When you’re just getting started with your dropshipping business, doing correct product research and finding what products you’ll be selling is critical to your long term success.
Knowing how to quickly research and find the right products to sell can be tough, but it’s worth the time to get this part right.
So, how do you find the best products to dropship?
As much as we’d love to be able to give a big list of the best products to sell…
…it wouldn’t really help you at all.
Why?
Because that would mean that everyone would then go out and try to sell the same products, and those products would then become oversaturated with sellers…
…and they’d stop being the best products to sell.
Not only that, just because a product could be a good seller, doesn’t mean that YOU would be able to sell it well.
Many times, the reason a product sells well is that the person selling the item is good at doing a few things like:
- Taking their own pictures of the product
- Making videos demonstrating the product well
- Writing really good, unique descriptions for the product
- Knowing how to target their ideal buyer really well and selling a lot to them
- Creating unique bundles of products for this one product that no one else offers
So, rather than handing you a list of potential products that sell well…
…I'll give you some important criteria for choosing the best products for you and your goals.
As we research the best products for you to sell, we’ll actually look at this in three major areas:
- Research the main niche focus of products we want to sell.
- Research the products within that niche that we want to sell.
- Powerful product research software to help you find hot-selling products fast.
The reason we start with a niche is that while some products can be great sellers, if we want long-term success, we look to identify a great niche that we can find a family of products to sell so we don’t put all of our hopes on one product selling forever.
With that in mind, we’ll break down the criteria we look at for finding a profitable NICHE…
…then our criteria for finding multiple profitable PRODUCTS within your niche.
How To Find Profitable Niches For Dropshipping
When it comes to getting started with dropshipping and finding the best products and suppliers for your needs, you need to start with good product discovery and niche research first.
After all, it doesn’t matter who you get your products from if you don’t have a product that you can sell easily or that the market doesn’t want to buy…
…and your success will be limited if you can’t identify a niche and family of products you can sell.
Product discovery and research is the most important factor that distinguishes successful e-commerce businesses from online shops filled with products that shoppers are simply not motivated to buy.
You got into drop shipping to earn and grow your revenue… it makes no sense adding products that are not in demand…
…or relying on just one hot product in hopes that it will always be a hot seller.
Niche product research takes time and a deeper understanding of the psychological tiers of consumer demand.
Do your products fulfill a need or function, that your customers will identify with?
Are they seasonally trending this year?
Are you seeing similar products offered by Big Box stores that are flying off the shelves?
Those are the types of questions you should be asking yourself as you look to identify products to sell.
Here are some strategies to consider as you begin your research.
Product Research Strategies:
- Your personal passion
- Consider your professional experience
- Solve a customer pain point
- Other people’s passions/interests/hobbies:
- Google “list of hobbies”
- Magazines.com/all-categories
- Facebook Groups
- Capitalize on trends (not fads) early
1. Your Personal Passion
The simple fact is, when you are really passionate about something, you’ll know a lot more about that subject than anything else.
So when it comes to finding products to sell, if you are looking for products related to your passion, you’ll have a much easier time finding products you know will sell. You’ll also be able to quickly weed out the products that are not high quality and won’t sell well.
Even better, you’ll be able to set up your store and market those products better because you know the market well, you know the industry/market terms and it will just come more naturally to you.
The nice thing about working with a passion, is that when things get tough, it's easier to dig in and push through it because you like what you’re doing, and you’re less likely to give up.
2. Consider Your Professional Experience
Similar to having a personal passion, but not exactly the same, is working with products that you have professional experience with. These are products that you have grown familiar with due to using them or experiencing them through your day job, career or profession, so you know all about the products, what they can do for you and how to talk about them.
You may not be passionate about the product at all, but you know the products thoroughly and could find them easy to sell regardless.
Another unique advantage of your professional experience might be identifying a need or gap in the market you’ve discovered in your job or industry and selling products that can help you solve those needs or fill those gaps.
That’s something someone outside that market would probably never uncover being outside of that career or market.
3. Solve A Customer Pain Point
A pain point could be something that causes your user actual pain, or something that causes frustration for your customers.
Products like Aspirin help to solve or at least help alleviate headaches and other physical pains.
Then you have products like the Apple iPod that solved a different type of pain point – wanting to have easy access to hundreds or even thousands of songs without having to carry around a huge box of cassette tapes and a tape player.
