Product Research

Hi All,

I'm fairly new to the forum's but have had a lot of great answers so far so thought I would ask one that's been rattling around in my head for a while regarding e-commerce.

I'm a fan of online retail and have a goal of setting up my own small, niche product online site. I really want to stay away from selling on amazon, ebay, etsy as I feel it kills customer retention (they own your customers and can essentially follow up advertising for your competitors) and it's kind of fun being your own entity for the amount of marketing activities you can take on.

So I guess my first question is: is it feasible to earn money on your own site?

My second is: How do you go about product research?

Right now I've been using Moz Pro for keyword research. Basically all I'm looking at is packages of keywords related to my product and the ease at which I could rank top 10 for them. I then look at competitors sites and see if I could out market them. Finally look at google trends for both the stability and growth of the product.

Thanks in advance!