How To Find Winning Products To Sell On Shopify?

Finding winning products to sell on Shopify is what's at the heart of a successful dropshipping business. With that in mind, we decided to make a guide that shows you how to find winning products.

1. What is a winning product?

If you want to sell a lot you've got to be selling something that a lot of customers want, that makes sense right?

So a winning product is just that, coupled with the fact that you're the one offering it, and also, hopefully, that not many other people are offering it. Roughly that's what a winning product is: something that you're selling that a lot of customers want and you're the first place they're finding it.

In short, it's a gold mine. But how do you find winning products? Well, to find them, you need to know where to look and how to spot them, so let's focus on spotting them for now, we'll go over where to look for winning products further along.

a) What makes a winning product?

To spot winning products to sell on Shopify we need to know what are the characteristics that winning products generally share.

Keep in mind that this doesn't mean that if a particular product doesn't meet each and every one of these criteria, it doesn't mean that it is not a winning product for selling, it very well may be, but you do need to consider these as guiding criteria that are going to help you find winning products.

i. Shouldn't be too easy to find

So this may seem a little counterintuitive for some people but it's true. Of course, you want to make it easy for your customers to find your product, right? But you don't want to be selling a product they can find easily anywhere else, because that means that now you have to offer your customers a reason to buy from you rather than somewhere else and that usually means you're gonna compete by offering a lower price than your competition or better delivery times.

· Lowering the price lowers your profit margins and that also limits your ad-spending budget.
· Achieving better delivery times is damn near impossible within a dropshipping model because it's just not up to you, is it?

This means that making sure a product for selling is not too easy to find will make your job a whole lot easier down the line, so keep this in mind.

ii. No advertising restrictions

Working with advertising restrictions can be tricky. Maybe you're used to it, if that's the case, then you know what we're talking about and know how to navigate these restrictions and still find ways to generate good copy for products with certain advertising restrictions but the most likely scenario is you're not familiar with them and you don't know what we're talking about.

So what exactly do we mean by advertising restrictions?

Well, take cigarettes and alcohol for example. These are very extreme examples but it helps to illustrate our point. But let's offer a less extreme example: supplements.

Did you know that even though some supplements can help you prevent or avoid certain diseases there are a lot of restrictions as to how you can sell and advertise them in order for the consumer not to confuse them with medicine?

It's a reasonable consideration. While it's true that selling these products may help you make up for a specific nutritional deficiency that may be causing you problems, if it's advertised incorrectly, it not only can potentially confuse consumers and also incur in fines or some other kind of penalties depending on the legal framework of any given country.

Navigating these restrictions and advertising your product correctly can be challenging, so it's preferable to look for products without such restrictions to sell.

iii. Wow Factor

Ideally, a winning product is one you shouldn't work hard on selling. And in the world of eCommerce and dropshipping that means finding products with a "wow factor" - products that are exciting, that demand attention, finding products that make consumers go "wow", hence the name.

Of course, that's the ideal scenario, but you may find very good products that don't make you go wow, but they're still eye-catching. Don't miss out on those! You can find great winning products there. So don't think of the wow factor so literally, think of it more in terms of a question: can I sell this effectively? If you believe the answer to that question is yes, then by all means, go ahead.

iv. Solves a problem

Generally speaking, finding products that sell well are products that solve a problem. That's not a hard rule, you see, one must remember that sometimes, some products that solve absolutely nothing can do well for a while (remember fidget spinners?) but even then, it's a good thing to think about, because even if you're considering selling a product that doesn't solve a problem, it's good that you at least know that, and you're making a conscious decision to sell that product anyway.

For the most part, though, stick to products that solve a problem. Usually, knowing what problem your product solves gives you a good idea as to who your target audience may be (to who is usually a problem?) and how to advertise your product (what's the pain point?).

v. Distinct

A product that is sufficiently distinct will help you stand out. This makes everything easier. From ads to conversion rates.

The logic behind this goes like this: if a product is distinct it stands out, therefore it's easier to make good performing ads for it and because it's a product different from others (and if you've been following this list it's also a product that is not so easy to find and that it solves a problem) well bam, a customer is likely to make an impulse purchase because they don't know how to find the product or if they'll ever come across your store again.

2. How to find winning products?

Now that you know how to spot winning products, we're gonna go into where to look for them and how to find them to later sell them on your Shopify dropshipping store. After all, the devil's in the details, so let's get to it.

a) Looking at best sellers

Looking at best sellers or finding the most watched or any of those sorts of lists that sites offer is a great way to get an idea of what people are buying, what they're looking at, and what they're looking for.