Now, your products don’t have to be revolutionary like these to sell well – they just need to have a large market that feels this same “pain”.
Some will solve really big pain points, and some will solve small, daily pain points. None-the-less, they still make the lives of your customers easier and help them do something easier or better.
So as you are reviewing products, really take time to consider if the product really helps solve a regular pain point and it’s something people are actively looking for help with when it comes to remedying those pain points.
4. Other People’s Passions/Interests/Hobbies
So, while you may not be interested in a certain passion or hobby, you can still tap into these areas by selling products related to other people’s passion and interests.
The good part is that finding products in these areas is not hard – you just need to spend time drilling down through each area to find niches to focus on.
Easy places to begin your searches of hobbies and interests is:
Go to Google and do a search for “list of hobbies” and start exploring the results.
Go to Magazines.com/all-categories and check out all the different categories and magazines that serve these nice interest groups. Given the shift to digital and how many magazines have closed down, if a hobby or niche still has a physical magazine, there is a good chance it’s a strong niche with a passionate audience.
Search Facebook for different types of Groups that exist around various passions and interests to see what they talk about and how big the various groups are. Be sure to join the ones that you’re interested in selling to in order to immerse yourself into that community to learn more about their pain points and products they like to buy.
It’s really easy to quickly find large groups of people and their interests in order to learn about what they like, what they buy, how they talk and specific terms and words they use that are unique to them. As you learn more about them, you’ll better know how to speak and market to them, as well as know more about what to sell them.
5. Capitalize On Trends (Not Fads) Early
When a trend is starting to form, being able to identify it and get yourself and your products in front of it can position you as an authority there…
…and generate a lot of sales for you fast.
To succeed at this long-term though, you need to have products that are part of a strong market, and not simply a flash in the pan or gimmicky fad that blows up one day and is gone the next.
For example, a lot of people made money with the fidget spinner fad… and a lot more people lost a lot of money and still have garages full of them because they jumped on a fad that died quickly.
Instead, focus on a trend that fulfills a need and solves a problem that won’t be going away.
For example, a growing trend is 3D printing.
Whether it’s printing household objects or artificial limbs for people, 3D printing is not going away. When you see a trend like this, you could sell anything from the 3D printers themselves, or the raw material and accessories needed to physically print the actual end products. You could also sell 3D plans for the items people want to print. Then you could 3D print your own fidget spinners. 🙂
Bottom line, you want products that will be around for years to sell and profit from, and not around for just a few weeks until they are oversaturated and people are tired of seeing them.
List Of Good Dropshipping Niches
Now, with all of that said, we’ve put together a list of some of the best niches to consider as you get started.
This is by no means a complete list. It does NOT mean that if you pick products form these niches that they will be best sellers, and it also doesn’t mean that if you pick a niche outside of this list that it’s no good.
We just wanted to provide a helpful list of niches to help get you started in case you find yourself getting stuck – niches we’ve seen other sellers have success in.
How To Find The Best Products To Dropship
Now that we have our niche selected, we need to start finding the best products to sell within that niche, so now we’ll look at product research.
Here’s the criteria we give new drop shippers when they ask.
Look for products that:
- Can be sold with enough margin to be able to scale ads
- Are unique / that can’t be found easily elsewhere
- Solve some kind of problem
- Smaller and are easily shipped
Let’s look at each one of these criteria a little more.
1. Can Be Sold With Enough Margin To Be Able To Scale Ads
If there is too little margin, then you won’t have enough money to put back into your ads to drive more traffic and scale quickly.
Now, this doesn’t mean you should avoid selling low margin products, because they do have their place.
For example, if it’s a popular product that brings in a lot of buyers and you are confident that once they are in your store, they will buy more products that do have a lot of margin, then these low price products could be a great loss-leader.
Another benefit of low margin products is if they make a good item to bundle with others that adds to a higher perceived value for the bundle, then that could also be a good use for products like that.
However, if the low-margin products are not used in that fashion, they may not be worth it to add to your store for now.
2. Are Unique / That Can’t Be Found Easily Elsewhere
Another great criteria to use is looking for products that are unique and/or are not readily or easily found elsewhere.
