8 Free Research Strategies to Find Trendy, Hot Dropship Products to Sell & Scale

How confident are you that the products you have on your store are hot dropship products? What is the likelihood of those products becoming consistent profitable sellers for your dropship business?

How much of your product selection was guess work?

Do you feel it’s a hit and miss process of choosing trending, hot dropship products to retail online?

If so, today’s article will help you navigate through 8 research strategies you can use for free, without any paid tools, to find your next proven product. From there you can launch a campaign to consistently sell & scale your hot dropship products through your dropship store, ebay store, Amazon listings, or anywhere else.

First let’s briefly discuss the two major approaches I’ve seen thousands of dropship retailers take over time to source and list products for sale so you’re clear about which one is the best.

2 Approaches to Sourcing Hot Dropship Products

After working with thousands of students across the globe the past 15 years, the two types of approaches people take when choosing products to sell online are:

1- The Gamble Approach

First, most newbies take the “slap it up on the site and let’s see” approach. This approach is something you might be doing right now. Don’t feel bad though. Many people do it without knowing there is a far better way to sell dropship products online.

If you’re just randomly sourcing in hundreds to thousands of product to your store from places like AliExpress, Oberlo, Spocket, eComHunt, Dropify, and so forth, I’d suggest stopping. There’s no better way of putting it. I’m not saying there isn’t a time use those product middle-men, but it’s better to do some market and product research first along with getting approved with USA dropship suppliers directly. Doing so will save you a ton of money and time.

2- The Investigator Approach

The 2nd, less common, but better approach to take, is the “investigator” approach by following the 8 product research strategies below. The following eight product research steps are what I teach all of my students how to implement with excellence.

For example, when I mentor any student through my 7-phase DropshipXLerator program, each student learns how to find the hot, trendy products for their niche audience. From there they learn how to launch marketing campaigns starting with Google Shopping ads. Finally, they learn from the campaign analytics data to make data driven decisions to increase their return on ad spend (ROAS).

Let’s learn the 8 product research strategies now.

8 Step Checklist to Finding & Selling Hot Dropship Products

If you’re just getting starting with dropshipping, you should know that there will always be an element of “let’s see what happens” when marketing even the hottest dropship products on the planet. Why? Because you need to invest in marketing data to truly know what works for you.

To become a dropship success you’ll want to learn how to target your audience effectively by first finding proof that the products they want to buy are highly desired, aka in high demand, and can make you a profit. I also highly suggest doing this product & competitor research before building your dropship store.

1- Find Competitors Selling the Same Trending Product

The first step to finding trending, hot dropship products to sell is to model after success. In other words find as many other online retailers selling the exact same product you want to sell. From there learn how they are presenting and marketing that product. And then see if you can do better!

To find product competitors you can research those retailers on Google Shopping, eBay, Facebook, Amazon and any relevant competitor website and document the website URL’s of those competitors of that exact product. From there you can use website analysis services like SpyFu to discover even more data about what keywords they are using, the ads they are running, other popular products, etc.

Observe all those URL’s you documented during your competitor research and learn HOW your competition is presenting their best product online for sale. Ask yourself, could you do better? If the product is already selling daily without it being presented professionally, this gives you an opportunity to generate even better sales volume if you can present the product professionally yourself.

To competitively sell your product better than your competition you need to understand how to present & market your product better with clearer images, video demos, more relevant product info, customer support, installation services, financing, etc.

After you gather all the facts you can about your product, think and document all the things that the end-consumer will really care about before buying that product from you and implement it. This is how you can out-compete the competition to produce far higher sales volume compared to if you don’t.

2- Learn From Trending Product Customer Reviews

If a customer loves buying a product you’re most likely going to see a higher volume of trending product reviews online. It’s true that not every product purchased online results in a posted customer review. But the bottom line here is to simply read the product reviews on any site to learn how people like the product and what they don’t like. Document your results to review later.

3- Confirm Hot Dropship Products Directly With Your Dropship Supplier

If you think about it, the #1 person who will know what products are hot and flying off the shelf is your dropship supplier who physically stocks the inventory. If you’re working with dropship suppliers directly, like I teach and train all my students on how to do, then it’s a simple call. You’d want to take your conversation with your supplier a bit further to confirm the top 10 hottest products that have been proven to sell daily if possible within the past 12 months. Document that list when done and implement the rest of what you learn today on that list you confirm with your supplier.

4- Learn from Competitors Paid Ads For The Product On Facebook

This product research strategy is based upon the timeless principle of what we discussed earlier, modeling after success. What you’ll want to do here is head on over to facebook.com and look up the name of each competitor’s facebook page. Click on the Page Transparency link and see if that competitors has or is running paid ads for the product you are vetting. Observe & learn as much as you can about their product ads, read the reviews, comments. From there take what you learn and add it to the context of everything else you have learned so far to determine if it would be worth your time marketing that product yourself.

