There are many factors for e-commerce success, but most boil down to one thing: knowing your target audience. If you know what your customers are looking for — and you deliver it — your Shopify store stands to make a lot of money and build a loyal following. Like it or not, trends play a big part in what consumers want at any given time of year. How can you find trends for print on demand items?
How To Find Trending Products for Print on Demand Stores
Sniffing out PoD trends requires you to be part digital detective and part social media surfer.
1. Use Google Trends for Inspiration
Google Trends is a powerful tool that gives you insights into the top searches for different topics, products, and niches. Considering that a whopping 49% of shoppers start their buyer’s journey with Google, checking out what people are searching for pays off. Weekly search results are great for getting your creative juices and entrepreneurial energy going:
- Open Google Trends and click on the “Trending Now” tab.
- Select the location you want to look at, such as the United States or a specific state.
- Click on the calendar drop-down and select “Past 7 days.”
- Click the “All Categories” filter and choose the category of products you sell on Shopify (e.g. beauty and fashion, health, technology, or shopping).
- Order the results by “Relevance” or “Search volume” to see the most promising items for your store.
- To dig down a layer, click on any of the smaller categories under “Trend Breakdown.”
When we performed this search for technology trends, the results showed “Airpods Pro 2,” “Apple Watch,” “Fitbit,” and “gaming laptops” as high-volume searches. Because these short-term trends are often linked to seasonal events, such as Black Friday, they’re mainly useful for knowing which items in your store to promote. They can also give you ideas for general topics to research more.
2. Perform In-Depth Research With Google Trends
Now, let’s switch Google Trends tabs to the “Explore” category at the top of the page. This side of the tool lets you look at trends going back as far as you want. This is where you’re going to do your deep dive into trending print on demand items you can sell.
Let’s go through it one step at a time:
- Where it says “Add a search term,” type a general category of products you want to learn more about or your store’s niche.
- For this example, we chose “cowboy boots.”
- Using the drop-down filters, set your location, trend period (e.g., “Past 12 months” or “Past 90 days”), and product category.
- Narrow down trends further by targeting “Web Search” or focusing on direct “Google Shopping” products.
- Look at “Related topics” to see trending search categories or “Related queries” for specific trending searches.
- Click on the search category or query you’re interested in.
Google Trends shows you a graph that outlines when the trend started, how long it has stayed popular, and whether interest is trending upward or dropping like a rock. Our search for cowboy boots revealed two interesting tidbits.
First, “women’s cowboy boots” was only trending seasonally, and only in certain states. Second, searches for “ostrich leather” were rising significantly around the country. Digging more into ostrich leather boots and accessories could be promising.
3. Investigate Successful Stores and Niche Competitors
It’s time to slap on your digital “night-vision goggles” and do some spy work. All’s fair in love, war, and e-commerce, and that includes checking out trending products that are making loads of money for other successful PoD stores.
The always-free but time-consuming way to handle detective work is to visit competing websites directly. Look for any products marked “trending,” “popular,” or “hot.”
A faster option involves search engine optimization tools. We like Moz Keyword Explorer (mostly free) and Ahrefs Site Explorer (paid). Here’s how to use Moz for trend research:
- Enter the competition’s website URL. For this example, we chose Design by Humans, a custom t-shirt shop. The URL was “https://www.designbyhumans.com/”
- Under the Top Ranking Keywords section, click on “See all ranking keywords.”
- Order the list by “Monthly Volume.”
- In our example, some top search terms for the Design by Humans site were “anime art,” “anime clothes,” “cool hoodies,” and “dog shirts.”
- Click on any of the keywords to see related terms and get more ideas for trending products.
Moz is free to use, but you can only perform a few domain searches per day.
4. Ask Your Friends
Don’t underestimate the power of your IRL friends or social media friends list to let you in on trending products that you haven’t heard about yet. People love to talk about cool new items they’ve heard about, seen around, or watched on TikTok. At the very least, you can get some ideas to follow up on.
5. Run an Etsy Search
Even though having a Shopify site is a better way to make money with print on demand, you can still turn to Etsy when it comes to product research. Etsy doesn’t let you see seller sales numbers or top items directly, but you can search for items in your niche. Pay special attention to anything marked “Popular now” or “Bestseller.”
When we opened up Etsy, the first thing we noticed was that the search bar showed “Personalized barware” and “Personalized serving board” in the top searches of the week, indicating trends. We wanted to check a different niche, so we typed in “women’s gloves.”
From the get-go, we saw a bunch of trending “bestseller” products that would be perfect for our hypothetical store going into winter:
- Cashmere fingerless gloves
- Genuine sheepskin hand-stitched gloves
- Convertible mittens
- Alpaca individual fingerless gloves
- Women’s tactical gloves
In just five minutes, we already had some great ideas to make our store stand out with our target audience.
An Easier Way To Find Trends for Print on Demand
We didn’t want to mention this solution too early, otherwise, our article would only have one subheading: Use ZenDrop To Find Trends for Print on Demand.
Shopify app integrations like Zendrop take the legwork (fingerwork?) out of looking for trends. Instead, you can see the top sellers and highest-rated dropshipping and print on demand products in countless categories, quickly and easily. Check out Zendrop and other amazing print on demand must-haves right away.