Finding winning products is the most important thing when starting a dropshipping store.
With so many products out there, coupling with numerous dropshippers, it’s hard to know which product to dropship.
Therefore, in this post, we will guide you through every step to help you find winning dropshipping products in minutes.
Criteria of a winning dropshipping product
Not all products are suitable for dropshipping. Before start selling, there are several criteria you should keep in mind.
Reasonable price
Impulsive purchasing is the tendency of a person buying products without planning in advance, and it plays a massive role in dropshipping.
To take advantage of this rather popular tendency, make sure that you don’t price a product too high.
Many people might be comfortable buying a product with a price of below $100 without researching. Pricing a product above that number might cause people to be subconscious and want to confirm if the product’s price is reasonable.
When pricing a dropshipping product, the most prominent cost you need to pay close attention to is advertising.
For example, The average cost per purchase on Facebook for the apparel industry is around $10.98. If a product has a wholesales price of $4 and a global shipping cost of $5, you would have to sell it for at least $20 to make a profit.
Portable and non-fragile items
You want to avoid selling heavy and large items because they often introduce a high shipping price.
Besides, avoid shipping fragile products as much as possible.
Although many shipping carriers have high standards in the packaging and shipping process, it’s still best to avoid unnecessary risks of breaking fragile items.
Nonbranded products
You absolutely should not sell popular branded products like OnePlus, Xiaomi, or Huawei. People know about them and tend to go to their official website to buy products.
Additionally, most advertising platforms don’t allow unofficial stores to advertise branded products. Your ad accounts might even be deactivated if they spot this issue. So, avoid branded products at all costs.
High-quality products and suppliers
Choosing a high-quality product from a high-rated supplier helps prevent both you and your customers from being scammed or experienced a long shipping time.
Avoid easy-to-find products
Selling something like an electric stove is not a good idea. If anyone can find them at a local store, why do they have to bother ordering it online?
A winning dropshipping product is not only something people want but also something people cannot find easily.
Problem-solving or hobbyist products
A problem-solving product like a posture corrector or back pain relief is relatively easy to sell because it directly helps your customers resolve one of their problems.
Hobbyist products are also what you can try dropshipping. Some people love their hobbies so much that they are willing to spend a fortune on them. For example, dog lovers can spend a lot of money on dog accessories. If you can find the right hobbyist products and target the right people, you can do extremely well.
How to find winning dropshipping products
There are 7 main steps to find potential winning dropshipping products.
- Figure out profitable dropshipping niches
- Find potential dropshipping products
- Review the product quality
- Check product shipping time
- Examine product materials for your dropshipping store
- Perform a product sales analysis
- Set up a high-converting dropshipping store and sell your products
1. Figure out profitable dropshipping niches
The success of your dropshipping business relies heavily on the dropshipping niches you choose.
Pick a small niche, and it will be hard for you to find customers. Choose a broad niche, and it will be tough to find the exact products to sell or compete with other dropshippers.
Therefore, figuring out suitable and profitable niches is your top priority before building your dropshipping stores.
So, how do you know which niches to dropship?
Below are some tips.
Capitalize on holidays and observances
E-commerce is a business that relies heavily on the current trends of the market, and dropshipping is no exception.
Take Christmas as an example.
According to Finances Online, the three most popular retail categories during the Christmas season are clothing and accessories (26%), food and beverage/health and wellness (20%), and toys and hobbies (17%).
Additionally, the top 5 items during the holiday are food or liquor (42%), clothing (39%), shoes (28%), books (22%), and cosmetics or fragrances (21%).
Furthermore, 56% of all shoppers buy gift cards, and 66% of Christmas shoppers will pay more for sustainable products.
As you can see, by capitalizing on a specific holiday or observance, it’s much easier for you to find profitable dropshipping niches. It’s also much easier to find customers since people are more likely to purchase holiday-related products.
To find similar statistics for other holidays, you can enter “X eCommerce statistics” into Google’s search engine with X being the holiday you want to conduct research on.
Check trends
Google Trends is a tool that helps you see the graph trend of a specific search term, thus providing you a general idea of what people are searching for and which products are in high demand.
For example, by entering the keyword “pendant” into Google Trends, you can see its interest over time.
Usually, it would be best if you aim for a niche that has a consistent or upward trend. A niche with a downward graph is generally bad for dropshipping since it proves that people care about that niche less over time.
You can also have a look at related topics and related queries for the search term to find more ideas.
With the keyword “pendant,” some related topics are “Rattan,” “Evil eye,” and “Resin.”
