Before you start making a bundle of money with the online business, you have to figure out what to sell by using a product search. Dropshipping is a good way to start your eCommerce journey for its special features – no storage nor fulfillment needed – but it requires just as much the effort of product research, if not more.
The one thing that experts stress if you want to make huge money as a dropshipper is market evaluation. So it becomes absolutely crucial to do proper product research before diving into the next level.
However, deciding on the bankable product is not as overwhelming as it seems, with the proper methods and positive attitude, it might actually be fun. In this article, we’ll introduce three ways and three tools for your business to soar high.
3 Free Product Research Methods
#1 Amazon Movers & Shakers
Among all online business modes, Amazon may come off as too taxing to most people, but the platform itself is an excellent tool for product research, it provides many valuable ranking systems for buyers to narrow down their shopping choices which is also a gold mine for sellers to get product inspirations. Amazon Movers & Shakers is a list of products that have been selling a lot in the past 24 hours which is automatically updated hourly by Amazon.
How to leverage this list? When you land on this page you can choose a category from the left and dive in. The trick is that many hot-selling products with a careless brand name and gibberish in the product description are normally from Chinese sellers and most of them can be found on AliExpress or other Chinese dropshipping supply platforms (like us). If these products are already selling well on Amazon, imagine what would happen if you take the same products and create a good-looking Shopify store and brand it? The money will just roll in!
Side tip: It’s a good idea to study Amazon products with a handy tool – Jungle Scout. Jungle Scout can reveal accurate data of any product, including sales amount, reviews and ratings. However, Jungle Scout does not have a free version, the basic pricing plan charges a $29 monthly fee.
#2 AliExpress Dropshipping Center
AliExpress has an advantage in the dropshipping supply chain for its massive collection of suppliers. That is why they keep investing in creating tools and services for dropshippers such as the well-known AliExpress Dropshipping Center.
As the name implies, this free tool allows you to find trending products on AliExpress. You can search for items by typing their names, uploading pictures, or just simply scrolling down the ranking list. If you’re not sure what you’re looking for yet, you can also browse hot selling products by category. It’s a great way to discover your dropshipping niche too.
AliExpress Dropshipping Center enables dropshippers to filter products by price, shipping time & price, and product images. It’s a really powerful tool to track down products, especially if you combine it with some product analysis extensions such as DSers and Topdsers (add from the sidebar on the left of the dashboard).
#3 Go Down the Rabbit Hole
You can start the rabbit hole method with any marketplace such as eBay, Amazon, Etsy… Just click on any product that you are interested in and scroll down to the related recommendation area, there will be a lot of other similar products waiting for you. Spend some time focusing on the trace, put your phone away and just keep going down the rabbit hole till you find something that meets your needs.
3 Product Research Tools
The absolute best way to do product research, unfortunately, is still using the paid service from research tools. You get what you paid for, not saying the free methods are bad, but if you include the time and energy spent on researching products in the investment, using some tools for assistance might be a cheaper choice than doing it for free.
Especially, if your business is already starting to take off, below are the 3 research tools you gotta try.
#1 FindNiche
No doubt that FindNiche has a very powerful database, it covers more than 100M products from AliExpress and over 25M products from Shopify. If you are a Shopify store owner, FindNiche would be a suitable choice for your business as it provides many in-depth data of top-ranking Shopify stores such as their URL, category, target country, ads shown, and the social media reaches.
The cool thing about FindNiche is that their algorithm feeds users with a list of the 20 best products to sell on Shopify and the most profitable dropshipping niches on a daily basis, which is helpful for dropshippers to stay on the edge with the trend.
Pricing: the price of FindNiche is $9 / $59 / $99 per month, it now offers a three-day trial for $1 for the elite and premium plans.
#2 SaleSource
You can use SaleSource to analyze Shopify products, Shopify stores, and dropshipping suppliers. With its Shopify products analytics, you can easily get the average selling price and product’s last launched date, which comes in handy when you need to decide whether a product is potential enough. The product overview function provides a generic synopsis of the product, like the data added, variants, and images that you can download.
Pricing: the price of SaleSource is not cheap, $49 / $179 / $399 monthly. In addition, a free trial that gives users full access to researching five products is available.
#3 Sell The Trend
Sell The Trend offers a series of comprehensive services, it has all the tools that you’ll ever need to find the winning products for your dropshipping store. If you are new to dropshipping, its 7-day trial could be a good choice for your business to get off the ground.
One of the most powerful features of Sell the Trend is called Nexus, the AI analysis tool that examines 26 data points for each competitor and product, providing powerful insights for dropshippers. It’s the primary product research resource that shows an incredible amount of information about items that are currently trending across multiple platforms.
Imagine what you can do with these:
- The number of AliExpress and Shopify stores that are already selling that item
- The selling price, cost, and profit margin for each product
- When an item was initially added to a Shopify store…
Pricing: the price of Sell The Trend is $39 per month, and there will be a two-month free discount if you pay for the yearly plan.
Wrap up
Product research is one of the most challenging steps as there are so many products to choose from, and the list is never-ending, which is also what makes the business so amazing – there’s always more than enough gold to go around for everyone as long as you finesse it right.
