European E-commerce Part 2: Product

Read Part 1 if you haven’t done so yet.

Takeaway

• A profitable business sells stuff people buy.
• There are a lot of ways to think about what people buy.

Choosing a product for your business is about a lot of different things (demand, margins, ease of shipping, ease of marketing, ease of packaging…) but mainly about one thing: money.

What matters the most in the end is to be profitable.

This article approaches product search through the following lenses:

• The product way to think about products
• The customers way to think about products
• The business-type way to think about products
• The marketing way to think about products
• The business needs way to think about products
• The e-commerce way to think about products

While I intended to focus on e-commerce, this piece ended up being a broad business article.

Enjoy!

1. The Product Way to Think About Products

The product way to think about products focuses on what to sell.

A. Sell What People Buy

Selling what people buy is the easiest way to get rich fast if you can execute well.

But it’s hard, not because it’s objectively hard but because most people want to sell what they want to sell.

I am also guilty of this.

I wouldn’t be able to sleep if I owned My American Shop, for example.

Here are a few ideas on how to find out what people buy:

• Look at what you bought online over the last three years.
• Look at the industries expected to grow the most.
• Sign up for a cheap keyword tool (keywordtool.io, keysearch, spyfu, etc) and see what people are searching for the most.
• Visit the Meta and TikTok ad libraries to see which ads are working the best.
• Sign up for Exploding Topics or Glimpse, choose one of their early trends, build your shop, and wait for it to explode.
• Search for the most successful Shopify shops and replicate what they do in a market where they are not present.
• Watch CNBC Make It for inspiration.
• Look at the fastest-growing companies in foreign countries and see what they do.
• Travel to another country to see what type of goods/services they sell there and that aren’t sold where you live.
• Go to the mall and see which shops seem to be the most successful.
• Ask your friends what they’re buying at the moment.

Avoid being obsessed over your products, it’s not that important. You’ll do better if you execute well on an okay product than if you execute badly on a great product.

In the words of billionaire Marc Lore:

B. Copy and Do It Better

Copy and do it better is the Richard Branson way of doing business.

Businesses can excel at two out of those three characteristics:

• Price (the lowest prices)
• Product (the best product)
• Customer support (the best customer support)

Nobody can have the best customer support while selling the best product at the cheapest price.

One needs to be axed out, and this is why you should do market research (we’ll talk about it in part 3: marketing) so you know how to position your product.

If your competitor focuses on price and product (Mediamarkt), you can focus on product and customer support (CoolBlue).

Here are a few other ways to find products to sell.

1. Be Mindful of What You Buy

Cortazu is a jacket brand I found on Instagram as I was looking for something that would keep me dry under the Belgian weather.

Their jackets are among the most waterproof jackets in the world.

Loop Earplugs is a brand of earplugs designed by two Belgians. They realized they had tinnitus and set out to create a stylish brand of earplugs.

In both cases, founders were looking for a solution to their problems but did not find a suitable one, so they built their own.

Start to think about the myriads of problems you have and for which no solutions exist.

Then build it.

It helps to be a perfectionist. I have yet to find clothes that are as comfortable as they are practical, bags that are stylish and well-organized, jackets that are well-ventilated, meat that tastes good, etc.

All of these are potential business ideas.

2. Look on Business Marketplaces for Inspiration

Flippa, Empireflippers, and Acquire list online businesses for sale. You’d be surprised to see what an auto-part online shop can earn.

3. Actively Look for Stores

If you type “most successful e-commerce brands”, you’ll have a long list of food, clothing, makeup, and supplement companies to find inspiration for your own business.

If you want to go a bit more niche, you can find stores featured on e-commerce SaaS homepages.

Let’s take Simpler as an example. Simpler is a checkout SaaS for European e-commerce companies. It features its customers on its homepage, which can give you plenty of ideas.

If you don’t know where to find these SaaS in the first place, you can start with Fomo.

Fomo is a social selling SaaS that creates notifications to stress people into buying.

If you click on the “integrations” page of Fomo, you can see all of the other e-commerce SaaS that Fomo integrates with, each of them displaying dozens of customers.

4. Look at the Ad Libraries

As above.

C. Copy and Do it Differently

Do it differently is different than do it better.

For example:

• You can sell something different (pink matcha).
• You can sell under a different brand.
• You can sell to a restricted geographic market (Belgium has its own second-hand marketplace as nobody uses eBay).
• You can be a unique actor in your market, such as “the only fully Belgian-owned supermarket brand”.
• You can become a brand aggregator of certain products. I once ended up on a vegan supplement marketplace (I forgot the name) or on this European perfume marketplace.
• You can import a specific product and sell it in a specific market only, like koreanskincare which sells… Korean skincare in the Netherlands and Belgium.