Now, people don't always know what they want, so keep that in mind when checking out this information. You would be wrong to assume "because a lot of people are looking at this then it must be a winning product". You need to consider everything we talked about in the previous section.

That said, yes, looking at these lists without making the wrong assumptions can help you learn a lot about consumers and find out offer information you wouldn't have imagined.

i. Oberlo

To get a good sense of what your competition may be selling, check out Oberlo, they constantly offer insights as to which products are selling, but do consider the fact that most of your competition is also getting this information.

For example, check out Oberlo's Top 20 Best-Selling Oberlo Dropshipping Products of 2020!

ii. Amazon

Amazon is a great place to turn to because it's such a tough competitor it almost makes it certain that whatever Amazon is selling well is something you shouldn't sell yourself unless you can compete with Amazon's price and delivery times which, let's face it, it's unlikely at best.

However, it can give you a good sense of what kind of things people are buying and this insight is going to be very helpful later on.

iii. eBay

Here you're more likely to find examples that are closer to what you may be considering selling. So do expect to find examples of winning products on this list. At the same time, it also helps you get a better sense of what kind of things people are buying online. That's the bottom line, what you're doing is getting ideas, and understanding the market.

Make sure you take a look at eBay's most-watched, not just those that are selling. Because that also gives you a good idea of which products grab the customer's attention.

vi. Wish

Each time we're getting closer, and what I mean by that is that here you're going to find a lot of products to sell that you'll see available to you later on when you're looking for products to import to your Shopify store. And, for example, many people that buy on Amazon don't go into Wish when they're shopping online, so you're already seeing products that a lot of Amazon users don't.

With each site you visit, the picture becomes clearer. That's the idea.

v. Your Competition

You may have already identified a few Shopify stores that you consider them competition based on what you're looking to sell or the audience that you're targeting... maybe a niche group? Whatever the case, do check out your competition.

This, presumably, is the closest you're going to get. If this indeed is your competition, you should be looking at something very similar to find what you're gonna be selling. If not, then maybe this isn't your competition.

Do note which accessories they're selling. What special offers discounts or other kinds of incentives are they offering?

If you don't know of any other Shopify stores that may be selling products similar to what you are selling, you may want to find out what's being sold on Facebook too. In this Dropshipping Guide, we found some good information on how to look for winning products on Facebook so check it out!

b) Take a dive

Ok, so now you've got a clear idea of what the market is like, what they're looking at, and what's selling. It's time to go to AliExpress and look for winning products that are being sold. You're gonna browse but you're also going to actively search for some of the products that you saw and that caught your eye on other sites. And you're gonna look at similar products.

Take a good long dive and try to go places you weren't expecting to go. Let yourself be surprised by what you find. You're here as an explorer, you're getting ideas anymore, you're out there, we're no longer doing theory, this is fieldwork.

c) Trust your gut

Like all crafts, you can't solely rely on theory to master it, you also have to develop an intuition for it which will get better over time and it's an element that you shouldn't dismiss. Trust your gut. If you're wrong, it will help you develop a better intuition next time, but if you're right, you stand to make a lot of money.

Of course, we're not saying "forget everything we've talked about just trust your gut". We mean that yes, consider all the things we've talked about but also use your own good common sense.

You're a person too, and you're a consumer. We all are. So deep down we all have an understanding of what a customer is looking for, what we did through all our research and our criteria for finding a winning product is narrowing things down so that they're easier to find, but the gut feeling is invaluable. A customer knows what a customer wants. Trust that.

d) Try the product

One thing is how things look on paper (or on a website, in our case), and another is how they actually are in the real world. So trying out the product you're selling is an essential part of finding a winning product that is already being sold. You've got to make sure that you're selling a good product that works as intended. Otherwise, you're risking having to offer refunds and hurting your store's reputation in such a bad way that your store may not be able to recover.

Oh, and one more thing...

e) Other considerations

There are a few things you may want to consider when looking for products to sell that will help you narrow things down further:

· Fragility - selling glass products may get damaged during shipping, for example, so you may want to steer clear of those.
· Size variation - selling clothes and other products like it offer complications that may result in customers sending products back and things like that because they don't quite fit them the way that they expected, so that's another thing to keep in mind.
· Supplier quality - you haven't found a winning product to sell until you've found a good supplier for it, so if you want to know more about how to find a good supplier, then do check out our post on that.

That's it. Thanks for reading. We hope we answered most of your questions and if you've got any remaining questions be sure to contact us, we'd love to hear from you.

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