How to do Product Research for Dropshipping? Expert Tips

Chris: Product is the king. This is where the real magic happens. If you have a great product and can get that product in front the right people, it will sell. Jessica: Jessica, Over the past year, I have asked numerous dropshippers earning six- or seven-figures to recommend high-potential products.

Chris : The product is the king. This is where the real magic happens. It will sell if you have a great product and put it in front of the right people.

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shopify dropshipping store set up

Jessica: Over the last year, I’ve asked countless six- and even seven-figure dropshippers to recommend high-potential products for new dropshippers to sell. Along the way, they’ve revealed their strategies for finding products to sell, validating new product ideas, identifying trustworthy suppliers and handling product saturation.

Many valuable tips and tricks for product research. You need to have value bombs if your business is in a hurry. This video contains the top 10 product research tips from professional dropshippers. Let’s start with tip number 10 on product research.

Facebook’s Algorithm can be trained

Jessica: Product research tip number 10. Scott Hilse describes how he trains Facebook’s algorithm to find him winning products.

Scott. This is how I found them. If you see a Facebook advertisement that mentions ecommerce, such as advertising a product or a service, you want to go in and click on it. Then you want to add the product to your cart and then you want to initiate checkout. Then, you can abandon the cart.

Facebook now thinks you are a viable customer for all of these ecommerce products. Your feed will then be full with these prime products. These are brand new. These products aren’t very popular, but I have seen two types of ads that are successful. These are going to be hot.

Jessica: That’s an incredible tip. But would I do that with every single product I see if I’m a new dropshipper? Do you set some criteria for an ad? If it gets a certain amount of engagement or likes, you then start following it?

Scott: It’s a good idea not to search for more than 100,000 views. This is usually the sweet spot.

Analyze Facebook Ads

Jessica In product research tip nine, Andreas & Alexander discuss how to analyze Facebook Ads in order to determine if a product is potential.

Andreas : I suggest that you look for products to sell. You can search Facebook for products. You can type “fitness”, “body” or another keyword, along with a small text portion like “get yours now” and “50% off”, to find many ads for different products. Then you will want to look at engagement. You can then look under engagement.

Then you’ll see that the product works. You can also open the store from the background. What’s the deal? What is the price? How did they do it? Then, do it again. Don’t copy. Yes, copying is forbidden. You can’t do it the same way, but you can do it better. Do it better than your competition. We’ll be able to find truly great products.

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Alexander: Make sure to verify the comments. If they are older than one year, it won’t work. It’s done. The ad will continue to run until they are either two days or one day old. He sells it online all the time. Yes.

Andreas : This is how we find new products every day.

Like Pages That Share Viral Video

Jessica: The next product research tip is that of the beast of electronic commerce, who shares his Facebook page to generate winning product ideas.

Harry: This is the most difficult thing you can do. You can start liking pages that share viral videos to help you find the next big thing. It’s possible to find something that’s being launched soon and is getting a lot of attention, but not yet being dropshipped or viral. That way, you can try and search on AliExpress to find if the product is there. If it’s there, we might be on to something.

Jessica: This is new to me. Could you please show me at least one of these pages?

Harry This page is what we are looking for. These pages share videos and post videos of viral content. Some items may be products. Other things might not be. It’s a great way to find something. We could try it on AliExpress.

Use proven products

Jessica: Scott Hilse shares his seven-point product research tip. He explains how he chooses which products to sell. What criteria should someone use to determine if their best-seller is under $10?

Scott: You want to do products that have proven themselves at least somewhat. I would suggest 100 orders minimum and maximum 10,000 orders. After 10,000 orders, depending on what dropshipping niche you are in, it kinda gets muddled, and most people already have a stronghold on that. I recommend looking for another product. Think about fidget spinners. You’d make so much more if you could get into fidget spinning before it became a craze. Also, you would already have all the data and the strength. So the whole idea of dropshipping is you wanna find those products before they hit viral status.

