Stop wasting money by selling weak products.
You don’t want to end up filing for bankruptcy because you burned through all your cash by pushing products nobody wants. Obviously, to succeed in dropshipping, you need to be smarter in choosing the right products to dropship.
One of the most important techniques in picking winning products is to study customer reviews because not all reviews are created equal. The good news is most sources like AliExpress include customer reviews on their products for everyone to analyze.
Here are a few tips on how you can capitalize on these reviews for your next product research:
Import Reviews
If you want to be more thorough in evaluating reviews, using Excel will make your life easier. You could manually copy and paste the reviews to an Excel spreadsheet or use an online tool to import the reviews for you.
For example, Dropified has an AliExpress review importer that lets you download product reviews in CSV format for Excel.
Read The Negative Reviews
Sure, there are cranky customers who complain about anything. But most negative reviews reveal honest flaws about a product or its supplier.
It takes time and effort to write a negative review and most people are busy or forgiving enough to not bother doing it, especially if the product is not expensive. Chances are that one negative review could be speaking on behalf of hundreds of people.
A lot of companies also inflate their reviews with fake positive reviews from the business owners, friends, employees, and fake review services.
Thus, it’s always a wise approach to give more weight to negative reviews than positive reviews.
Ignore Nonsense Reviews
Some reviews are totally irrelevant. But they can still drag a product’s average score lower or higher than it should be.
Some customers may leave a one-star review for flimsy reasons like the product not being made in the USA when it never claimed to be in the first place.
Some people write reviews that are totally out of this world just to amuse themselves. Use your common sense to identify these nonsense reviews.
These reviews should be deleted and the average score recalculated.
If you're using Excel, then recalculating the average score will be super easy as reviews are being deleted. Just have the review scores on a separate column and apply the AVERAGE formula to it.
Highlight Reviews That Are Relevant To Your Target Market
If you already have a target market in mind and you are looking for products to serve that market, then you must add more weight to reviews from customers who fit your target market.
For example, if you are planning to sell Christmas sweaters to people living in the USA, then reviews coming from the USA are definitely more valuable than ones coming from China.
Some product sources such as AliExpress allow reviews to be filtered by country of origin. Some customers reveal information about themselves on the reviews they write. The more the customer fits your target market, the more valuable the review.
You can even have separate Excel spreadsheets for these reviews with their own average scores.
The More Reviews The Better
A product with a perfect five-star average from ten people is not better than a product with a four-star average from a thousand people.
Remember that suppliers often inflate their product reviews with fake positive reviews, so a product with ten five-star reviews might as well have zero stars.
It’s safer to assume that the average score from a thousand people is more accurate. Moreover, more reviews mean that the product has a clearer demand because more people actually bought it.
So there you have it, learn to analyze product reviews and you're on your way to finding your next winning product.