Being different can be simply about having a different design, colors, or names.

Here are things you should avoid having in your brand (we’ll talk about branding in part 3).

• A real person’s name (Logan Dacia)
• An animal (Duckduckgo, Mailchimp, etc)
• Ugly colors (orange or brown)
• Ugly names
• Weird logos

Eg: LiquidDeath.

D. Sell What You Would Buy

I wear a Xiaomi band whose bracelet breaks after a year. When I went on Amazon to buy a replacement, the only product I found was a pouch with 20 colorful bracelets. No dark ones.

Boom, new product idea.

Be mindful of your desires. If you want something, other people probably want it too.

There is no point starting a business if not out of frustration.
Richard Branson

The biggest businesses in the world started because founders wanted to solve a problem they had.

What problems do you have?

E. Invent

Inventing something is the worst way to build a business for two reasons.

1. It’s really hard.
2. It hardly ever works.

You have much higher chances to succeed if you:

1. Improve an existing product.
2. Solve a problem people are willing to pay to get it solved.
3. Create an old product under a new brand.

2. The Business Way to Think About Products

The business way of thinking about products looks at the margins and business model to maximize money-making.

There’s a difference between selling McDonald’s burgers, which people consume daily, and selling carpets or wedding rings, which people buy once in their lifetime.

Likewise, there’s a difference between selling accounting services that your customers pay for yearly or selling accounting software in a one-time payment.

I began reading business books in 2019 but it was only in 2024 that I understood the importance of the type of revenue stream.

One of the reasons it took me so long was that I didn’t have an overview of how the business world worked.

So I made one.

You can sell three different things:

1. A service
2. A good
3. A digital good.

A massage is a service. A book is a good. An online course is a digital good.

A ticket to Disneyworld is a service. A pair of shoes is a good. An MP3 song is a digital good.

You have different ways to sell services, goods, and digital goods.

A. Ways of Selling Goods

You can sell goods in real life (shops), online, and through the mail.

1. In real life: selling something in a shop.
   • Direct-to-consumers (DTC): DTC companies manufacture and sell their goods to consumers in their own shops, without an intermediary. Think of Zara, Ikea, or H&M.
   • Distribution partners: Distribution comes down to selling your product to someone who sells it to your ultimate customers, like Mars or Coca-Cola. These companies sell their products to other companies that sell them to you.
2. Online:
   • Direct-to-consumers: You sell to your customers directly from your own website.
   • Marketplace: You sell on established marketplaces like Amazon or eBay.
3. Mailed-in: some companies are still selling through the mail by sending customers magazines with their products. However, the purchase is done online in most cases.

These are the only sales channels for products. I don’t include door-to-door sales because it’s retarded.

B. Types of Services

How you sell a service depends on what service to sell.

There are many types of services and some of them, like a marketplace, aren’t easy to understand.

• Basic services: cleaning, landscaping, going to the doctor, to the hairdresser, etc, are basic services.
• Brokerage services: brokerage means connecting things together. It’s a fancy way to say “marketplace”, but you have different types of marketplaces.
  • Commercial marketplaces: eBay is the most famous marketplace in the world and sells a connection between a buyer and a seller. There are as many marketplaces as there are products to sell, each focused on a different niche (from clothing to second-hand medical equipment to Legos) in a different market.
  • Social media: social media work like marketplaces. They establish connections between people, businesses, and institutions. They also sell “attention” to brands eager to advertise.
  • Financial marketplace: Binance and Coinbase, or Robinhood and Degiro, are financial marketplaces that sell the possibility to buy and sell financial assets, connecting sellers to buyers.
  • Digital marketplaces: the Google Play Store is a digital marketplace for apps, iTunes, for music, and Steam, for video games.
• Software-as-a-Service: SaaS businesses sell services in the form of software, usable only as long as customers are paying for it. Eg: Adobe. You cannot “buy” Photoshop. You have to keep paying if you want to keep using it.

