Jul 19, 2022 · 20 min read
The worldwide dropshipping market was worth USD 102.2 billion in 2018 and is predicted to grow at a CAGR of 28.8 percent between 2019 and 2025. Since 2010 when AliExpress launched, this $1.5 Billion industry has experienced rapid growth, and this is due to its accessibility and relatively low risk.
However, despite its rapid growth and ever-increasing scope, dropshipping is not a walk in the park. According to Adam Enfroy of BigCommerce, 'it's a lot of work, no matter how you slice it.' Dropshippers must still do business with their wholesale suppliers, order processing returns, and render premium customer services. We dropshippers need all the help we can get, and a good place to start will be free dropshipping product research tools to scale our businesses.
In this article, I will walk you through six of the best dropshipping tools you can lay your hands on for free and explain how they can assist you in effortlessly locating winning and viral products on Shopify, Aliexpress, and other vendors.
But before that, let's cover some salient points:
Finding the right products to offer in a dropshipping business is one of the most challenging problems for an online merchant. Figuring out what customers want is a mind twister; it might feel like you are playing Russian roulette with your doubts. That is why conducting product research for your dropshipping business is critical.
Identifying your target audience's requirements, expectations, and challenges not only helps you understand them better but also assures that you're building a product or service that will have a genuine influence on the market.
Winning dropshipping products are simply those that your target audience adores and sell like hotcakes.
Below are essential characteristics of such products:
Now that that's out of the way, let's get into the crux- how to research winning products?
Google Trends is a popular free tool for determining if a product's popularity will increase or decrease. Enter the product's name into Google Trends, and you'd be fed with accurate data showing its popularity over a designated period. The image below, for example, is the result I got when I searched 'nose mask.'
It's past its prime, so pouring your money into it wouldn't be wise - Maybe some twelve months ago.
Study Customers' Demand
This may sound apparent, but you must go after products that customers desire!
Study seasonal patterns. Ensure you constantly monitor products that regularly sell throughout the year or have a regular selling season that you can pounce on.
Focus on Useful Products
Always keep an eye out for products that are useful and solve consumers' day-to-day issues. Neck mobile phone holders, for example, have been popular in recent years since they provide an alternative to holding a phone to your ear for extended periods.
Give Attention to Low-priced Items
The distinction between high- and low-ticket products is straightforward: a low-ticket item is just a low-priced product, such as a sock or plate racket, that will not provide a large profit margin for the seller. High-ticket products, such as furniture, command higher costs and carry higher returns (but also higher risks) for the store.
When dropshipping, it's best to focus on selling low-ticket items because buyers are much more inclined to buy these items at the spur of the moment, resulting in more enormous sales volumes and profits. When it comes to high-ticket goods, consumers will want more time to make a judgment and much more help from you, which means you'll spend more time dealing with client queries, which may not end up converting to sales.
Choose Items Not Subject to Any Advertising Limitations
You'll probably make most of your sales through advertising, especially if you're just getting started with your store. Make sure you're not selling things that can't be advertised on major ad platforms. Ads for face masks, for example, are not permitted on Facebook or Google. Examine what Facebook and Google have to offer in terms of ad policies to prevent unpleasant surprises.
Proceed to the Marketing Funnel of Your Competitors
Begin frequent visits to your competitors' websites. Add a few items to your cart and then abandon it. You should start seeing adverts from your competition on your social media sites soon. Take care to save the print screens for subsequent examination.
Product Research
SimplyTrends is a full-featured Shopify-focused data analysis tool for e-commerce sellers. It comes first on the list because I've found it to be the most comprehensive and easy-to-use dropshipping product research tool anywhere on the internet.
With SimplyTrends, you can find winning products straight away, or foresee potential ones across the Internet with unparalleled insights. Below are the three ways you can grab profitable hot products with just a keyword input with this complete tool.
With SimplyTrends you can find the hot-selling products in real-time by staying in the loop of the products that are actually selling across 1 million Shopify stores. With just one click, you will get to know the accurate number of prices, orders, ranks and revenues, and other details of products.
From a list of profitable ads across social media platforms, you can get inspiration on what products are trending in the market. Meanwhile, you can learn how they are selling by checking the ad details and visiting the product page. These are all presented on one page of SimplyTrends for your convenience.
