What to sell, what to sell, what to sell. That’s one of the biggest questions you’ll be asking yourself when building your online store. How do some stores end up making six and seven figures while others have a big, fat zero? It comes down to having winning products. And fortunately, all you need to do is find one to make it big. So in this article, I’m going to answer a common dropshipping FAQ: “How can I find a winning product?” I break down the eight easiest ways to find such (and the exact thing that helped me find my winning product). Time to get those dolla dolla bills y’all.
8 Easiest Ways to Find Winning Products Every Time
Most online stores have best seller lists. This is obviously great for customers who want to see the best products an online store can offer. But for online retailers best seller lists are a freaking goldmine.
And new entrepreneurs don’t exploit them enough.
Most say that the downside to dropshipping is that everyone is selling the same products as you. But I like to look at it with a glass half full approach: if everyone’s selling the same stuff, you can easily sell it too. And if you know what their best sellers are, then you can sell a winning product. To find the product that helps you hit the jackpot, all you need to do is a little bit of product research.
Here are a few examples of websites with public best seller lists.
1. Amazon Best Sellers
So, I’m going to be a Captain Obvious and start with the obvious choice first.
Amazon has best seller lists for literally every category. And not only that, but they’re updated every. single. hour.
You will find some brand name products on best seller lists like Lego and FujiFilm above. However, you can also discover some unbranded products that are also easily available.
Let’s take a quick look at women’s fashion. On the best seller list, I found these comfortable drawstring pants which are ranked 14 on Amazon’s Best Sellers for the Clothing, Shoes & Jewelry category. But they also ranked 1 in women’s Casual Pants & Capris. There are 964 reviews with an overall 4 star rating. Not bad at all.
I decide to look up the exact keywords following the brand name to see if I could find it on AliExpress. And sure enough, there’s a supplier carrying the exact product.
If they’re best sellers on Amazon, they could also be best sellers on your own store. So you can add products to your store, like this one, based on their performance on Amazon.
Okay, let me guess what you’re thinking right now. “But Nicole, I can’t possibly compete with Amazon. Their prices are too low.” Am I close?
I used to have those fears too until I experienced the impact of a winning product first hand. If someone sees your product from an ad first, they’re more likely to buy directly from you.
The secret – and this is a BIG one – is don’t use the manufacturer’s product name. You’re building your own brand, so spend the 30 seconds needed to come up with a unique product name. If you find the product and add the manufacturer’s product name, your competitors will find the product too. But if you have a creative name, it makes it slightly harder to find the same winning products.
2. Wish’s Winning Products
Wish is another example of an online retailer who publicizes their best-selling products. Take a look at the cat towels on the bottom right corner. Over 50,000 people have bought those towels off Wish’s website so they’re definitely a winning product.
If you head over to Wish’s product page, you’ll see some more impressive numbers. Over 6,900 reviews proving that people are actually buying these products.
Wish is a bit more sophisticated, so you can’t just copy and paste the title into AliExpress. However, if you search for cat towel, sure enough, you’ll find the exact product.
The cool thing about this cat towel is that you can immediately tell just from looking at it that it’s an impulse buy product. Most of the winning products on Wish are catered to attract the impulse buy. So naturally they would do well on visual platforms like Facebook and Instagram.
So when looking through best seller lists, keep your eyes open for impulse buy products. Some trademarks for impulse buy products include things like:
- Colorful (or visually stands out when scrolling)
- Elicits an emotional reaction (“I need this” or “This is adorable” or “I love this”)
- Different design or style from anything you’ve ever seen
3. Insert Your Competitor Here
Most of your competitors have best seller lists. Check them out. Even if you can’t find their exact product, by studying their product collections, look for patterns within best selling products.
If you’re in fashion, online retailer Suzy Shier has a trends category. Within the trends category, you’ll find best sellers. However, what’s just as interesting is that they also divide their clothing into fashion trends. This can help give you an idea of what types of trends within the fashion niche are popular right now. Under trends, you see categories like athleisure, animal prints, and plaid. So, you can search for fashion within those types of categories so you’re selling the latest trends.
Ardene is another retailer that has a trends section. Funny enough, when you check out their best sellers, the first item that shows up is a plaid hoodie which confirms that this trend is on fire right now. So if you’re looking to sell women’s fashion, having a few plaid items can help you get some sales.
The more you look through competitor websites, the more you’ll find patterns and connections among top brands. You can incorporate these patterns as you build your product collection.
4. eBay Watch Count
Find the product you should sell using Watch Count which allows you to see what’s popular on eBay. You can either find winning products on hyper targeted keywords like ‘ionic hairbrush’ to see the photos and style that’s most popular right now.
Or you can broaden your keywords so you can find the best sellers in your niche. So instead of ionic hairbrush, you’d just search hairbrush. Or instead of flower leggings, you’d just search leggings.
The best dropshipping product recommendations include the items with the most watchers. Keep in mind that when doing a narrow search like ionic hairbrush, the number of watchers will be lower because you’re being specific and that the ionic hairbrush is still wildly popular despite a lower number than the leggings.
Also, you’ll notice that with both sets of pictures that there are always multiple products shown in view. Making your photos in a similar manner can also help customers see the entire selection before clicking onto your product page (and it can help entice them more since there’s more options for them to view).
5. Monitor High-Performing Ads
We live in a world of scrollers. We scroll through articles, newsfeeds, and product pages. But have you ever stopped to think what could happen if you didn’t scroll past an endless wave of posts?
My world completely changed because, one day, I stopped scrolling to look at a Facebook ad.