Many business novices always come up with marketplace ideas. They’re easy ideas to come up with but they’re extremely difficult to execute and make money from because of the following:

• HR intensive: you need to hire a lot of people to build and maintain your marketplace, which means it’s an expensive business to have.
• Marketing and Customer Support intensive: most businesses have one type of customer; marketplaces have two (providers and buyers) which means they need to double their marketing and customer support teams.
• Low margins: marketplaces earn money based on the margin of what they sell. For Fiverr to earn €20, someone needs to buy a service for €100 (Fiverr takes 20% commission). Airbnb, Amazon, etc have processed hundreds of billions of transactions but are hardly profitable.
• Your customers constantly try to cheat you: when I take a Uber in a developing country, I almost always receive a company card from the driver who would rather that I call him directly instead of going through Uber. Likewise, Upwork bans people who make business dealings outside of Upwork.

C. Digital Goods

Digital goods are particular because sales are independent of the work needed to create the product.

If you sell bread, you need to bake every single piece of bread that you sell. Once you run out of bread, you run out of ways to make money.

Not with digital goods.

You can sell as many ebooks, videos, songs, or courses as you want.

This explains why the digital product niches are overcrowded.

Can you still succeed in this market?

Yes, but with an entry barrier depending on your content.

SkatterBencher makes overclocking guides. It’s valuable information that’s not easy to come up with, so SkatterBencher can live off content creation.

The barrier of entry is one of the five requirements to have a profitable business according to MJ DeMarco’s CENTS framework.

CENTS stand for:

• Control: control comes down to having control over your business. If you sell on Amazon, you don’t have control; Amazon does.
• Entry: if anyone can replicate what you do in 24 hours, you don’t have a good business (Eg: Uber driver). Whatever you do must have a reasonably high barrier of entry.
• Needs: do you solve someone’s needs? If not, no one will buy your product.
• Time: does your income depend on you working, or can you make money while you sleep? Eg: a dentist has his income attached to his time. But from the moment he hires other dentists who work for him, his income is no longer dependent on his time.
• Scale: can your business scale? The easier your business is to scale, the more money you will make.

D. Revenue Types

Revenue streams are often dependent on the type of goods/services you sell, but not necessarily so.

There are four types of revenue streams.

1. Sell Once

Whatever you sell once should make you a lot of money upon the sale (Eg: houses) or you won’t ever make much money.

Eg: Crocs. Crocs sold one pair of shoes to everyone then went bankrupt because they ran out of customers to sell to. The Crocs were too resistant.

2. Sell Once Knowing You Will Sell Many Times

Food and clothes, for example, will never stop selling because everyone needs them regardless of the state of the economy. From my perspective, they’re the best products to sell. It’s easy to differentiate yourself and build your own brand, and there are myriad ways to segment your audience.

The same is true for energy (gas, electricity, etc), communication services (phone data), transportation (cars, airlines), RE (people need a place to live in), etc.

3. Rent Out

A friend of mine bought an RV and rents it out on Airbnb. Renting out stuff is the low-IQ way of getting rich.

It entails:

1. Investing in an asset.
2. Renting it out.

OR

1. Buy low
2. Sell high

Eg: real estate. RE is the industry that constantly produces the most millionaires, simply because it’s stupid.

If you don’t have hundreds of thousands of € of capital to invest in RE or RVs, you can always rent out cheaper stuff like bikes (Swapfiets), motorbikes, kayaks, etc.

Companies make millions out of renting planes, cars, and even, people!

I once interviewed for a financial consultancy that had over 1400 consultants (estimated revenue: €134,400,000 yearly).

When I asked about the structure of the company, I was told it was a family business.

Oh my.

4. Subscriptions

Investors love subscription businesses because they assume customers never cancel them which creates automatic revenue ad vitam eternam.

That’s not true. People do cancel them.

Nonetheless, subscription remains a solid business model.

I am not a fan personally because they’re not critical businesses like food, clothing, communication, and transportation.

But plenty of people have made lots of money off them.

Putting it All Together

You have three types of goods that you can sell in three to four different ways which means you have at least nine combinations of different businesses.

E. Ways to Earn Money That Aren’t Real Businesses

So far, every type of business we’ve seen entailed the production of something.

The hairdresser cuts your hair, the farmer grows food, and the teacher teaches.

The genius of the free market system is that people transact freely and willingly.

If you open a bakery and I buy bread from you, we’ll each get what we want from the other – you will get money and I will get bread.

These are the real “capitalist” ways of earning money because they make society richer thanks to everyone’s production of something. They are win-win transactions.

Then you have a bunch of transaction types that are either lose-lose (Eg: stealing) or lose-win (poker).

If we play poker, and I win the game, I will definitely be richer, but you won’t because I’ll have taken all of your money without producing anything for you in return.

Lose-lose or win-lose ways of earning money are banned in a lot of cultures because they contribute to their poverty rather than their enrichment.