SimplyTrends also demonstrates real-time trends on Google for you. Through a glance at the data of how many times the product is being searched, you can easily judge whether it is hot-selling for the time being. Moreover, an array of information such as CPC, SEO difficulty, and competition level can help you make the right marketing decision.
Other Key Features
Discover Competitors:
You can hunt all Shopify stores and products you are competing with, and review their performance, marketing, and product strategy to sharpen your competitive edge.
Track Competitors:
With just a click on the follow button, you will be informed when your competitors take any action- from product launch to Facebook ads publish, in a twitter-like feed.
Find Suppliers:
Drop an image of products and you can instantly find suppliers direct from factory AliExpress, with key information like prices, orders, and customer ratings for your quick and easy reference.
Pros
Cons
Sell The Trend was explicitly created to assist people in locating lucrative dropship products. It collects data by looking at hot products on Amazon and reviewing sales data from high-performing Shopify and AliExpress sites.
Sell The Trend is capable of much more than simply locating products. It has unique features that allow you to import goods into your Shopify or WooCommerce online store. Also, Sell The Trend includes a Facebook ad audience builder and access to a dropshipping program.
Key Features
The Nexus
According to their official website, the Nexus enables you to "Learn what your competitors are selling and how they're pricing their products— plus a lot more!"
The Nexus product research feature allows you to filter and sort trending or popular items. Hot Products, Trending Products, On The Rise, New Products, All Products, Hot Stores, and Trending Stores are the various sections of the Nexus tab.
Nexus, which the company commonly regards as their next-generation AI analysis tool, analyses 26 data points for each competitor and product, giving more sophisticated insights than just about every other dropshipping platform.
Learn which goods are popular, how much rivalry there is in the niche, which niches have an opportunity to develop, and how to price your products so you can create a comfortable profit from your business. You should check it out.
The Explorers tab is divided into four sections: AliExpress, Amazon, Shopify Products, and Shopify Stores. This feature displays information that is comparable to your Nexus findings. You'll be given a list of the most popular goods on Amazon, AliExpress, and some Shopify sites.
Many online retailers are currently into drop shipping, so you should take advantage of this Explorer. You can easily find the best-selling goods on AliExpress, Shopify, and Amazon by going to their respective websites on Explorer.
The My Stores page is divided into five sections: Products, Orders, Import List, Notifications, and Connect Store. It serves as a repository for where you can effortlessly import the trending and winning items you found using Sell The Trend.
Sell The Trend may be linked to your WooCommerce or Shopify store. You may add goods to your store as easily as the press of a button. When you're not using the Sell The Trend dashboard, you may import items from AliExpress using the Chrome extension.
Pros
Cons
EcomHunt is easily one of the most effective free dropshipping product research tools there is. It is well rated due to the wide range of data it delivers to store owners. When selecting a product to sell, you must obtain as much information on the item as possible, and this is where EcomHunt comes in.
EcomHunt relieves the hassle of looking for hot and fast selling products online. Instead, you can concentrate on other aspects of your e-commerce business as it regularly refreshes various items for its users.
Whenever you search for a product on EcomHunt, you will see the following results:
Key Features
With the data offered by EcomHunt, you can easily know how well a product is selling and how to effectively set up Facebook advertisements that will help you push them to the appropriate target market.
This not only assists you in finding and selling items in the key categories (fashion, electronics, cosmetics, etc.), but it can also assist you in finding niche products in less-popular categories.
This is used to propose selling prices based on expected expenses and profit margins. The Profit and Cost Indicator tool, as the name suggests, does a breakdown of how much you'd get the product from the store and what selling price you should maintain to sustain a healthy profit margin.
Still, to provide you with as much information on products as possible, EcomHunt provides interaction statistics, such as total likes and comments on paid adverts. This feature displays the interaction of Facebook advertising without redirecting you to the social network to view the ad.
Pros
Cons
This is a versatile tool for spying on other Shopify stores and gaining helpful insight into your niche's best-selling products. Consider CommerceInspector to be a legitimate means of tracking and spying on your competitors. This tool is available as a web-based app or a free Chrome extension. Shopify store owners can monitor competitors without violating privacy or data security rules.
Commerce Inspector is heavily reliant on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Google Analytics to collect data. Commerce Inspector employs a tailored AI system to identify market trends and consumer insights and has the assistance of Google Analytics in gathering data from many sources.