How many times have you searched for a products, thought it was cool, but the first thing you did was search for it on Amazon or eBay to see if you could get it quicker and cheaper than the eCom store you originally found it on.
Now, if doing a search didn’t turn up anything on Amazon, and I really liked the product, I’d be way more likely to buy it from your store.
Another option is to create a unique product bundle.
As I mentioned in the point above, putting several related products together in a bundle is a great way to not only sell more products and make more money per sale, but it’s also a great way to make your store and your products unique.
That way you don’t look like every other eCom store out there selling the same products for the same price. You will stand out from the other sellers and make more money.
3. Solve Some Kind Of Problem
Outside of impulse buys, most people are searching for products that solve a particular problem they have.
Whether it’s buying sprays to keep pests away while they camp…
…or it’s a bundle of camping supplies that they need for their next trip, people are buying to help solve these problems.
What are some of the biggest “pain points” or “problems” people in the niche you are serving have that a product of yours can help solve?
Once you answer questions like that, product ideas will begin popping up all around you.
The last criteria is something that can seem obvious, but that you have to pay attention to or it can eat up your margin quickly. That criteria is…
4. Smaller And Are More Easily Shipped
The fact is, it’s cheaper to ship smaller packages.
Now, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t consider bigger products that sell well. It just means you have to factor in the shipping costs that come from larger and/or heavier products.
You need to look at your profit calculations to make sure that the higher shipping costs don’t cause you to lose money or cut deep into your margins so that it’s no longer worth selling.
Many drop-shipping apps like the Dropified App calculate all of this automatically so that you can review your potential profit margin for each item and make a more informed decision on selling certain items or not.
If there is a larger product that you want to sell, but that has low margins, you should consider bundling it with other products that are related to it.
Dropshipping automation apps like you Dropified make creating and fulfilling product bundles easy and hands-free. You select the products in the bundle and Dropified does the rest. No other drop ship tool on the market makes fulfilling product bundles as easy as they do.
Use The AliExtractor Software To Quickly Find Hot-Selling Products Fast
As you consider all the criteria we’ve shared above…
…we also have a powerful hot-selling product finding tool that helps you find your next product fast.
It’s a powerful tool called AliExtractor…
…and it’s the #1 Tool for AliExpress product research.
AliExtractor uncovers exactly how many products a vendor is already selling per month on AliExpress (in units and sales dollars), saving you hundreds of hours on product research and helping you make smarter decisions for your e-commerce business.
Here’s A Little More About What AliExtractor Can Do:
- Find Best-Selling AliExpress Products for You
- Save Hours And Even Days Off Your Product Research Each Week
- View Product Reviews
- Get Cash Back on Almost EVERY Product from AliExpress
- Save Your Favorite Searches
- Compare Prices on 3rd Party Websites
- Download Your Images Instantly
- And Much, Much More!
The Best Part?
While it sells every day for $29 per month on it’s website…
…Dropified users get UNLIMITED ACCESS to AliExtractor at a discounted rate as a part of their subscription!
Look, this isn’t just a random software we’re giving users to inflate the value of their Dropified subscription…
…it really IS powerful at helping you find the best products to sell quickly.
In fact, one e-commerce store owner saved $16,796 per year and 13 hours per week with AliExtractor!
We wouldn’t be shocked if AliExtractor quickly becomes a tool that you start using every single day to discover new products to sell and to make your own store more profitable.
You can learn more about it on their website…
…but Dropified Users should NOT buy it, because it’s already available to them at a discounted rate from inside their Dropified dashboard.
Non-Dropified users can access the AliExtractor product research software tool in one of 2 ways:
- Buy access to it at AliExtractor.com
- [Recommended] Get it at a discounted rate as a Dropified user
So, if you’re ready to uncover your next red-hot best selling products on AliExpress, then join Dropified right now and fire up the AliExtractor tool today.
Conclusion
In the end, finding the right products for you is finding your own products your own unique way. The criteria above are simple guideposts to get started.
As you go through the process and begin finding your own products, you will begin to develop your own process for finding winning products that sell well and make you good money.
When you find those winning products, the Dropified App will be here to help you automate your entire dropshipping business from A to Z.
And if you ever find yourself stuck, we’ve got in-depth training for any level you’re at (including detailed training on how to find the right products for you) and we have a great support team ready to help you get unstuck.
