I came across this question How To Choose The Best Items To Dropship from a forum which is quite common about people who just started dropshipping.
The great thing about dropshipping is that you are not really hugely impacted if you chose the wrong item as compared to someone keeping inventories. Of course, there are several tools like google trends, competitors website research or eCommerce platform research that you can do to increase your chances of success. Do understand that best items trends are ever-changing regardless of how much homework you have done and you have to adapt accordingly
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What Are The Best Items To Dropship
Based on my experience, the best items to dropship are those that are you can sell at $20 or less and still make a healthy profit margin. If you are someone like me who does not like to shop online, it may be a challenge to have a pulse of what is happening in the eCommerce world. There is an easy way to overcome this if you are dropshipping on platforms like Qoo10 or Shopee.
[Related Article: How To Dropship In Qoo10]Let’s use Qoo10 as an example. I would use a scattergun approach to understand what sells and what does not. Let’s say you are listing 1000 items from Aliexpress or Banggood. You love fashion and have in-depth knowledge of that. It will be a bad move to just focus all the 1000 items in the fashion category.
The main advantage of having a dropshipping store with 1000 items is to be as diversified as possible like a value shop or mini-mart. If you are focusing on just one niche and it is not popular and too competitive, you may waste all your time and effort listing them in your store. Check out the video below on how I dropship thousands of items from Aliexpress to Qoo10.
Choosing A Few Popular Niches
Let’s go back to where I mentioned about items that will sell well and cost less than $20. The main reason is that most Singapore buyers would may emotional purchases at this price point. However, it must be within a niche that interests them. Below are some of the niches you can consider exploring
- Hobbies – Badminton, Gardening, Cooking
- Home Improvement
- Fashion Accessories
- Consumer Electronics
- Beauty Care
- Automobiles & motorcycles
- Toys
- Sports
- Babies & Kids
What Products Are Trending
Based on the several niches mentioned above, you will notice they are quite broad. So you have to go into sub niches. For this example, I will use Aliexpress and choose the automobiles & motorcycles category. You will notice that there are multiple sub-niches for you to explore
If you are not sure which sub-niche to use, you can basically research what are the hot selling items from the main niche. The good thing about Aliexpress is that it shared a lot of information on what are most items sold for that particular niche right now.
If you look at the image below, I normally will check that box that ensures the box has at least 4 stars review and I will sort by the number of items sold. When you scroll down, you basically can shortlist a bunch of items to dropship in your store. Aliexpress has done the job of helping you to identify what items are hot selling at this moment. You should be able to replicate this strategy on other retail suppliers.
Google Trends
Another useful tool I will use is google trends. You can just google “google trends” or you can access it from here. Everyone knows Google is the biggest search engine in the world which means it has the most accurate data of what is trending right now.
Let’s say you want to drop ship a car charger. A search in google trend over the past 12 months shows that it is quite a popular product and the demand is quite constant and trending up. You can also choose different countries and time span.
Just in case you are confused about how to read the chart. A value of 100 is the peak popularity for the term. I would normally go for products that are at least constantly above 60 for past 12 months to ensure there are enough demand for the product I want to dropship.
The powerful thing about this free tool is that when you scroll down, it will also show you the related popular topics and queries based on what you are searching for. These are all useful information that you can use to discover the Best Items To Dropship
How Do I Find Good Products For Dropshipping
If you are still overwhelmed on how to find good products for dropshipping, the next option will be looking at what your competitors are doing. If you are doing dropshipping using Shopify. you definitely have to use paid ads to target potential buyers to your site.
Social Media Platforms
Common products ads will be on Facebook, Instagram. Keep a constant lookout on what ads are showing at your feed and how much response are they getting. You can also try to search for buy term keywords in facebook like 30% off or buy it now etc.
Shopify Competitor Research
Let’s say you are deciding to sell pet hamster items. You will want to learn from successful Shopify stores. You can basically do a search like hamster shop or hamster store. Glance through those stores and avoid big branded stores that you can recognise.
Your target is smaller eCommerce stores. Compile a list and go to myip.ms to see how many visitors the site is getting on a daily basis. Any sites that have more than 1000 visitors a day is something you will want to learn from
Ecommerce Platform Competitors Research
Let’s say you are dropshipping without a website. Then most probably the most effective way will be doing reverse product engineering to find out what your dropshipping competitors are selling in Qoo10 or Shopee. You will be able to find out what is selling well and even their profit margin using this method. You can check out the full strategy here.
Conclusion on How To Choose The Best Items To Dropship
Learning How To Choose The Best Items To Dropship is not something that you can catch on immediately from the start if you just started out in your dropshipping business. However, it should get easier as you start to sell some items and have a better feel of what is trending out there.