Some interesting related queries for the keyword are “medical alert pendant” and “Taurus pendant.”
Remember to pay close attention to the number beside each topic or query. It tells you how much the topic increases in search frequency in the requested time period.
It’s important to note that by default Google Trend applies the “Past 12 months” filter to all results, including the graph trend, related topics, and related queries.
We recommend having a look at results for 2 additional filters, which are “Past 30 days” and “Past 90 days.” Examining these gives you a better understanding of more recent market trends.
Besides, you can change the location filter to “Worldwide” to inspect the global trend.
Do keyword research
Doing keyword research gives you a more detailed insight into how frequently certain words are searched.
To do it, use a keyword research tool like Google Keyword Planner or SEMrush.
Below are results from SEMrush for “necklace.”
The tool gives you various relevant keyword ideas related to your entered term with useful information, including average monthly search volume, keyword difficulty, competition, and CPC (Cost Per Click).
Usually, you should dropship a niche that the keywords related to it have high monthly search volume and low competition.
Additionally, the higher CPC (Cost-Per-Click) of a niche is, the greater chance it can convert potential buyers to customers.
If you are interested in ranking your store in search engines, pay attention to Keyword Difficulty. It tells you how hard it is to rank high in search results for your term. Otherwise, ignore it.
Play with all broad topics
One problem when doing keyword research is how you know which keywords to enter into the keyword tool.
A method to solve this is to play with all broad topics. Then, use relevant terms to narrow them down further.
To demonstrate this method, we use Sonar, an Amazon keyword tool that helps you find relevant terms to a specific keyword.
For example, by entering the keyword “face” into Sonar, you can get back some interesting results like “face paint,” “face shield,” “face moisturizer,” “face steamer,” and “face roller.”
The broader a keyword is, the more ideas you can find.
You can look at AliExpress or Amazon categories to find broad topics.
2. Find potential dropshipping products
Knowing which niche to focus on, the next step is to find potential dropshipping products.
AliExpress
Most dropshippers find and source dropshipping products on AliExpress, an eCommerce platform that sells a wide variety of items globally at a very low price.
Owned by Alibaba Group, AliExpress is the home for mostly Chinese manufacturing suppliers. It means when you buy a product on the platform, you actually purchase it directly from manufacturing sources, rather than intermediate companies. Thus, it cuts out all sorts of costs, such as transportation cost, warehouse cost, and taxes.
Start by going to AliExpress and choose the category related to the niche you have researched in Step 1. You can also enter your niche directly into the search field.
For example, click on Beauty, Health & Hair.
Click on the “Orders” button at the top of the page to sort all products by the number of orders.
It’s important to note that sorting like this means that you will see the most popular items in the category, and there is a very high chance that other dropshippers are also selling the product.
However, it doesn’t really matter. As long as the product is in demand, you can always step in and take a slice of the cake.
You can see a wide variety of products to choose from.
The idea here is to choose items that tick all the criteria of winning dropshipping products. Let’s try clicking on the Muscle Stimulator.
This item seems to tick all the boxes. It’s a problem-solving product that is relatively small, not too fragile, unbranded, and hard to find locally.
With a price of $7.37 plus free shipping, you could sell this product in your dropshipping store at around $19.99 to make a decent profit.
Similarly, look at other products and examine whether they have the potential to be dropshipped.
Consider having a look at other popular eCommerce sites like Amazon or eBay with a similar process.
Dropshipping product research tools
Many advanced tools can help you find potential dropshipping products quickly, such as EcomHunt, Sell The Trend, AliShark, Seller Pulse, or Dropispy.
Let’s use Sell The Trend as an example. It’s a powerful 9-in-1 dropshipping tool that not only lets you discover winning dropshipping products but also allows you to spy on your competitors.
SelTheTrend’s NEXUS is where you’re gonna visit most of the time. Powered by A.I, it allows you to quickly see what is trending across popular E-commerce stores around the world.
There are 4 main tabs in the NEXUS you should care about, including Hot Products, Trending Products, On The Rise, and New Products.
Hot Products are products with a high number of orders that are being sold by many dropshipping stores. These products are usually winning ones in the past. However, there is no guarantee that it’s gonna sell well now. So, you might need to test it yourself.
Trending Products contain currently trending products. This is mostly the place where you are gonna find high potential dropshipping products.
On The Rise tab contains products with a high growth rate but relatively low sales. The sales performance of these products tends to be unstable. Therefore, test them thoroughly.