The ad copy? Lackluster.
The website design? Mediocre at best.
But somehow the ad engagement on this winning product was unlike anything I’d ever seen before proving that it was one of the best items to dropship. Sky high. Comment after comment. Friend tagging like you wouldn’t believe. Tens of thousands of likes.
Everyone wanted this product.
It was almost hard to believe that these comments were real. But they were.
I decided to look for a similar product with AliExpress. It was a big, colorful blanket, so I tried different keywords like “beach blanket” and “meditation blanket.” After a bit of searching, I found the exact, same product.
Bingo!
But the truth is, just because you find a winning product doesn’t mean you know how to sell it.
That first month, I only made $1659.70. These numbers don’t really hint that success is coming up: Less than a 1% conversion rate and only 39 orders. This product’s supposed to be a homerun?
The truth that no one tells you is that you can have a winning product on your store and have no freaking idea. Your store’s performance can be just like a lot of other new stores. Enough sales to know you can make money, but not enough to know you’re onto something big.
There are so many factors to ensure your winning product has the best chance of success:
- Your ad needs to target and attract the right audience
- Your website needs to convert
- You need to convince customers to buy right now before going off and doing research
- The product shouldn’t be widely available (i.e., not in retail stores)
- And more!
So don’t be afraid to ask around for store reviews to get feedback on your store. Because you could very well have some best-selling products on it without even realizing it.
And keep your eyes peeled on Facebook and Instagram for ads.
A little trick to consistently trigger ads from various stores is to add best-selling products from various competitors to your cart. Top-performing stores will usually have retargeting ads which often get triggered by abandoned carts. And you can use the templates from those ads as inspiration for your own ads to give you a better chance of marketing your winning product.
You can also use a tool like FB Search to find ads within your niche with high levels of engagement. You might need to play around with various keywords to find them (the more specific the better). So avoid keywords like “fitness” or “yoga.” Instead do keywords like “mandala blanket,” which narrows it down to the exact product. You’ll find posts with high engagement – sometimes they’re just standard posts but sometimes advertisers turn their existing posts into ads.
6. Unicorn Smasher
Looking for an Amazon product research tool? Unicorn Smasher helps you find the best-selling Amazon products for free. With this handy Chrome extension you can find the prices, best-seller rank, reviews, ratings, and estimated sales in a single glance. And this data is shown for every single Amazon product as long as you’re on the .com domain.
Let’s take a look at the data when searching for kitchen products. You can choose to sort any of the Chrome extension by any of its headers. Here I chose to view based on estimated revenue but you can also view by price, rank, reviews, ratings, and whether or not it’s fulfilled by Amazon.
A handy trick for dropshippers to find the best items to dropship is to view based on the number of sellers. If there are multiple sellers for a single product, it’s more likely that the product can be found on AliExpress. Alternatively, you can use the AliExpress Dropshipping Center to discover high-potential items. Dropshipping secrets like these are really effective for finding winning products.
Pro tip: Be careful when analyzing branded and trademarked goods. For example, if iRobot Roomba only has one seller and you see that iRobot is also the brand name, you likely won’t be able to sell the product since it’s branded. However, multiple sellers shows that the product likely isn’t branded and anyone can sell it too.
7. Using Automizely to Find the Product
Within Automizely, you can get access to data for various AliExpress products. You can find out which products have had sales and which haven’t. But you can also find out how recent those sales are. Keep in mind that some of these products will be the most popular that everyone else is selling since it’s what people will check through first.
So you’ll need to dig a little deeper and look at all of these details to help you make a decision. A 4.7 star rating is great. I usually like to stay above 4.5 stars. But keep in mind that if there are more than 100 reviews anything above a 4 star is a great product to choose from.
When it comes to pageviews, I like to compare it with orders from the last 30 days. When you divide orders from the past 30 days against total pageviews (also from the past 30 days), look at the percentage you get. If it’s above 50%, you likely have a winning product on your hands. Anything lower than that and your ad pricing might end up costing you too much.
When it comes to Orders, check to see if the orders in the past 30 days are high. If they’re higher than the past six months, you likely caught it before the trend blew up. However, you don’t need to discredit a great product because of it either. Even if the trend is dying, you can still capitalize on it if sales in the past 30 days are in the hundreds or higher.
8. How to Use Google Trends to Find Winning Products
Google Trends is a popular free tool you can use to find out if a product is growing or declining in popularity. Read this to find an in-depth breakdown about how to use Google Trends to find winning products. But in the meantime, let’s break down some basic ideas on how to find the product using this tool.
Using Google Trends, enter the product type. For example, a popular AliExpress product is a rose in a glass that you can sell as wedding centerpieces, a Valentine’s Day gift, or a piece for home decor. I simply add “rose in glass” to see the search volume popularity and voila.
It hit its peak in March 2017, but it’s actually been rising again the past few months. You can add this product to your store knowing that it’s still popular. Take a look at the data points I used. First I used United States since it’s one of the biggest markets to promote too (but you can check others too – and you should). I also chose the setting from “2004-present” which helps me see the full picture a bit clearer. There are other methods for Google Trends you can check out so be sure to check out the full article on the topic.
Conclusion
So the main secret to finding winning products comes down to research. I know, I know, it’s super tempting to add random products onto your store just because they look nice. But if the goal is to have a store that sells top performing products, your process can’t be random. It needs to be strategic. So don’t be afraid to do you homework, do some competitor research and monitor what people are talking about online. By paying attention to high-performing ads and competitors, you’ll inch closer to finding high-performing winning products for your store.
Have you had success with a winning product?