Needless to say, you should never get into these activities if you hope to be rich – but you can be an enabler.

These activities are:

• Gambling: never be the gambler; be the casino.
• Poker: don’t play poker; organize the games.
• Trading: don’t trade the market; be the trading platform.
• Stealing
• Having a job: don’t look for a job; look for employees.
• Printing money.

3. The Customers Way to Think About Business

The customers way to think about business comes down to identifying a group of people you’d like to sell to.

You have four main categories of customers, and then an infinity of categories under them.

1. People (B2C): a B2C company sells to people, private individuals like you and I. Eg: supermarkets. “People” can be further segmented based on gender, age, religion, social class, geography, net worth, aspiration, IQ, etc. I segmented them based on their net worth below:
   • Rich people: a distinctive sector catering exclusively to rich people is the luxury industry. You have luxury categories for anything nowadays, from food to kitchenware to electronics to dating apps to Uber. Selling to rich people is always a good idea because they have money and are easily identifiable because there aren’t many of them. But whatever you’re selling must be good enough that it justifies the price. Bread in Switzerland is not just more expensive; it also tastes better.
   • The middle class: the middle class makes up the customers everyone fights to sell to because it’s the most obvious demographic. Since most people don’t know any rich person, they hardly ever think about catering to them.
   • The poor people: I’ve always thought it was a terrible idea to sell to poor people because they either don’t pay or don’t buy. But after witnessing the success of Temu, I changed my mind. You can get rich selling to poor people.
   • Other ways to segment: ethnicity, religion, political orientation, love orientation, health, status, height (short people are more likely to buy status goods to compensate for their height), professions, etc.
2. Businesses (B2B): B2B means that your company sells exclusively to other companies. Eg: Airbus. Airbus sells planes to airlines.
3. Consumer-to-consumer (C2C): that’s when an individual sells to another individual. Eg: you sell your bike on Facebook marketplace. It’s only for small or rare transactions because you need a business if you want to start selling stuff repeatedly.
4. Business-to-governments (B2G): B2G companies sell things like weapons.

Segmenting your customers means choosing a specific niche of people to sell to.

DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE THE POWER OF A NICHE. A lot of people think that niching down means restricting your market which will earn you less money.

But it’s wrong. It just means that your offer will be more targeted, hence that customers will be more likely to buy.

You’ll make more money selling makeup to upper-middle-class blond girls who play tennis between 18 and 25 than you will by selling “makeup to women”.

4. The Marketing Way to Think About Products

The marketing way to think about products comes down to looking at your product from a marketing perspective.

For example:

• A product that exists for X segment could be adapted for Y segment. Eg: 30 years ago, no one was selling skin creams for men.
• A product that isn’t branded could become so. Eg: LiquidDeath made sparkling water fashionable.
• A monopoly needs to be disrupted. Eg: Warby Parker. The founders noticed that the eyewear industry was a monopoly of Luxottica.

5. The Business Needs Way to Think About Products

Building a business is about solving a problem (or at minima, delivering value) and the best way to find a problem is to build a business.

What?

When I built my e-com shop, I stumbled upon hundreds of problems that had no solutions. I had to fight my urge to jump onto other ideas every day because I kept on finding new problems to solve aka biz opportunities.

This is how Ryan Peterson built Flexport. He was running an e-commere company in the early 2000s and found it so hard to track his imports that he started Flexport.

Same story for Shippo.

Sometimes, it’s worth starting a “fake business” to find good business ideas.

6. The E-Commerce Way to Think About Products

The big upside of e-commerce is that your market is as big as you want it to be.

The big downside of e-commerce is that you have to ship stuff.

And shipping is expensive, up to 33% of the final price.

Resultantly, you want to sell something that’s light, small, and with high-enough margins that can absorb the cost of shipping.

The best goods to sell online are probably watches.

Watches are small and light and you can sell them for anywhere between €100 to €20,000 if you want to.

Shipping will cost you no more than 5% of the total price.

I asked chatGPT for products that are great to sell online.

Funny as I didn’t even mention watches and yet, it’s the first coming up!