Jessica: Okay. There are many products that sell more than 100 units, such as a women’s dress. How can you narrow that list?

Scott : It’s a good idea to use common sense and be honest. You shouldn’t sell anything you don’t find in a department store. You want to focus on practical, unique items that can be targeted when you first start. As you gain experience in the niche market, you will be able to add these items as upsells, but for your first start, you want to find something unique, practical, and attractive that you can target people with.

Get ideas from Facebook Audience Insights

Jessica: In at product research tip number six, Andreas and Alexander show how to use Audience Insights to validate product ideas.

Andreas : We chose this product because it isn’t well-known. In normal shops, in offline shops, I haven’t seen it before. It was something I hadn’t seen before and it surprised me. The niche is huge. It is the self-doing and gadget niches that are most popular. There are more than 50,000,000 active…

Alexander: Homeworker.

Andreas : Yes. Facebook has more than 50 million users per month.

Jessica: Well, why don’t we go into Audience Insights and show us how you found that out in the first place?

Andreas : If you click in the Ads Manager of the Audience Insights Tool, it will be there. You can also choose your country in the Audience Intelligences tool. We always test in the United States because the market is big, people are willing to pay via PayPal or credit cards, and then I type in the niche.

Alexander This product is ideal for the US market, as Americans love to do-it themselves.

Andreas : Now, I have two interests. “Gadget” and “do-it-yourself” niche. It’s between 50-60 million people using Facebook. It’s a large enough market to test, so I wouldn’t start testing it. A bigger niche is good. You have room for both your new store and competitors.

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Jessica: Time Out. These tips and tricks will help you take your ecommerce business to the next level. You will need to be able to apply these tips and tricks. If you don’t have that, check out Oberlo 101. This course is the best for starting an online dropshipping business. It provides step-by-step guidance for choosing a product, creating a store and making your first sale using Facebook Ads.

Analyze Google Trends and Analytics

Jessica: Okay, back to product research tip number five, where millionaire dropshipper, Melvin, explains how to analyze Google Trends and Google Analytics to validate product trends.

Melvin Yes, it’s very important to validate the products you want to sell. So I use Google Trends to see if there are a lot people tweeting about the product, or if there is a lot of Googling. Let’s take a look at “travel makeup bag”.

This is just the surface. We can see that the product was hyped back in November 2018. It was November 2018, so it was Black Friday week. This was when people started to travel for Christmas. That’s when you can see the spike. The trend then dies down. The trend for the next few weeks is actually upward.

So, I believe we use… I use Google Trends for actual product analysis. Is it a past winner? Does it have the potential to sell… Will it make me money?

Jessica: Are you using any filters? Would you be content to only see the US in the last 12 months, or would you look deeper?

Melvin: This is where I’ll start… The past 12 months are the best to see if someone has scaled up this product to millions. I’ll also look at small indicators like cities that are actively searching for these products, keywords they’re using, and related topics. This gives you some clues as to where to look for this type of audience. It also enables you to connect with a variety of blogs, websites, and influencers who are talking about your products.

Jessica: I’m looking at this and thinking, “Okay, it makes sense that it trend upwards because of spring vacation and summer vacation travel in warmer months.”

Melvin Exactly.

Cross-Reference AliExpress Orders over Time

Jessica: Jeff Ho demonstrates how to track AliExpress orders in dropshipping. This tip is number 4.

Jeff : This is where you can cross-refer, as I like to refer to it. You could go directly to the product page to check if the product is in high demand. If so, you can then verify that by copying the URL from that page and pasting it here to see how sales have been in the past few months.

Jessica: What’s so interesting?

Jeff: Yes.

Jessica: Let’s go. I am curious.

Jeff: Yes.

Jessica: For more information…

Jeff: You can copy and paste.

Jessica: Cut and paste it

Jeff: Copy the code and paste it in to the product analysis. Then, click on…

Jessica: What do I have to do to get rid all the search stuff?

