Finding a winning product in dropshipping is one of the most complicated task and yet, it’s also one of the most important.
How do you know that a product has the potential to be successful? I see far too many people who start dropshipping by completely neglecting this step.
Some will test dozens of products, sometimes even up to 100 products with Facebook advertising campaigns without finding a single winner and very often stop dropshipping by saying that it’s saturated.
Understandably, these people had spent too much energy testing products and too much money launching advertising campaigns. They will end up discouraged, and even disgusted with dropshipping…
The key is to test fewer products, but spend more energy in choosing them.
If you apply the right methods, you can even stop testing products altogether, freeing you more time to focus on your marketing.
Products to avoid in dropshipping
In order to avoid that your launch is a certain failure or brings you problems later on, you should in my opinion avoid the following products:
- Fragile products: a lot of orders will arrive broken at your customer’s premises, such as glasses or cups.
- Branded products: it’s illegal to sell such products without a licence. Also avoids counterfeits or products from films or series.
- Over-sold products: including products from an over-saturated niche such as watches, smartphone cases, dog and cat collars, etc.
- Clothes: lots of problems with size and returns, your customer service will be overloaded quickly.
In the end, maybe you think the choice is very limited, and I might agree with you, but it turns out it’s not at all.
The sales possibilities are still extremely numerous.
Criteria for a winning product
To find successful products to sell in dropshipping, I advise you to consider the following points in your search for the winner:
- Useful product: it will be much easier for you to sell products that meet one or more needs.
- Low availability: your product must not be available at the local supermarket. Indeed, why go online to buy what you can find 10 minutes from home?
- Wow effect: when we see your product, we have to tell ourselves that we absolutely need it, the new innovations are very strong for that.
- Interesting margins: you need to be able to make sure that to generate good margins in order to be profitable.
- Serious suppliers: you must also check the seriousness of your supplier so that he respects the delivery deadlines.
The ultimate way to find winning products
For finding the trendy products that sell the most in dropshipping, just go to the place where they are most promoted, i.e. Facebook.
The goal of this method is to use techniques and tricks to sort of straighten your news feed so that it shows you lots of dropshipping ads that hit the spot and gives you clues as to what’s working at the moment.
So you’re probably wondering, what’s the method? We’re going to see this together right now.
Essential extensions
Before you start, it’s important to install two very useful extensions for our Chrome browser.
One will allow us to display only ads on the Facebook News Feed and the other will allow us to retrieve information about the dropshipping shop that launched the ad campaign.
The first extension, Turbo Ad Finder is available for free download. It’s a must-have to boost the effectiveness of this method.
Very easy to use, just go to Facebook, click on the icon of the extension and then click on the button to activate it.
The second one is an extension you probably have, it’s the Facebook Pixel Helper which will allow us to retrieve the transaction id.
Become a committed user
When the first dropshipping ads appear on our News Feed, all you have to do is take the following actions to show Facebook that you want to see more of these types of posts:
- Watch the video if there is one.
- Save the post in the records via the publication options.
- Like the post, if possible, put a heart instead of the classic blue thumb to raise the level of engagement.
- Optionally, you can comment or share the publication, personally I never do.
- Finally, we click on the call to action button, e.g. « Buy now » to redirect us to the Shopify store that sells the product.
That’s it? No!
We can still take our level of commitment up a notch to show Facebook that we are active buyers. How? By simulating the purchase of a product.
The magic script
At this stage, Facebook will show us in the coming days and weeks many more dropshipping ads.
However, we can go even further by asking Facebook to be among the active buyers and thus have much better performing ads in our News Feed.
To implement this, we need the Facebook Pixel Helper previously installed and the following script :
fbq('track', 'Purchase', { content_type: 'product_group', content_ids: '[X]' , value: Y, num_items: 1, currency: 'USD', })You don’t need to understand this script to use it.
I’m going to show you how it works so you can make Facebook think you’re buying a product without actually buying it. To do this, simply follow these steps:
- Find an advertisement for a product sold in dropshipping.
- Access the product sheet by clicking on the call to action button.
- Add the product to the cart and start the ordering process.
- When we get to the page that asks for our confidential information, we open the Facebook Pixel Helper and look for the line content_ids in InitiateCheckout.
- Then we replace in the script the X by the content of the content_ids example 1097178961979, the Y by the value of the object and the currency by EUR – we don’t change anything if the shop is in dollars.
- The console is opened by right-clicking > Inspect and then Console.
- Finally we paste the script into the console and press Enter to validate.
No error messages? That’s perfect, you just faked a purchase.
Repeat the manipulation several times and Facebook will consider you an active buyer. You will then see more quality dropshipping ads and then see which ones work and which ones don’t by analyzing them.
The Aliexpress method
The Aliexpress method is a simpler method than the one seen previously but can be just as effective thanks to the hidden function of Aliexpress, the Dropshipping Center.
It’s however necessary to have an Aliexpress account to access and use it.
As a first step in this method, we need to find products that have already sold in bulk. Choose any category and sort the results by number of orders.
Copy the link of the product you are interested in, and paste it into the « Product Analysis » tab of the Dropshipping Center. Here’s an example of what you can get:
We may have some useful information.
First, we can analyse the evolution of sales – are they declining or growing strongly? You can also see the number of sales of the last few days by placing your mouse over the dots.
Repeat the process with several products that have thousands or hundreds of orders until you find a good product.
You can also visit the « Hot DS Items » tab, but this one is not yet fully developed.
The Ecomhunt tool to save time
Finally, there are several more or less expensive tools to find trendy products without too much effort. Ecomhunt has the advantage of being inexpensive and very powerful.
This tool allows you to easily find trendy products with several very useful information such as the Aliexpress supplier or a promotional video of the product.
A free version is available to test the tool to get an idea. Alternatively, you can pay $20/month for full access to the tool.
What remains cheap for a service that finds you products that can make you big money!
It’s important to understand that not every product on Ecomhunt is a winner at this time.
Some of them may have been successful months ago. However, I would advise you to do a thorough analysis of the products you select.
To discover my complete review on this great tool, you can read my article : Ecomhunt – Review: New Winning Products Every Day!
Go for it!
Now, the best way for you to find winning products is to apply these few actions quickly.
However, it takes a lot of time, time that not everyone has. And just like Ecomhunt, there are others sourcing tools to find big potentials.
Don’t forget the tips for selecting your product, it will save you a lot of unpleasant surprises!
