The following are several effective methods for judging products that sellers can use in product positioning or creativity.
1 Questionnaire
(1) Difficulty: Simple.
(2) A good questionnaire for verifying a product should cover the following points:
● Ask key questions to the respondents.
● Do consumers like this product or concept? Why do they like it? Why don’t they like it?
● Some questions need to be set to assess purchase intention. Many people (especially familiar people) sometimes respond positively to questionnaires, but we must grasp the key points and understand whether consumers will really pay for the product.
(3) Questionnaire tools.
● Google Customer Surveys or Survata tools can create questionnaires and distribute them to defined target audiences, but a small fee will be charged.
● Liwu Blog can creatively design seller forms.
● Typeform is a good online questionnaire platform.
2 Pre-sale on social media and email
Pre-sale on social media and email is a very clever way to test a product. This method does not take up a lot of money or a lot of time.
(1) Difficulty: Easy.
(2) Case: A seller named Noah Kagan used email pre-sale to test his product at the beginning. The seller wanted to verify the concept of his beef jerky product subscription service, so he used his social account and private email to contact acquaintances and friends who might be interested and asked them if they were interested in buying. He sent an email to his acquaintances and friends.
After that, the seller posted his product information on his personal Facebook and expressed the hope to get some feedback.
Finally, the seller used Facebook’s Search Graph to find and contact some friends who all liked beef jerky.
The seller’s purpose was very clear, and he received orders worth $3,030 within 24 hours. This method successfully verified his concept.
3 Create Crowdfunding
A very popular product verification method in recent years is to set up a crowdfunding campaign on a website, such as Indiegogo and Kickstarter.
Creating a crowdfunding campaign not only verifies the product, but also raises funds in advance. However, crowdfunding is suitable for products that are fresh, interesting or innovative. Therefore, simply reselling another brand’s product or importing products from overseas will generally not be successful. Using crowdfunding to verify a product is more difficult than the previously discussed methods, and a lot of work needs to be done in the early stages.
Most crowdfunding websites require sellers to have relatively mature products before conducting crowdfunding activities.