The dropshipping business model is a lucrative one, something that demands a relatively small investment and when done right, can bring about serious return on investment.
This is particularly because there is very little risk involved in dropshipping. With dropshipping you don’t have to stock the product which drastically lowers your risk if you are not able to get a lot of sales.
With that said, lower risk does not translate to automatic success.
Since the financial barrier to enter into the dropshipping business is low, there is serious competition among dropshippers.
Standing out from this competition and making a profit involves a number of things like finding the right products, understanding your audience and finding the right targeting options with your advertising platform (Facebook or Google), and finally having a dropshipping store that communicates trust and credibility.
In this article, we will be discussing the first and perhaps the most important step to getting success with dropshipping- finding the right products.
However, before we start talking about the places where you can find products for your dropshipping store, let’s first look at a few products that you should avoid listing on your dropshipping store:
- Branded Products: Most brands issue a license to their authorized sellers. Selling their products without this license is illegal and will get you into trouble.
- Fragile Products: Dropshipping products sometimes travel hundreds of miles before reaching the buyer. Fragile products sometimes (or often, depending on how fragile the product is) break during this long transit, leaving you with the detestable task of processing refund requests and dealing with negative reviews of your store.
- Apparel: Apparel products are one of the most popular kinds of products on dropshipping stores, and for good reason. Many buyers will purchase clothes based on something as fleeting as a whim. With that said, a lot of times, there are frequent problems with size and returns, making clothing one of the most challenging types of products to manage with a dropshipping store.
Now that we know what you don’t want listed on your dropshipping store, let’s look at the attributes of a good or a ‘winning’ product:
- Usefulness: I’m not saying that things that aren’t useful don’t sell online. HOwever, as a new seller, it is much easier to make a profit with something that your audience needs to address a need or a problem in their life.
- Scarcity: If the product you are selling is also available at the local supermarket, you can assume it won’t sell a lot of pieces. Your objective should be to sell something that is not easily available.
- Margins: As a seller, setting the selling price in a way that you make some profit is necessary. However, you cannot set unrealistic prices (compared to your competitors) and expect to outperform them. THat’s why, you should look for products that offer the ability to secure a higher margin with the sale price.
- Authentic Supplier: For a dropshipping business, the suppliers can make or break the customer experience as they are the ones responsible for packaging, ensuring the product is truly up to the mark, and ensuring the product is delivered on time. This is why you need a supplier or a set of suppliers that take their business seriously and respect delivery deadlines.
While those criterias may seem like they are making dropshipping more complex than it needs to be, it is important to understand that the products you are selling are the lifeblood of your business.
Now, let’s look at where you can find winning products for your dropshipping store:
Use Yakkyofy To Find Products In Real Time
Yes, we chose to keep Yakkyofy on top, but it’s not only because this is the Yakkyofy blog, it’s because the product delivers real value.
The AI powered tool allows you to find products by simply using images that best represent your product. Backed by a database of 12 million+ products, Yakkyofy will provide you with the shipping and cost details of the same product, or a similar one from the database.
The best part is the ability to find almost any product is just one of the many features of Yakkyofy that are all designed to make life easy for dropshippers.
Here’s a detailed tutorial on all the ways you can use Yakkyofy to find dropshipping products online.
Here are a few places you can find products that you can run through the Yakkyofy AI, or find manually on a marketplace:
Competitor Websites
If you have identified your competitors, finding their winning products should not be too difficult.
Almost every one of your competitors will have a bestsellers section on their website. All you need to do is go to that section and find products that you want to sell.
The best part is that you don’t have to limit your research to the competitors that have a similar sized business as you. You can go on the websites of the top players in your niche and find products to sell in their trending sections.
Some big websites further categorize their popular products under more focussed categories, making it even easier to look for products that you want to sell. Finding the websites where you will find these products may take some time initially but rest assured that you won’t have to find such websites often.
After you have identified a few websites, you can routinely visit them to find new trending products.
Whenever you like a product, simply run it through Yakkyofy and you’ll be presented with the selling details of the product and the option to feature it on your store.
Amazon Bestsellers
Just like you find products on competitor websites, you can find trending or best selling products on the biggest ecommerce platform on the planet, Amazon.
This is a common place to find winning products and many dropshipping experts begin their search by scouring through the Amazon Bestsellers.
The biggest advantage of employing this strategy is that you can (almost) never run out of ideas. This is because the Amazon Bestsellers list is divided into numerous categories and each list is updated twenty four times a day.
You read that right, the Amazon Bestseller lists are updated every single hour, giving you free access to a virtually endless supply of dropshipping product ideas.
One of the apprehensions surrounding this strategy involves the insanely low prices of products being sold on Amazon.
You may be thinking that you cannot compete with that kind of pricing, and you might be right.
However, if a prospective buyer first comes across a product on your website (branded under a unique name), they are much more likely to make the purchase from you, even if they find the same product at a cheaper price on Amazon.
Branding is powerful when it comes to selling but it also has another hidden benefit for dropshippers. When you use unique branding and unique names for your products, it makes it slightly more difficult for your competitors to search for the winning products they find in your website’s bestsellers section.
Watch What Others Are Selling
This one of the easiest ways to ensure you are being fed a regular supply of hot selling product ideas. All you need to do is visit your competitor websites and even the big players’ websites in your niche and add products to your cart and leave.
Soon enough, you will see retargeted ads trying to sell you the products that you added to your cart. After some time, you will start seeing ads about similar products on your competitors’ websites.
Now all you need to do is evaluate these ads based on the engagement numbers. More engagements directly translate into popularity. In other words, if you find a product ad that has an unusual amount of engagement, chances are that you have stumbled upon a winning product.
All you need to do next is to add the said product to your store with the help of Yakkyofy.
Having said that, simply having a winning product on your store is only half the battle won. You must also ensure that you are targeting the right audience when you advertise the product. To ensure the same and develop a better understanding of the audience amid which the product is popular, all you need to do is manually scan the profiles of people that have engaged with the competitors’ ads.
Your objective here should be to gauge attributes that can help you find the right targeting for your ads.
Conclusion
Finding winning dropshipping products is not rocket science. In fact, with the right innovation mindset, finding winning products can be turned into a repeatable process that allows you to never run out of ideas.
This means, there are virtually endless ways to find winning dropshipping products. Did we miss out on mentioning your favorite tactic for finding winning products? Tell us (and everyone reading this article) about it in the comment section below.
Author Bio
Vaibhav Kakkar is the Founder and CEO of Digital Web Solutions , a globally trusted agency with a full suite of digital marketing services and development solutions. Vaibhav believes in building systems over services, and has helped scale up agencies from scratch to niche-leaders with million dollar turnovers.
