I remember reading an article a long time ago...

wait here it is:

https://www.cringely.com/2009/03/14/parrot-secrets/

This guy had found a niche for an online business.

I can't help but wonder how many competing cookie-cutter copies of the businesses were started the day that article was published.

Actually sometimes a dropshipper will be willing to say what sold really well last year (if they're seeing poor sales on that item during the current year).

My sister does this and she was a hairdresser so she mostly operates in the beauty product sector but also has had a lot of luck with things from IKEA this year.

It's not hard to figure that out, make bunch of fake Facebook accounts in different age groups and disable ad blocker, you'll get bombarded from ads on store.

Then go to that advertisers profile and checkout their all running ads on their page, you can easily Google how.

The generic product area like clothing or whatever is probably ok. Got to protect the secret sauce though.

Yes that's why you need to keep spying on competitors using fake fb accounts and establish a protocol of quickly testing and dropping the duds without investing feelings into it and scaling only the winner.

Most newbies fall for sunk cost fallacy.

Margins on electronic components like resistors are huge. But you have to sell loads of them to make some money.

So a 60-100% margin tells us nothing.

Actually many times I sell products which are available elsewhere for 1/2 the price like on Amazon or wallmart but it doesn't stop people from US buying those products. Not everyone has time or smartness to acquire perfect price info of the market.