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How to Find Market Demand to Forecast Your Sales

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By Sam Nguyen

CEO Avada Commerce

Drive 20-40% of your revenue with Avada
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Here come lots of economic concepts controlling the way you are doing your business. Some of them simply work in the same background when you run your business successfully. Some can ask for a more hands-on approach. Market demand is then in this category, and every business owner must acknowledge to control their business effectively.

In this article, you will learn about How to Find Market Demand to Forecast Your Sales

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What is market demand?

Definition of market demand

Market demand can indicate the requirements for a specific item and who is interested in buying that. This is decided by how ready your customers become to spend an amount of money on certain services or goods. Since the market demand can increase, the price will do the same. As the demand decreases, the price will somehow go down too. Market demand is known as the total of what each one in a particular industry will desire and aid you in guiding merchants when you tend to build up an eCommerce website.

definition of market demand
definition of market demand

Examples of market demand

Test market demand at local levels

Shopify merchant Woodlot is the first example of market demand. It is a lifestyle as well as a body care brand related to roots in Vancouver. As Sonia Chhinji and Fouad Farraj would like to strive for a new line of candle items, they already knew it was their hometown that could become the perfect testing place to see whether there remained market demand and what demand would be. Both are at local and even global levels.

They did research local neighborhoods and ended up with a menu of shops they wished to get targeted for the wholesalers, and its inbound leads started to trickle in. This first requirement assisted them in getting the venture validated and have robust markets besides Vancouver identified. Additionally, it helps forecast requirements for their general business.

Measure the requirements of the market on eCommerce channels

Both Cinnamon and Jason Miles’ Liberty Jane Clothing brand was developed in the very first-hand market research. They just began to design and make doll clothes, along with testing ideas. They then took ideas outside to help take better ideas of what market requirements can look like in the real world.

After that, finally, they got bigger waters tested to begin to sell on eBay. After 18 months, they started to publish patterns as extra revenue. Up to know, they have made use of that market demand to make an ideal eCommerce business bringing out around USD 600,000 annually.

Find out an item with stable market demand

While there are several seasonal items and they are witnessing the fluctuating requirement, the others are level. Another good example is matcha, and they are among reasons for you to get Shopify experimented with selling matcha online. And in three days, the store took over USD 900 in revenue. You can take a closer look at Google Trends to check the item is emerging in popularity and paired with other market research to get the demand validated. Since matcha is not a seasonal item, the store could make sure that the demand could stay steady.

How to find the market demand curve?

Before going further, let’s figure out the market demand curve and how to find it. The market demand curve is considered as a visualization of the requirement, which depends on the product’s price. More importantly, you can map all of the personal demand inputs into a line graph to generate market demand curves.

For example, at USD10/latte, the quantity which is required by each person in the market will be about 150 lattes daily. At USD4/lattes, the quantity demanded by people in the market will be 1,000 lattes each day. As you can see, the quantity curve will provide you with the quantity required by individuals in the market for each pricing point. Then, the market demand curve will be graphed and downward slopping since when the price is increasing, the quantity demand will decrease. The market demand curve can be offered as a schedule, known as in table format.

To decide the market demand curve of specific cargo, you will need to sum all of everyone’s demand curves for the cargos in this market. And here is the algebraic equation for this market demand.

The quantity demanded (Q) is a function of price (P), and it sums all of the personal demand curves (q), which are a price function. Those subscripts one through n will represent all the individuals in the market.

How to find market demand for eCommerce business?

As you can see, while the 1:1 conversation with a real person will probably give you tons of helpful insights, there might be no way to get extra data, then making the whole process streamlined and valuable. And search engines and social media are the two perfect ways to help you find market demand for eCommerce business.

How to find market demand
How to find market demand

Make use of search engine optimization tools

Why do you need to take notice of your SEO tools? The Keyword Surfer is known as free Google Chrome add-ons from Surfer SEO that allows you to take insights directly from SERPs, known as search engine result pages with login required or no dashboard. SEO tools provide you with keyword suggestions, search volume, and organic traffic for all ranked pages. Even you can get lots of ideas before getting it doubled by the search trends.

Trends’ inspiration by getting keywords, topics, or phrases typed to check how regularly users search related terms. Also, you are allowed to filter by country, time period, and city. It will inform you where these searches are trending now too.

Trending countries and specific cities that search for your promising items offer you insight into the interest’s distribution. They indicate the insight where you had better concentrate on your marketing efforts and decide to move forward.

