How To Start An eCommerce Brand (In 2025)
Steal our tried and tested 5-step process…
Which will give you 100% clarity on:
Everything you need to know before you spend your time and money on a new eCommerce brand or product category for your existing brand.
Make no mistake about it…
This research blueprint will give you the best chance of success.
In fact:
We use this system for our clients who are making well over $100M in sales per year.
Let’s jump right into it!
Here’s what’s in store for you today:
Niche Example
Before we get into it, just a really quick note.
For the purpose of this guide, we’ll be using tights as the example category.
Rest assured that no matter what category you’re considering, what follows has you covered.
Niche Qualification
Before investing extensive time and money into an eCommerce brand…
You need to qualify it first.
How?
By looking at two key areas:
- Keyword search volume
- Seasonality
You want to do this to review and compare the potential of each category you’re considering to help you make the best decision.
Keyword Search Volume
For this you’ll need to use a keyword research tool, we’ll be using Google’s Keyword Planner.
By simply typing in “tights” into the planner, it’s returned thousands of keyword ideas alongside the average monthly search volume of each.
Going through and scanning the data, we can see a healthy amount of search volume across a broad range of qualified keywords.
You want to do this for each category you’re considering.
Once you’ve done so, summarise your findings into a simple table:
Seasonality
It’s critical to identify seasonality early on to determine if the products you’re considering are in demand all year round or if they’re seasonal.
Simply type in the primary keyword for the target category into Google Trends to work it out:
You want to complete this for every category you have in mind.
Manufacturer Selection
We use Alibaba for this.
It’s critical you do this early on to qualify the category you want to focus on.
Simply start by typing in your primary keyword and reviewing the manufacturers until you find a few solid options.
Here are the key online store performance metrics to look for:
- On-time delivery rate
- Online revenue
- Response time
- Store rating
- Product cost
Here’s a good example:
If you find several manufacturers with a similar profile, you know you’ll be successfully able to source your products.
Competitor and Product Pricing Review
Next you want to review your online competition.
In particular:
- The total amount
- How much they sell their products for
Having a quick look at Google Shopping, we can see there are 42 brands selling leggings online across 3 different price ranges:
- Under $40
- $40 – $70
- Over $70
Make note of this for each category because you’ll need it for the next section.
Viability Testing
This is where you determine your product market fit.
It’s the final check you need to make before confirming:
The category you want to go all in on.
To do this, you simply want to calculate if you can compete in market.
Let’s first look at estimated costs:
- Shipping: $10
- Payment gateways and fees: $1
- Product cost of goods sold (includes cost per tight at $6.95): $12.50
- Cost/sale (within the marketing platform e.g. Google or Meta Ads): $20
Take your time to work out the estimates for each of these costs.
The information is available to you online, you’ll need to do a bit of research to work it out though.
This will bring the total cost per sale to $43.50.
Being a challenger (the newest online brand in the market), you’ll need to price your items as competitively as possible.
In saying so, in this example, we’d want to price our tights at $55
Once the brand matures, we can look to increase prices to make more profit.
Become Even More Competitive
The key is to reduce your costs as much as possible to ensure you can price your products as competitively as you can.
This will give you the largest cut through and the highest chance of success.
You do so by reducing your COGs and shipping as much as you can.
Find the best deals (whilst maintaining quality) and negotiate with manufacturers.
If we brought our total cost per sale down per tight from $43.50 to $35.50, we’d be able to price ourselves at $45 instead which would be much better.
Bringing It All Together
Once you’ve completed this exercise (the entire 5-step process) for each category you’re considering…
You’ll be armed with the visibility and data you need to launch and grow your eCommerce brand with the most success.
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