New Products contain dropshipping items that are just discovered by the system.
You can also search for products using the search field. The results can be filtered by categories, niches, price, number of orders, found dates, top countries, and more.
Clicking on each product lets you see lots of additional information, such as which stores are selling the item, order trend, recommended selling price, top customer countries, etc.
Another tab to explore winning products is AliExpress Explorer and Amazon Explorer. It offers many advanced filters that AliExpress and Amazon don’t provide out of the box.
3. Review the product quality
It’s important that you sell quality products to your customers. Otherwise, you would get a lot of complaints and chargebacks.
Worse yet, if you run ads on a platform like Facebook and get a significant amount of negative feedback from your customers, it can seriously hurt your ad delivery.
A quality product usually comes from a high-rated supplier and has a lot of good reviews.
Going back to our muscle stimulator, you can see that it comes from a 95.4% positive feedback supplier with an average of 4.6-star reviews.
It should be noted that since the product has over 2591 reviews, you can safely rely on the average star review to judge its quality.
A good practice is to find products with at least 500 reviews. If a product has only a couple of them, you cannot ensure that it is good.
4. Check product shipping time
One of the most important factors that customers concern about is delivery time.
According to Hollingsworthllc, 69% of consumers “are much less or less likely to shop with a retailer in the future if an item they purchased is not delivered within two days of the date promised.”
If it takes too long for an order to arrive, it will also be very likely for you to get lots of complaints and negative feedback.
Below are Amazon global shipping times to Europe.
On average, 30 days should be the maximum delivery time. It would be even better if you manage to find a dropshipping product with a shipping time of fewer than 15 days.
Therefore, remember to look out for shipping times on AliExpress.
5. Examine product materials for your dropshipping store
The next thing you need to care about is the materials you can use to advertise your products.
Make sure that the product offers lots of high-quality images. It would be even more amazing if it comes with a few videos since video ads tend to perform much better than image static ads.
Another place to find additional product materials for your dropshipping store is Alibaba, a B2B marketplace also owned by Alibaba Group.
Amazon and eBay are other good platforms to do the same thing. However, be careful with non-copyrighted materials.
6. Perform a product sales analysis
After having a list of dropshipping products with high potential, it’s necessary to analyze their sales performance. This will help avoid outdated or saturated products.
AliExpress Dropshipping Center
AliExpress provides AliExpress Dropshipper Center, a dedicated dropshipping tool to analyze products’ selling trends.
Start by clicking on “Find Products to Sell” on the left sidebar to open up the product window.
Enter the name of the product you want to analyze. You can also sort all products by the number of orders by clicking on the “Orders” button.
After having a list of results, click on the “Analyze” button on the right side of each product to analyze its sales performance.
If a product has a consistent or upward selling trend and an average sales volume level of around 50, you are up to a great start.
Although products with inconsistent trends might still be winning ones, it might be much harder to advertise them effectively.
Because there can be many suppliers selling the same items, consider examining a couple of them to understand their sales performance precisely.
You can also do the same thing using a dropshipping product research tool like SellTheTrend.
Check Amazon listings
Usually, you can find a similar AliExpress product on Amazon since the platform also allows dropshipping.
Retake the Muscle Stimulator as an example. You can use whichever Amazon product research tool, like SellTheTrend or AMZChart, to check for the trends. Here, we will use AMZChart.
Enter “Muscle Stimulator” to AMZChart’s search field to find its listings on Amazon.
Click on a listing that closely matches the product on AliExpress.
Similarly, if the product has a consistent or upward ranking trend on Amazon, you are good to go.
7. Set up a high-converting dropshipping store and sell your products
You have gone through every step to find potential winning dropshipping products for your store.
However, besides winning products, there are many elements that can significantly affect your sales performance, such as how trustworthy your store looks, FOMO factors, email marketing, and more.
Consider having a look at How to create a high-converting dropshipping store for more information.
Conclusion
There are 6 main criteria of a winning dropshipping product: reasonable price, small, not too fragile, unbranded, hard to find locally, and problem-solving or hobbyist products.
When finding winning products, remember to pay attention to the quality, shipping time, materials, and, most importantly, the selling trends of those products.
Following this tutorial, you should have a great start in your dropshipping journey to success.
Useful Resources
- How to Create a Free Order Tracking Page: It’s important to have an order tracking page for your online store so your customers can easily track their orders. So, how to create one for free without wasting your money on expensive third-party apps?
The rightful owner of The Clever Business. I review & curate the leading suppliers so you don't waste time scouring the internet.