Jeff: Leave it as it is.

Jessica: Okay.

Jeff: Click on search to see a graph showing the number of orders. You can then see that it was at its peak around the beginning of June.

Jessica: Yes, it’s interesting.

Jeff: We don’t know if there were 16 or more orders per day.

Get Ratings for Suppliers and Products

Jessica Chris Wane, product research tip number 3, shares the numbers he is looking for on AliExpress product pages.

Chris. The first thing I want to look at is the rating of your product. You need a rating over 4.5 and above a 4.8, which is where you should be working. This product has nearly 4,000 votes. Most of these are five-star reviews, which immediately gives you an idea that it is a great product.

I am also interested in the supplier. As you can see, this supplier is a top brand. They’ve been around for some time and provide excellent service. As you can see, this supplier is getting 4.8s and 4.7s for item-as described, communication, speed of shipping, and all that tells us that they are a reliable supplier and that the product is good.

Conduct Supplier Research

Jessica: In product research tip number two, Melvin explains how to find trustworthy AliExpress dropshipping suppliers.

Melvin To be honest, it’s a challenge for any dropshipper to find reliable suppliers. They don’t know if the supplier they are dealing with is trustworthy, honest, or not. AliExpress is one of the metrics that I will be looking at. Let’s say you are looking for unicorn slippers. Then I’ll sort them by orders. This is done by looking at how many reviews they have, the number and number of orders they get, and the badges they earn. This gives you an indication.

However, we also split our orders among different suppliers simultaneously to find out who has best quality products, reliable fulfillment processes, and who has the best shipping process around it. This allows us to determine which suppliers we should work with two weeks later.

Jessica: Wow. That’s some serious stuff. Are you actually testing suppliers with different segments?

Melvin Exactly.

Jessica: Many of our viewers still hope for multiple customers. I wanted to delve deeper into what you said. This is what you mean when you refer to badges.

Melvin: So, these are the badges that these suppliers earn, to recognize them as a top seller. This is usually a sign that the supplier is okay. They aren’t here to con you or give you shitty products.

You can check if other dropshippers are selling the product

Jessica : Ryan Carroll explains in Product Research Tip number 1 how to determine if a product with a lot of orders actually is being sold by dropshippers.

Let me dig deeper into your previous statement about AliExpress if you find a product from multiple suppliers. Let’s run a quick search to see if there are any other competitors or similar products.

Ryan: Yeah, 100 percent.

Jessica: Ok, we searched for “body camera”, which are cameras people can wear. Where would you go?

Ryan: So, what are we going to do first? Click on “Orders”, which will just bring the best-performing product to top. This order has approximately 1,500 sales, which is quite a number. Products that don’t sell in the thousands are not my favorite, as they are very saturated. If the top order is 1,500, there’s a good chance you will be another seller of this product.

Clicking on this will bring up 732 reviews. This is a good sign that people are likely to buy this product from AliExpress. This is a strange ratio. This is about half the orders.

So that means just about 50 percent of all of these purchases aren’t even bought from someone dropshipping it, ’cause if someone’s dropshipping this product, the customer is not gonna go then to AliExpress and give a review of the product, because the product’s not coming from there, it’s coming from your Shopify store. This shows me that people actually find the product and buy them.

Jessica: That’s a great hack. If you take a look at the number votes in the reviews and compare it with orders, you will see that a 50% ratio is quite acceptable.

Ryan: That’s because another 50% could… It just so happens that there are still people buying the product from AliExpress. They’re not leaving reviews, but it shows me that a lot people are purchasing this product directly from AliExpress. This product is not being drop-shipped by many people right now.

Jessica: How do these product research tips make you feel? Which of these product research tips worked best for you? Which product research tip was the most surprising to you? Comment below and let me know your thoughts. Keep learning, improve your marketing and sell more.