How to Find the Best Niches for Print on Demand

If you want to build a side-hustle selling print on demand products on Amazon, Etsy, and eBay, then understanding the value of targeting the right niche is crucial. Why? Because if you don’t sell the things that buyers are actually looking for, your products won’t be found on the popular buying platforms (which means it’s harder to make sales). But I’ve found a perfect solution.

Here are three tools and methods to help you jump to the top of the search page with your print on demand products.

Finding “low hanging” niches

Most sellers go for the big, juicy niches like “mom, dad, lawyer” and, of course, cats and dogs. While it’s true that customers look for products in those niches, they are also extremely competitive on both Amazon and Etsy.

The number one searched niche on Etsy is “mom,” and an estimated five million products are trying to rank for that keyword on Etsy. Even if you have an amazing product, the chances that you will rank for that keyword are low.

When I review a store, it almost always targets the same things. This is because most new sellers rack their brains trying to think of the most popular things, off the top of their heads. The trouble with this is that you will likely choose the same few niches that other people choose.

There are tens of thousands of people who want products, but no one is making them. These niches are hiding in the dark and lurking around corners, waiting for sellers to find them and make products.

How to uncover hidden niches everyone else ignores

Niche discovery tool #1 – Search engines

Let’s start with a popular target: grandmothers. Everyone loves their grandma and wants to buy them a gift around the holidays. Did you know that there are hundreds of nicknames for “grandma,” including names in different languages?

I have had a lot of success with this niche, and the bestsellers seem to be the more obscure nicknames, such as “omi.” To find these nicknames, I open my favorite search engine and search “top 50 nicknames for grandmother.” I might do two or three different variations of this search. Then, I copy the results into a spreadsheet.

Here’s another version for dog breeds, which is another popular topic that buyers love to shop for.

You can use this method with many popular topics, for example, “top 20 cat breeds, most popular summer sports, top 30 nurse specialties” and many more.

Niche discovery tool #2 – Your mind

I mentioned before that most people are predictable when they try to think of niches to sell to. But you know more than you think. You just need to direct your thinking in certain ways to get better results.

Try this: pick a broad topic like “beauty care.” Then, think of as many related job titles as you can. I did this, and I came up with “beautician, hairstylist, barber, salon owner, and pedicurist.” This might not be the most efficient way, but it works in a pinch.

Niche discovery tool #3 – Chat GPT (or another AI text tool)

This is the ultimate tool for sellers who want to save time and get an extensive list of niches. Chat GPT is free to use (at the time of writing this), so you don’t need to pay any money to access this fabulous tool. Whenever you want to use any kind of AI tool, the most important thing is the “prompt.” In this case, I asked ChatGPT the question the same way I would ask a human, and it delivered fantastic results.

AI programs like ChatGPT or Claude are subject to errors, so keep that in mind as you use these tools. Even with the possibility of errors, the worst thing that might happen is that you create a product for a niche that doesn’t exist, and you might waste a small amount of time.

Using AI is a lot of fun, and you can keep working with the prompt to refine and improve your results.

And if you haven’t yet checked out Rachel’s GPT video on how to come up with tons of ideas, you can do so here.

There are a few things that you can do to get better results from AI prompts. Try being specific when prompting and include instructions like “Give me 10/10 results” or “I’ll pay you $10,000 for your best work.” You can see in the example above that I requested at least 100 examples, and I wanted only the names, with no extra text.

Bonus tool – SpotNiches

This is the only tool on this list that comes with a cost. But in this case, the cost is well worth it.

SpotNiches is a tool that grabs data from Amazon, Etsy, and eBay, showing you every search that customers conduct based on one or more words. It also shows the number of results, which lets you see which keywords are more or less competitive. For the keyword “mom gift,” you can see that there are dozens of longer searches that contain these words but relate to very different and specific things. These longer searches are the niches you want to target.

What should I expect when targeting these niches?

Not every niche I target gets results. Sometimes, you can do everything right and still not get the results you want. But when you do get sales, those winners will make up for the products that didn’t work.

The niches that pay off for me are almost always niches I didn’t expect. So when I launch my products, I try to let go of my expectations and have fun with the process. After all, if you’re not enjoying what you do, why are you doing it?

Here are some examples of these cool niche products

Here are some screenshots of products with sales on Etsy. I selected these because the niches were unusual.

As you can see, there are niches out there that defy expectations and conventions. How many can you find?

I hope you find this post about finding the best niches for print on demand useful. If you have any other tips or suggestions, please leave a comment below. And if you enjoyed this post, consider sharing it with your friends and followers.