5- Verify a Growing Product Trend

Reviewing historical trends for any specific product will help you discover if your product is on the rise, if it’s a seasonal product, and help you better assess when best to market the product for better sales volume.

There are two great tools I like to use to verify product trends. One is the blackbox Amazon tool here. And the other is to check the historical trends of the product on Google Trends.

Simply look up the name of your product and analyze the historical trend from different time ranges such as the past 12 months, the past 2 years, 4 years, and so forth. Take note of what you learn. Also research product trends in the specific country you plan on marketing your product to. Don’t look at the product trends world-wide if you are not planning on a global marketing campaign.

6- Examine Amazon Product Reviews & Sales

If the product you want to sell is hot and trending it’ll most likely be selling really well on Amazon. This is not always the case, but in most cases it will be. To know if your product is selling great on Amazon you can use this research tool here. From there you can invest time reading Amazon product reviews to learn what customers are saying, what they like and don’t, and make note of your findings.

7- Verify Consistent Product Sales on eBay

eBay has a unique search engine to use to find products that are proven to sale. Simply go to eBay.com and click on the “Advanced” link at the top right of the page. From there click the “Sold Listings” and “New” boxes and search for the exact product you are vetting. Observe & document the frequency of sales and the date the sale happened. If you see your product selling every day or multiple times a day you’re on the right track with finding a winning product that could sell multiple times for you as long as you competitively market the same product.

8- Create Your Buyer Intent Keywords List for Your Hot Dropship Products

A buyer intent keyword is a keyword that indicates the commercial intent to buy a specific type of product.

This is an extremely valuable step to take, so don’t skip over this. I’m not talking about general keyword research here. Instead I’m referring to finding keywords that give you the confidence that there is a high likelihood of people looking online to buy your product.

As you research your buyer intent keywords list for your hot dropship products it’s also important to learn about the online organic competition and search volume for any given product.

Now, there are a ton of keyword research tools you could use to discover your buyer keywords list, but many of them are unreliable. The most accurate keyword tools I have used over the past 15 years boil down to the following.

6 Keyword Tools to Find Commercial/Buyer Intent Keywords

1. ahrefs.com
2. helium10
3. semrush
4. ubersuggest
5. bing keyword research tool (found inside your Bing ads account)
6. google keyword planner (found inside your Google Adwords account)

As you utilize any of the keyword research tools above, begin documenting a list of at least 20 or more buyer intent keywords for your product. If you want some help with this you can reach out here for 1-on-1 training.

The more commercial intent keywords you can find indicating people actively search for that product with the intent to buy, the better.

I want to see at least a variety of 20 plus buyer keywords for my product with a monthly search volume of at least 100 or more for it to be worth my time. If I can see a good variety of buyer keywords for my product I’ll have more confidence people are actively looking and most likely buying my product online. And my confidence of getting organic traffic to my product will also be better.

If I don’t see that type of buyer keyword variety I might choose a different product if my other product research approaches provide weak evidence of being a hot product.

Examples of Buyer Intent Keywords

Some examples of buyer intent keywords will usually include words like the brand name in the keyword.

For example let’s take the product “large dog pillow”.

A list of possible buyer intent keywords I might discover that I would like to see could be:

• where to buy a large dog pillow
• or the type or color of the “large dog pillow” such as black large dog pillow.
• the SKU of the large dog pillow such as “sku product name”
• or any other combo above or possibility

A keyword reveals what people are thinking. If someone is ready to buy a product online what they type into Google is going to be more specific. That’s another way of thinking about buyer intent keywords.

You’re Ready to Build Your Dropship Store & Find Dropship Suppliers

Once you’re done with your product fact finding then you are ready to build your dropship store and then get approved with dropship suppliers.

After implementing the 8 product research methods above, you should be ready to decide if it might be worth your time sourcing that product from a legitimate dropship supplier in the USA or globally. Or you might even consider sourcing & selling your hot dropship products from an affiliate source like Amazon Associates, Shareasale or CJ.com (learn more here).

If you’re new to dropshipping, just remember the proper order of operations is to build a dropship store AFTER you do your product research. It’s not wise to spend all that money and time building a store when you’re not confident of having a proven product to sell to make money with.

And the time to get approved with dropship suppliers and present products on your store is AFTER your dropship store is built and launched. You can do this by adding affiliate or demo products to your site temporarily to get approved with suppliers. Or you can have my team build your dropship store for you if you prefer not to do it yourself.

Final Words

You will know the potential profit you can make when you get approved with a dropship supplier. They will tell you your product cost. So until then focus first on gathering as much evidence that your product is a winner using the 8 steps above, then move forward.

Once you have properly vetted a list of one or more hot dropship products, built your dropship store and sourced your product from an affiliate or direct dropship supplier you’re ready to launch your marketing campaign!

If you launch your marketing campaign yourself remember that each marketing platform is different. For example marketing your product on Facebook vs Google will be different.

If you feel you would like some guidance walking through this process in full you’re welcome to apply to my DropshipXLerator mentoring program here.