How To Find Products For Dropshipping – Step by Step Guide
If you are new to dropshipping then finding dropshipping product ideas is definitely challenging, not to mention that product should gain profits for your business. Wrong niche, or should we say unsuitable products is one of the top reasons that ruined most of dropshipping businesses.
Looking for a great product that suits the concept of your store can be a daunting task because you will probably get overwhelmed by an enormous number of products floating on the market. But there’s nothing to be worried about! In order to help you and make the process much easier, we have created this article to provide the answers to all of your questions related to how and where to find ideal products.
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1 – Where to find dropshipping product ideas
The first step is where brainstorming happens. Sit down with your team and list down the types of products you want to dropship. Generally, 5 or more dropshipping product ideas are a good starting point.
If you don’t know where to begin, you can check the following sources to get inspired and find dropshipping product ideas:
Other Online Stores
You can find profitable products by analyzing what other dropshipping websites are selling, especially big ones. The technique here is to browse other online stores’ best-selling products, trending items, and even the least selling items to gauge what to include and exclude in your dropshipping products list.
Understand why certain products are popular and why others are not. Use that analysis to your advantage. Here are some links from the most popular eCommerce stores to find dropshipping products:
- Amazon’s Best Sellers
- Amazon’s New & Interesting Finds
- eBay’s Trending on eBay
- Alibaba’s First Look at Next Season’s Products
Online Community Sites
Online community sites display relevant behavior, interests, and opinions that you can’t find elsewhere. This is why you need to browse and explore popular online community sites such as Facebook pages to find dropshipping product ideas. Here are some online communities that you need to look at for drop shipping products:
- I Want One
- Insider Pages
- I Want That
- Best Products
Social Shopping Sites
Social shopping sites work typically like an online store but with consumer recommendations in a social network environment. It centers around communities of social network users who share similar interests and rely on other people’s opinions. You can get more dropshipping product ideas from social shopping sites such as:
Local Communities
Don’t go somewhere else, look around your local neighborhood. There could be local stores waiting to be an online success. Begin by finding what the locals are raving about. Visit community bazaars, food parks or thrift stores. There could be products that are worthy for your drop shipping business.
2 – Determine the Perfect Product Price Range
When coming up with dropshipping product ideas, determining your product price range is an essential aspect to consider. You have to find a balance between selling marketable products and being able to generate a profit.
Generally, the lower the price, the better the conversion rate is. Higher priced products like gadgets or digital items, for instance, would require more buying consideration from shoppers and entail more customer support.
Some eCommerce experts say that a price range from $100 to $200 or $75 to $150 will be a profitable range already. The reason behind is if you try to sell products lower than that price range, you need to sell more units. This means you need to attract more customers in order to generate a good profit.
However, your target location should also be a consideration. For instance, a $75 product may not be that expensive for people living in the US but it’s already a lot for some Asian countries. In any case, try to find a price range that for every sale, it will cover the cost of sourcing and marketing. Plus, it will return a nice profit margin.
3 – How to select the best products to dropship
Now that you’ve listed the dropshipping product ideas, this step is where you will filter your ideas to decide which products are the most feasible to sell online.
Narrow Down Your Product Ideas
Based on your shortlisted product ideas, ideally 5 or more, you can trim down your dropshipping product ideas by using Google Trends or Keyword Tools.
How to Use Google Trends to Compare Dropshipping Product Ideas
Google Trends is a platform used to determine the frequency of a particular search term parallel to its search volumes. By using Google Trends, you will get a visual representation of how particular products trend over time and how they are performing compared to other products.
Here’s a step-by-step product idea comparison guide using Google Trends:
1) Compare five dropshipping product ideas: Google Trends only permits up to 5 search terms at a time.
2) Customize comparison: Based on the available four filters above, you can customize how you want your product ideas to be compared to the following:
a) Country – Choose a global view by selecting ‘Worldwide’ or narrow down by a specific country. But, you can’t filter by region (e.g.: Southeast Asia) or continent (e.g.: Asia). However, you can explore results by subregion, see it on the next steps.
b) Time Range – Custom time range based on how recent or how old the archives you want to include. Pre-filled options include ‘Past 12 months’, ‘Past hour’, or ‘Past day’.
c) Category – Refine the data based on a specific category, such as Arts & Entertainment, Finance, Food & Drink, and a lot more. There’s also a category called ‘Shopping’. Under a category, there are also sub-categories.
d) Source – Filter the source of data where the user searched for the term. Available options are Web Search, Image Search, News Search, Google Shopping or Youtube Search.
3) Interest Over Time – The numbers represent search interest relative to the highest point on the chart for the given region and time. You can hover over the trend line to see the data points for each search term.
4) Compared breakdown by subregion – The color intensity represents the percentage of searches for the leading search term in a particular region. Hover over a region to get more details on search volume in a region.
Find Your Niche
Still using Google Trends, you can find a specific product niche for your dropshipping business. Each of the search team will be presented with an in-depth analytics for you to help narrow down your product idea and find your niche. Here’s how:
Scroll down to your desired search term. Let’s take for example ‘sunglasses’.
