

Sometimes finding a new product is a matter of doing market research. Here are a few ideas to get started:

Spot trends before they emerge

Once a trend is widely recognized, it’s often already peaking. The goal is to anticipate trending products before they become mainstream.

That’s what Miguel Leal and his cofounders did with Somos. They noticed that Mexican restaurants in the US were starting to serve more regional cuisine. 

“Food became a lot more like the food we ate growing up in Mexico,” Miguel says on Shopify Masters.

But US supermarket shelves weren’t reflecting this growing interest. It was an untapped market. They studied concepts from popular restaurants and brought them to grocery aisles with products like birria simmer sauce and salsa macha.

Find product opportunities in keywords

Search engine data can help you brainstorm new product ideas or validate an existing one. One option is to use keyword research tools to find search terms with high search volume (indicating customer demand) and low competition (making them easier to rank for using search engine optimization and search engine marketing). 

You might focus on long-tail keywords or niche keywords, which are more specific and tend to have less competition but higher buyer intent. 

The founders of Earthy Shop chose to rebrand their company as Zero Waste Store after discovering 10,000 to 15,000 monthly searches for that precise keyword phrase.

Long-tail keywords can be particularly helpful if you want your product to show up in results from AI assistants like ChatGPT. A Shopify study found that in 2025, 71% of AI-attributed orders came from long-tail searches.

You can also check Google Trends, a free tool that shows a search term’s popularity over time, to see if a trend has already peaked or follows seasonal patterns.

To validate your idea, you can purchase Google Ads directing potential customers to an email capture landing page. That’s what Anaita Sarkar did to test her concept for Hero Packaging.

“We thought, at the time, ‘We’re going to get about 30, 40 sign-ups to get some free samples of eco-friendly packaging,’” Anaita says on Shopify Masters. “In a week, we got a thousand people. And that was the first sign where we said, ‘People are interested in this.’”

Try social media tools

According to product experience management platform Salsify’s 2026 Consumer Research report, social media is the top product discovery channel for Gen Z and millennials. If you want to reach those demographics, it makes sense to use popular social media platforms for product ideas. 

AC uses what he calls the “act like a shopper” method. He creates a new TikTok account and browses the app from the point of view of a potential customer, searching for trending TikTok products using terms like #TikTokMadeMeBuyIt.

Some platforms also have built-in tools designed to help businesses identify popular search terms, hashtags, or products, like TikTok’s Creative Center and Pinterest Trends. If you have a Shopify store, install the TikTok for Shopify app to manage orders and inventory from TikTok Shop.

Analyze international markets

International markets may be the key to the next big thing in your region. You can become a local distributor or reseller for an existing brand or create your own products inspired by those popular in other regions.

That’s how frozen food brand Spatula Foods began. When one of the cofounders, Ian Weng, was in Europe studying for his MBA, he learned about Picard, a billion-dollar frozen food brand from France. Ian noticed that Picard sold more elevated frozen food than what he was used to seeing in Canada.

Inspired by Picard’s success in Europe, Ian and his cofounders decided to create a chef-driven frozen food company based in North America.

Use dropshipping tools

Dropshipping is a business model that can also function as a product validation strategy. Because there are no upfront inventory costs, you can sell products and see how well they perform without taking on major financial risk. 

This is the exact method AC teaches his ecommerce students: find a winning product, dropship it, then reinvest the profits into manufacturing your own custom version. 

To start, you need a minimum viable product. Dropshipping platforms are aware of this, and many come with built-in tools to help you discover trending products. 

AC uses AutoDS, but other options include Sell the Trend and Dropship.io. These tools sync with online marketplaces like AliExpress to estimate product popularity and sales velocity.

If you have an existing Shopify store and want to explore expanding your product offerings, one option is Shopify Product Network. 

Shopify Product Network automatically suggests products complementary to your existing inventory, then gives you the option to list those products on your storefront in exchange for a commission.

*Based on a November 2025 survey of 500 Shopify merchants conducted in English across Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, New Zealand, and the United States. Respondents were established merchants with more than two years on the platform. Results reflect the experiences of this specific sample and may not be representative of all merchants.