1. Smartwatches
2. High-end earbuds
3. Portable SSDs
4. Luxury watches
5. Designer sunglasses
6. Fine jewelry (rings, necklaces)
7. VR headsets
8. Professional camera lenses
9. Graphic cards (GPUs)
10. High-end mobile phones
11. Specialty headphones
12. Portable projectors
13. High-end fountain pens
14. Premium wristbands or straps
15. Precious metal coins
16. Smart home security devices
17. High-end perfumes
18. Designer wallets
19. Compact binoculars
20. Limited-edition coffee beans
21. Digital drawing tablets
22. Organic supplements
23. High-quality protein powders
24. Custom mechanical keyboard parts
25. Vintage wines or spirits
26. High-end leather belts
27. Small designer bags
28. High-end skincare products
29. Compact kitchen gadgets (espresso makers)
30. Vintage coins
31. Luxury lighters
32. High-quality saffron or spices
33. Designer ties or bowties
34. High-end silk scarves
35. Nutritional supplements (omega-3s, vitamins)
36. Limited edition board games
37. Gourmet chocolates
38. Specialty tea blends
39. High-quality camera filters
40. Professional video microphones
41. Limited edition artwork prints
42. Premium power banks
43. Small electronic repair kits
44. High-end hair styling tools
45. Portable massage devices
46. Premium travel-size toiletries
47. Organic essential oils
48. High-end hiking or trekking gear (knives, tools)
49. High-quality mini drones
50. Designer clothing (shirts, dresses)
51. Specialty pet accessories
52. Premium skincare tools (face rollers)
53. Small-batch gourmet snacks
54. High-quality cigar accessories (cutters, humidors)
55. Designer notebooks or planners
56. Portable luxury camping gear (compact tents, cookware)

Big items like furniture or lawn mowing machines, or ladders (almost bought a ladder online once) are not good products to sell online.

Unless you sell B2B.

7. Other Ways to Find Products to Sell

A. Pay Attention to Your Needs and Desires

We’ve already touched on this but it’s worth repeating.

I was looking today to buy high-quality, leather-made shoes that would last at least three years and cost anywhere between €200 to €300.

I could not find any. The shoes I found either cost €50 (no thanks) or €500 (no thanks).

Additionally, there are no real shoe brands that I know of that make high-quality shoes for men for an honest price.

The only high-quality shoes I ever bought were Paul Smith’s shoes on sale for €190 down from €250.

They lasted three years, almost four. THAT’s what I want.

As far as I am concerned, it doesn’t exist. Shoes either last ten years or ten months.

B. Just Research, Dude

There are a lot of different ways to do research.

1. Listicles: start with online listicles. Simply search for “10 profitable e-commerce websites” or “the biggest Shopify shops” or “the most successful e-commerce companies” or “up-and-coming brands”. See what products they sell, their branding, which CMS they use, etc.
2. Trends: search for trends in the wellness, food, fashion, makeup, supplements, or any other industries. You can use Google, Perplexity, TikTok, Pinterest, Google Trends, and then access Glimpse or Exploding Topics to either validate those trends or look for more.
3. Search per product: let’s say you want to sell snacks. Search the new up-and-coming snack trends and see if you can’t add your own touch to it (healthy, sustainable, catering to a specific audience, etc).
4. Search per country: koreanskincare.nl simply imported Korean skincare into Europe. Take the plane to find out what’s available in a foreign country that isn’t locally sold yet. I have yet to find empanadas in Belgium.
5. Sector: search for sectors expanding quickly (at the moment, it’s the meeting apps to find friends like TimeLeft).
6. Social media: Once I checked out the Dutch rain jacket brand Cortazu, Instagram began to show me other jacket brands. I also discovered Mammut by googling “best rain jacket”.
7. Ads: An ad is a signal that someone is selling something. TikTok and Meta give you free access to their ad libraries, which is insane.
8. Media: I am obsessed with new startups selling new products. They always give interesting ideas.

8. What if Others Are Already Doing It?

THIS IS A GOOD THING, IT MEANS THERE IS A MARKET FOR IT.

Did you know that there were 7,644,677 fashion companies on the planet?

7,644,677.

Do you think there’s space for one more?

Probably.

On the other hand, there are only two operating systems for phones in the world: iOS, and Android.

Do you think it’s a good idea to create a third one?

Probably not.

Samsung and Microsoft tried and failed.

The fact that other people are doing what you want to do is a good thing. Just do it slightly differently.

9. Anything Else?

• When a shop runs big discounts (50% and more), it means they earn high margins on their products.
• In retail, the luxury industry is the fastest way to earn a lot of money as retail prices are often 10, 20, or 100 times greater than what the item costs to produce.
• Beware that package and return costs must also be considered when calculating potential profits.

Conclusion

Five years ago, I was obsessed with finding something new. I started plenty of very hard companies (apps, marketplaces, etc) and all of them failed.

Today, I am obsessed with finding something people will buy.

This is not the same.

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