1 Mega Store vs Hundreds of Niche Stores

Operations may be similar because when you really get down to it you are really just dealing with a page, so whether that page has the same vs a different name, operations ie, quality and customer service still has to be up to par.

Your overall positioning strategy has to also be taken into account...a lot of it has to do with what you are trying to achieve.

One large same niche site.

Niche Store

Pros
High converting
Higher profit margin
Less risk (spread over multiple industries, multiple suppliers, multiple hosting companies etc etc.)
Sell in many industries

Cons
Cost to develop many sites (Hosted solutions are cheaper upfront, but cost more long term)
SEO efforts dispursed

Mega Store
Reverse the above.

(Disclaimer: I favor niche stores )

Niche stores. The tighter the niche, the greater the chance you have of dominating that niche. But as said, maintaining lots of niche sites can be quite costly in the way of domain names, especially. I mean you don't want to brand your store with cheap.info domains.

I recommmend sevarl, not just one big one. The products should be related. You should not cover all bases with one store. You are never going to be an Amazon, you should specialize relatively.

I've owned and own both types of stores and from my experience I can tell you that niche stores convert at a MUCH higher rate.

My shopping mall type sites still do well but not as well.

I think this is because when a buyer lands on my niche site they are getting exactly what they were searching for. It's right there, right in front of them. Then I give them a reason to buy it now. They can choose to purchase, or leave the site (no distractions).

On shopping mall types sites I may get a customer searching for one product who lands on my page, then sees a link to section of something else they might be interested in, then something else, then something else, the something else. I used to think this would lead to more sales but when I track my visitor flow in analytics I can see it leads to a lot of clicking around and then exiting.

My goal is to give the customer exactly what they were searching for, with as little room for distractions as possible.

Find my store -> read my policies -> add to cart

Obviously, there ARE ways to do mega sites the right way (just look at Amazon and Wayfair) but for the average person/company the costs of doing it right far outweigh the rewards of building multiple niche sites.

I prefer 1 store and focus on getting traffic to just one place. It is less work to keep track of then several stores. My coach also agrees with this strategy.

Hundreds on niche sites - HANDS down.

This is because of Google's relevancy constriction.

If you have toasters and post-it notes on the same website, they are very far in the 'related keywords' realm.

Very far away.

And the further you are away from a relevancy standpoint, the harder it is to rank content-wise.

Google ranks via popularity and relevancy, with relevancy gaining its foothold even more after Panda/Penguin.

With a 'mega store' selling whatever haphazardly, you're not giving your site any sort of angle with unique, related content, and Google is going to hate that.

I have experience in niche sites.

Not mega sites -- because those don't work.

I go for niche sites. More focused and targeted and you are giving ease to the visitor. Less distraction. Focused. Leads to higher conversion.

It's not 2006 (or even 2010)... niche stores are NOT a viable solution any longer (when starting from scratch).

The Google webmaster team located in Zurich, specifically stated that having multiple websites will incur SEO-related penalties. Sites like Amazon.com or "large providers" will be rewarded and receive higher visibility comparatively.

Those are Google's words, not mine.

Although it makes sense that niche site would perform better, it's simply not true. Large providers with highly-targeted "inner pages" or subdivisions, so to speak, will dominate the future.

Anyone can create a 3-page WP site overnight, and that's exactly why niche sites are penalized, low quality, and full of bottom feeders.

It worked better for me when I combined all my niche stores into 1 big store. I had category landing pages, so I could still promote the main site to specific niches that would show the categories related to those niches. The biggest benefit of the 1 site was that it built trust for all the products.

Once I got a customer to buy from one category, I could get them to buy from all the categories. With the separate sites, a customer who checks out on one site only trusts that site. You have to build trust separately.

The other advantage was customers would place one order instead of 3 or 4 smaller orders on separate sites. When they were quoted 3 or 4 shipping prices, my 1 price would also come in lower. That could make the entire order cheaper, even though the item prices were actually higher. Plus, the bigger order made it easier for me to ship anyway. It was also easier to get customers to just add that extra item to their order since I have it without them price shopping each item.

Finally, promotions seemed to work out better. When I sent out free gift cards or even just emailed coupons, there was a big enough selection that people would order way more than the gift card was worth. Same with the coupons, 10% of the entire order would encourage customers to place larger orders to save the most money. By having products in several niches that they would buy, made it easier for them to get the larger order.

Other benefits were just having 1 name. The merchant account used to accept credit cards only need the main name. I didn't need a merchant account for each site, or to do the big warning during checkout that says even though you are on the XYZ site, your credit card will be billed as ABC. Customized stationary and boxes only needed the 1 name and domain. Customer support was outsourced to a single phone number without having to ask which site the caller used, there's only the one.

Finally, reviews increased since each review was from the same store. If I promoted 10 category landing pages to niches, and I got 1 order from each, I would end up with 10 reviews for the site. A site with 10 5-star reviews got more attention than 10 sites with 1 5-star review. It was really increasing the social acceptance of the site.

The big downfall, though, is emailing new items/promotions. Instead of making a campaign and sending it out to everyone, there needs to be several campaigns targeting each category. Then some logic is needed to categorize previous customers and then send the campaign relevant to them. Otherwise, you send them promotions on products they don't care about and ultimately unsubscribe. For the most part, this isn't all the complicated. It becomes harder when customers cross over into several categories. Your choices are then to randomize which category they are in so they get a little of everything, or make more campaigns that actually mixes categories together.

My advice is, don't put all your eggs in one basket.

I would rather make $10,000 consistently from multiple sources than $15,000 from one.

Thanks for all the replies guys, I am sided with 1 Mega Niche store

Before the thread I was considering a walmart type mega store (don't laugh, i know I am new to this forum, but I am not new to the game) but after reading all that has been said, I decided to combine the best of two worlds, and that is high conversions + big assortment of products.

I have experience managing multiple websites (ecommerce and others) and to be honest, its too much hassle and sometimes I get caught managing rather than expanding. Shifting focus between different project dilutes quality of work. That is something I do not want and I believe building a branded store is a better solution.

Niche stores take up too much time with accounting and management from the sheer fact of having to run multiple sites. And as some of you mentioned, the trust that you accumulate towards a brand will trickle down on all your other offerings within that brand.

The choice is clear for me. Thanks again.

Niche Store:
More fast on building until and not hard to SEO. Just concern on Research keyword to get high profitable Niche.

Mega Store:
Hard to optimization. But if you success to passed it, you can get more high profit

I vote for mega store. Here is one of my site Zen Cart!, The Art of E-commerce

One large store! Why

1. You have to market one site, not ten.
2. Easier to remember one name than many.
3. As a customer, I want everything under one roof.
4. You ll have to build one brand only, so customer loyalty will increase.