When you are planning on stepping into an eCommerce business or expanding your online stores, what to sell is always the crucial question that you need to figure out.
You must have heard about the concept of “winning product”. Targeting the right winning product to sell will be the key to making your business successful.
You only need to find one winning product and make it work in the market you are going to enter at first.
After all, no matter what niche market you are digging in, business is all about buying and selling.
So the question comes to “how to find winning products?” Believe that it is one of the most frequently asked dropshipping topics for beginners.
Here this article concluded five effective ways that experienced dropshipping veterans use to hunt for winning products.
Ⅰ. Find the trend on the Internet
Surfing the trend is one essential rule about finding dropshipping winning products.
The first thing you can do is to get closer to what’s trending right now. Use data analyzing websites like Google Trends to see people’s interest in search terms and products with high sales.
Google Trends
Google Trends is a search trend feature that shows how frequently a given search term is entered into Google’s search engine relative to the site’s total search volume over a given period of time. The tool can be used for comparative keyword research and to discover event-triggered spikes in keyword search volume.
Simply enter the keyword and check the interest of your winning product idea on Google Trends, it will show you an overall trend graph and more related buzzwords.
You can easily find out if the topic is growing or declining in people’s recent interest.
Taking Christmas 2021 as an example, after searching on google trends you can find a related topic like “Christmas 2021”, people’s interest is on the rise sharply, which means that people are paying attention to this. Maybe they start to look for Christmas gifts for their families, or something like that. So the next step is you may try to look for some unique designs to promote the coming festival.
Ⅱ. Research supplier and marketplace platforms
The second way to get closer to the trend is to see what are people selling at the moment.
You can go to the supplier website like AliExpress to see which kinds of products have had sales and which haven’t. Or you can also find out how those products sell recently.
AliExpress
In addition to checking the banners and different concepts of product activity sections on their homepage, you can enter one title of the item to search. Then you can see all the related products are shown below sorted by best match, orders, price, or the filter you set.
In this way, it’s easy for you to find what is the most popular that everyone is selling. But these will also come into others’ eyes when they search for the same thing. When you decide to dig deeper, you can combine multi-aspects like orders, star ratings, reviews, etc. together to evaluate the product.
Therefore, how about checking famous marketplace platforms like Amazon, eBay, and so on? Because they have a large market share in eCommerce and can provide excellent insights into what is popular in the market.
Especially, Amazon holds the largest market share, and a highly diversified product range, and the seller product page is updated hourly, isn’t it amazing?
.png)
Amazon Best Sellers
The Amazon Best Sellers calculation is based on Amazon sales and is updated hourly to reflect recent and historical sales of every item sold on Amazon. So, you can be sure that the findings are timely and in the right way.
They created category and subcategory best seller lists to highlight an item’s rank in their super diversified categories or subcategories where it stands out.
For example, if your niche is baby care, you can click into the specialized subcategory to find the trending items.
eBay Watch Count
eBay Watch Count is another useful tool for people to figure out what products to sell. It lets you see what the most popular items on eBay are.
You can search based on a keyword connected to your store or niche. For more specific results, just try to enter a more detailed description.
You can use Watch Count to find winning products for your online store. eBay continuously tracks users who add products to their watch lists and reports real-time results for different regions.
It’s ok if you don’t have a particular product or niche in mind yet, you can use Watch Count for inspiration! Under the tab “What’s Hot on eBay?” you will find lots of different products currently trending among eBay users.
Ⅲ. Use tool plugins to spy on product data
Spying on your competitors is the other golden rule to follow when you are looking for winning products.
But how? You need some useful tool websites to help you to do that. Watching what those successful and popular dropshipping stores are selling at the moment is an effective way to look for trending products. What’s more, you can also learn a lot from your competitors by studying their ads, their product collections, their store pattern, and so on.
Commerce Inspector
Commerce Inspector is a very powerful google plugin with many features and what’s important it is free to use!
You can spy on your competitor’s store by Commerce Inspector. You’ll have an overview of the store, including the traffic sources, product information, ads running, and apps used. Or you can go to the top products page to find the latest hot products and how the seller prices the product, as well as the product images, videos, and descriptions.
There are also find top posts, top products, and top e-commerce groups on the Trends page. You can set the period for the last 7 days, today, this week, last week, this month, and last month. From the top posts, you can see Facebook ads with the most engagement, so you’ll know what products are popular these days.
ShopiStores
ShopiStores is a tool to collect the best Shopify stores for you and it is also completely free!
It would show you a list of the best Shopify stores, including non-dropshipping stores, and they are ranked from high to low.
Just click on the store address and it will take you to the homepage of the store. The “Click Here” button will take you to the store’s best-selling product page directly.
Sellthetrend
Sellthetrend is considered by many dropshippers to be the best niche finder. The website is described as a “powerful 9-in-1 dropshipping tool”. It performs so comprehensively in its product analysis. and it is an excellent tool for finding trending products and patterns.
This software offers over two million active and trending products, with thousands added each day. By predicting based on product selection, Swllthetrend helps users to discover their specific winning products.
Ⅵ. Take advantage of social media
When you scroll down on your social media feeds, you might have come across some ads with an extraordinary amount of engagement. And this will be your inspiration to find the potential winning products!
Which social media app is your favorite? Tiktok? FB? Instagram? Youtube? All of them can be used to hunt for potential winning products!
Here I list 6 main social media platforms that have massive user bases and powerful social influence that you can take advantage of:
TikTok
Youtube
These social media platforms may aim at different target audiences and goals, the logic for you to use them to find the winning product is in common.
There will be various topics that go viral on the platforms every day since these topics resonated with thousands or millions of people successfully. Behind these trending topics, there’s a hidden chance for particular potential products to become popular overnight.
So you may find some product advertisements on social media have a superpower to attract and engage many people. People react, comment, tag others, and even share these ads.
One useful way is to search some trending tags or study those successful ads to see what people really care about and what are they paying attention to. Then you will know what kind of products can capture the interests of your potential customers.
Ⅴ. Offline surveys
The last way to find winning products is a more straightforward one. No need for your phones, no need for apps, even no need for the Internet-Simply go ask people around you, or go to the physical stores for surveys.
Research on physical stores.
Even though people’s shopping habits have changed a lot during COVID-19, people are still more likely to buy a product when they’ve seen it in person.
According to a survey from Harvard Business Review, shoppers who buy both online and in physical stores tend to spend more on average compared to those who interact with a business on only one channel.
So you can go to a physical store, to see what they are selling and what kind of product that people tend to finally take it home, and how they are interacting with the space and products
This kind of free-market research on not only the products but also your customers’ preferences and habits will significantly help you when you are choosing products to sell in your online store.
Do Surveysamong the people around you
Try to give out some questionnaires to your friends, and families when you start to find winning products.
They are the nearest “potential customers” around you. By asking their questions, you can get to know their shopping habit for your reference. Or you can invite them to test the product you are going to sell first, to collect their feedback, and to see if they like the product or not.
Compared to testing products after marketing, letting your friends test for you may save you a lot of money and lower the risk.
So much for the five methods on how to look for winning products. To sum up, the whole process is more like doing homework when you were a student at school. You may feel a little bit lost at first, but don’t worry because we all feel this way when we start to learn something new.
All you need to do is do some competitor research and pay attention to what people are talking about online recently, sure thing is that you can handle the skill and take your online business to the next level.