It can track and discover the following types of data:
Key Features
Through their sales data analysis, you may find out how many products are sold each month and how much money is made — for as many businesses as you like. Although detailed sales analysis is not offered on the free chrome extension, notable features such as shop level revenue, product-level revenue, last week's bestsellers, and more are present on the premium paid versions.
The tool is quite helpful in locating the finest products on the internet. However, if you use its free version, you will notice that many of the products are locked. This is because they are premium goods and can only be accessed by premium members.
You may look for goods by category and sub-category. Toys, beauty and health, family, and pets are among such categories. Commerce Inspector will also allow you to categorize your searches into various sections once you've received the search results. These include the most recent goods, the most orders, the most Facebook Ads, the most Facebook Ad likes, the most Facebook Ad shares, and the most Facebook ad responses.
Pros
Cons
Thieve. co is an online inventory of renowned AliExpress goods and manufacturers. What it does is carefully pick items from a variety of categories and niches from such manufacturers. Thieve. co was specifically designed with eCommerce and dropshipping business owners in mind as it gives expert ideas on what products to sell.
Initially, viewing the inventory on the platform required you to sign up. Now, a sign-up is no longer necessary to view all of the items, although by signing up, you gain access to "exclusive stuff." Thieve. co-exists, among other things, to assist you in identifying products and reliable manufacturers that have previously been verified and are safe.
Thieve items are handpicked by a global collection of creatives, including bloggers, photographers, and designers. Because of massive economies of scale in production and reductions in intermediary expenses, wholesale manufacturers may offer items directly to customers all over the world at far lower rates than are generally paid in stores. Thieve connects you with such manufacturers.
Key Features
In general, hand-selected items offer significant benefits in quality and pricing. To begin with, the timeliness of products, which is what this feature helps you see, is an essential factor that sellers must consider; otherwise, there is no rationale behind ranking niches by "trending" or "latest," since only a few goods in the world are always trending; most of them trend for a short period and then fall out of favor.
If you place a potentially hot product on your shelf just before it becomes viral, you will almost certainly take the chance and earn handsomely. But if you didn’t foresee this opportunity, it will be almost impossible to catch up after the product has taken off. That's what makes this tool so important - it puts you ahead of the pack as a drop shipper.
In Thieve, even without paying, there are quite a several products at your disposal. However, the particular number is never shown, nor is there a page selection button. So, all you're left with is to scroll and keep scrolling down the endless list of products. By the time you get to the end of a page checklist, new products would have loaded so you can scroll further. While not knowing the total number might be a bit of an issue, there is no denying that Thieve has a very powerful product database.
Pros
Cons
The Niche Scraper is a very effective dropshipping and product research tool. It allows you to browse other Shopify sites and identify winning products. It simply saves you time and conducts all of the research for you to concentrate on selling your goods.
Shopify Store Search
With this feature, you can quickly find all of the winning goods of any shop of your choice and their expected income. This strategy may be pretty beneficial in obtaining top-selling goods from your competitor's store. With this feature, all you have to do is input a keyword to access all the newly added winning items directly from the best performing Shopify stores globally. You can also apply multiple filters to obtain the most exact search result.
To sum up
In summary, this Niche Scraper's feature helps you locate the top-selling goods and consequently lands you higher sales conversions and ROI. Furthermore, each product has insightful product descriptions which are highly beneficial to users.
SimplyTrends is a toolkit for Shopify and dropshipping business at every scale.
You can discover, spy and track any Shopify store, find real-time winning ads, find suppliers with image search, and there are just so much more. Explore all features in SimplyTrends
In SimplyTrends, everything is intuitive. Start to find, track and monitor your competitors in just 3 steps.
Sure thing! We gather real-time profitable winning ads while you can also search for keyword-related winning ads.
We've also visualized active ads over time on a graph so that you can anticipate the trend beforehand, and recognize whether it's a winning product. Try it now.
Of course, and it's FREE FOREVER!
SimplyTrends is a great combination and upgrade of all Shopify related Chrome extensions. Spy on any Shopify stores with store-level and product-level insights, and scrape products in bulk from Shopify-powered stores instantly with a few clicks.
It also runs on AliExpress page for scraping digitals at the best quality, and capture ads on any Facebook page you are browsing at the moment. Pin it to your browser now.
We analyze millions of searches, conversations and mentions across the Internet to ensure our data are accurate. But some data are estimated, for example, the revenue of a store.
We have a dedicated support team available for all your questions and needs. If you need anything, simply shoot us an email at hello@simplytrends.co.