The ‘Related Queries’ box will display the terms that users also looked for in relation to your search term. You can filter by ‘Top searches’ or ‘Rising searches’. It’s recommended to use the ‘Rising searches’ as these are the terms which had the most significant growth in volume in the requested time period. If you see “Breakout” instead of a percentage beside the related query, it means that the search term grew by more than 5000%.
Let’s take for example I am interested to learn more about ‘clout sunglasses’ because of its significant growth. Click on the related query and then you will see the interest over time.
You can see that the interest for clout sunglasses is piquing tremendously. You can validate the search volume using a keyword tool such as Google Keyword Planner. As a rule of thumb, you should keep away from products that have little (less than 500 monthly searches) or no search traffic at all. Find the right equilibrium between search volume and competition.
Evaluate the Competition
To effectively choose the best product for drop shipping, you also need to know what the level of competition looks like. Although you may be considering for niche products, don’t think that you’re the only one who can come up selling them.
Here’s what you can do to evaluate the competition: using Google Search, input your product in the search key and look at the results page. Say, for example, our clout sunglasses earlier.
Based on the results page, you can already identify your competitors which actively advertise the product. Alternatively, you can use the Image Search to look at how many online stores have the similar product for sale.
List down your possible competitors. This is also the best time to check their pricing strategy. Say, for instance, if you check the UVLAIK clout sunglasses in AliExpress, there are already more than 7600 orders made and it’s sold for just $3.06 per piece. But, if you check the same brand on eBay, it’s being sold for $8.79 + $2.49 shipping cost.
If you can be more competitive with your pricing, then consider the product on your list. But, if you can see that you have a huge competitor for a product idea and they offer a much affordable pricing strategy that you cannot offset, then cross that out from your list.
4 – Where to locate dropshipping suppliers
With a drop shipping model, you will need an agreement with manufacturers or distributors that will drop ship your products on your behalf. At this point, you will need to locate for legit dropshipping suppliers. You can locate dropshipping suppliers through the following:
Contact the Manufacturer
Try to contact the manufacturer first. Starting at the source will give you the possibly lowest prices. For some dropshipping products, you can buy them directly from the manufacturer. This is how traditional brick and mortar stores operate — they purchase from the manufacturer directly.
Some manufacturers have minimum order requirements. If you don’t meet this, ask if they have a list of distribution channels instead. The idea is the fewer supply chain you have to go through, the lower your cost will incur. This allows you to be more competitive when selling your dropshipped products.
Online Wholesalers/Distributors
Locate wholesalers or distributors online. A supplier’s online presence is a good sign for your online business. The following sites contain domestic or overseas directories.
- Alibaba – has available regional suppliers from 17 countries.
- AliDropship – with 100К+ trusted suppliers and 100 million products available.
- Kompass – represented over 70 countries worldwide across industries.
- Wholesale Central – over 1,400 suppliers with 740,000 products
- Doba – with 165 suppliers and over 1.5 million products
- Worldwide Brands – over thousands of wholesalers and over 10 million products
When deciding on the best suppliers, make sure that you check their reputation, quality, efficiency, and of course, pricing. Here’s how you can spot if you’re going to be profitable from a dropshipping supplier for a particular product.
Say, for instance, you want to sell elastic headbands. Check on Amazon for available products. Via Amazon’s site, you can check the demand for a particular brand by looking at their best sellers.
Now that you have a particular product, go to a supplier’s site. Let’s go to Alibaba, for example, and check if this bestseller elastic headband is available in its supplier’s list.
By doing so, you can already compare the prices of the supplier versus an online seller. You can see that the elastic headband is sold at $0.5-1.5 from the supplier while Amazon is selling the same product for $9.99. Do the math and you’ll see how much profit Amazon is generating for every product sold.
To make it easier for you to fulfill orders, you can use Spocket, an e-commerce plug-in with thousands of dropshipping suppliers from the US and Europe. This application allows you to import products you like, process your orders and have the items quickly shipped to your customers with only a few clicks (with branded invoices).
5 – Closing terms and deals with suppliers
Lastly, finding the best products for drop shipping includes the relationship you’ll have with your suppliers. This means that you have to close the terms of agreement first to gauge the fulfillment and delivery service. If you can’t agree with clear-cut terms with the supplier, it’ll be a headache in the future.
Request for quotation
You need to request for quotation, often called RFQ. It is a regular business process that serves as an invitation to suppliers to bid on particular dropshipping products or services.
Your RFQ must include all important parameters in your dropshipping business. The most essential ones are the following:
- Price per item or per unit of service
- Quantities/Volumes/Minimum Order Values
- Quality Levels
- Delivery requirements
- Terms and conditions
Visit the Project Management Hut to get a list of the most common contract types and negotiation terms.
Discover the best dropshipping product ideas
That’s pretty much all the necessary information you need to source for suitable products. If you already have some awesome ideas in your mind then let’s create a dropshipping website with ShopBase right now to sell your amazing products.
But if you’re still wondering and can not make up your mind, ShopBase has also offered you 3 powerful product sourcing apps so that you can have more choices to pick.
Good luck!