Currently, you can refer to Google Keyword Planner, and you will have to open Google Ads accounts; however, it is free to that. Generating accounts will be much helpful as you are running your eCommerce business.

Keyword Planner lets you search for many keywords to decide the average search volume each month on Google for the relevant search terms. In case you type “iPhone accessories,” Keyword Planner will give you the full list of the same keywords that can aid in serving you for item ideas and validation for the market demand. You should bear in mind that fewer searches will inform less demand.

For your market demand research, you can use targeting settings to take data from the intended market. You might wish to guarantee that you are targeting the right countries you plan to sell to them.

In the list of results, there remain three things you should pay attention to:

  • Long-tail keywords: Long-tail keywords are known as keywords that are created from three and other more words. You should not just look for long-tail keywords and long tails relevant to your niche and products. For instance, “HDMI to lightning cable” can end up with iPhone researches.

  • High search volume: This matter can become subjective. But, you would like to look for long-tail keywords that can own decent search volumes monthly. Also, higher search volume means that many people look for your perfect products. This can begin to provide you with a very good understanding of how the demand for your items is.

  • Competition: This problem can be related to how many people are bidding actively for and strongly competing to get queries that appeared to those keywords. The low competition means that it could become easier to get those keywords ranked and cheaper to buy ads accordingly to those keywords.

There will be a maximum of relevant keywords in the number monthly you are recommended; however, you need to to realize the current potential. It is relative to other items, along with its keywords. Even though Google can see its share of queries and traffic, it is the place to take a lesson about the market demand and enter social listening.

Make use of search engine optimization tools
Make use of search engine optimization tools

Make use of social listening tools

Social listening can get aggregating data from social media conversations on industries, brands, and products involved. There are many tools that let you filter conversations, pull out summarized analytics reports, and target certain geographic locations you can take advantage of in combination with other data. Every tool can work differently; however, they accomplish a similar thing in researching market demand.

More importantly, you can type some keywords; then the tool will try to pull put social media posts mentioning or become relevant to those keywords. Additionally, you can check what sentiments are where everyone talks about it and what they are trying to say.

However, market demand is more than calculating the interest in an item. It is about making out how much an item your market can buy at what the price points are.

Make use of social listening tools
Make use of social listening tools

Why is market demand important to your business?

As you might know, market demand can get unstable during the time, and it does most of the time. This can be owing to various elements, and some can be seasonal and predictable. Other can be out of control, including natural disaster and a pandemic. As more and more people would like a certain kind of product, there will be an increase in your market demand. Take note that prices can go up no matter what is going on, and when lots of people want it, they are ready to pay for it. But as the market demand goes down, the price will follow the scenario. It will become more complicated than that; however, you have to get well with it.

It is critical to take market demand into consideration for any business; nevertheless, when you mention the development of the product. You might not want to invest your money in items nobody buys. On the other hand, you also need to make sure that you have enough to serve your customer base well. Out-of-stocks are known as costly problems and can ruin your opportunity to follow new lifelong customers. Learn more about how to hide out-of-stocks products from your collections on Shopify.

You want to know how to find out the market demand for your business operation. If it is run inappropriately, it can affect your business. The predictions you are making will impact your expenditure, cash flow, margin, and many more. Incorrect demand can jeopardize your business, which spends money on the very wrong way. It also brings out domino effects on other factors of your own operations.

For instance, you can guess how much requirement there is for your item. And as a result, the goods you are going to sell are overproduced, then you can receive the surplus for your inventory. This will cut down your cash flow before leaving you with dead stock behind. This can lead to the fact that you need to liquidate and sell at a loss. Your demand will also be underestimated, and you can make customers upset, then leaving them to your competitors or pay for premium to strive to restock as soon as possible.

Further readings

Final words

It is amazing to get excited about your business idea. Also, the viability of your items can be analyzed logically and objectively by deciding if there is any market demand or not. As you know market demand well, it is much easier and simpler to forecast accurately so that you will not have to purchase so much or little for the inventory. Furthermore, there remain lots of intangibles to find market demand. Although demand forecasting is not known as an exact science, you can help your business with everything, consisting of pricing and production, if you can tell me a bit. We hope that with our complete guide on How To Find Market Demand To Forecast Your Sales, you can easily find your market demand and prepare for a good direction for your company.


Sam Nguyen is the CEO and founder of Avada Commerce, an e-commerce solution provider headquartered in Singapore. He is an expert on the Shopify e-commerce platform for online stores and retail point-of-sale systems. Sam loves talking about e-commerce and he aims to help over a million online businesses grow and thrive.