There are a number of product research software which costs money to use. Most software promises to help find winning dropshipping products easily.
but is there such a thing as a winning product or is it just a myth?
Long story short, In my experience, there is no universal winning product! A product that sells well in the United state may not sell in Europe.
The pitch also matters. A product that sells well in the United States. That same product may not sell to the to the same US audience with a different pitch.
I understand that some products generally sell better, also, some products are considered saturated because there are more supply than demand for it.
Yet, I want you to understand that the presence of “demand and supply” for a product validates that there is a market for it and your ability to sell any product, isn’t entirely dependent on wether the product is a “winning product” or if the market is “unsaturated”
In reality, what we are better off researching is not a “winning product” but a “winning product strategy”.
Vivian.E, e-commerce publisher/2022
Of course, you can find a good selling product with low competition and become profitable with it!
If you’re an innovator with an innovative product, that makes sense because then you’d be introducing to people a product they didn’t know they needed with little or no competition.
The problem about obsessing on finding a “winning product” or an “unstaturated niche” is that there is no universal winning product and when a niche is unsaturated, its also likely to be “unvalidated”.
It becomes a risk because you might go into it and discover that its a hidden jewel or you might run into a volume problem.
A “volume problem” is a situation where you have a good product with low competition but the demand for it is so low that you still aren’t profitable dropshipping that product.
“Winning product” and “unsaturated niche” aren’t bad concepts, they have their use cases (especially when dropshipping on marketplace platforms like Amazon) but what we want to do in this tutorial, is not obsess over it.
We want to have a “Product strategy” that integrates product, audience, pitch and location.
Find some good product that’s marketable to an identified target audience, understand that audience enough to know what pitch will sell that product better to them and where!
The question of “where” is “where do they spend more of their time and are more likely to purchase, is it on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest or Tiktok?
I haven’t seen any better way to do a product strategy research than to do it organically!
This method is free to do and has proven effective however it can be time consuming and requires you to make good use of your intuition.
How to research dropshipping products strategy organically.
Organic research simply means promoting your products organically, that is without spending on ads to see what products will attract the most organic engagement, from what audience and on what platform.
The idea here is to choose a niche, create a social media niche profile, try to organically promote several products within that niche, see what specific products get the most organic engagement then go ahead and build a dropshipping business around that product.
You don’t need to have an ecommerce website or have the product in stock or even have a supplier for the product to do your market research this way.
When someone messages you on your social media page to order a product, you can simply say the product is not in stock at the moment and if you get 2 or 3 organic orders for the same product then it’s a good idea to go ahead and build a dropshipping business around it.
You can choose to promote your products organically on any social media platform. i.e Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Quora, Pinterest, Tiktok, Snapchat etc
I recommend promoting your products on the social media platform where you know your target audience spends the most time!
I do not recommend trying to promote your product on all social media platforms at the same time. The goal is to choose one social media platform and work to dominate it.
In reality, you might spend a sufficient amount of time trying to promote your products on one social platform and later discover that the users there have little to no interest in it.
The issue could be that the products you are trying to promote aren’t marketable or you aren’t targeting the right audience or that the majority of users on that platform doesn’t have a good purchase behavior for your product.
In this case, it makes sense to try promoting on another social media platform and weigh the return on time investment spent on each one.
If you’ve finally settle on what social network you want focus on to promote your product and to what country or demographics then you need to spend sufficient time engaging with your targeted audience and building up your followers organically.
A good way to build up your follower base is to post interesting content of your products and follow and like the “followers” of your competitors pages.
Some people would follow you back and you can always unfollow some of them later to create a balanced profile for your business.
You could ask your friends and family to help share your posts on their profile.
If you find that people aren’t engaging with your posts and you’ve spent sufficient time trying to promote those products, then that may be an indication that the products aren’t marketable to your audience or that your sales pitch (i.e caption, product image, video etc) isn’t compelling.
In this case, you should try to post and promote other products within your chosen niche and make sure that your posts creatives and captions are engaging and that your profile looks great.
Staying within a niche is important so that your profile maintains a focus.
Therefor if you’re into kids toys, try posting and promoting other more engaging toys. Don’t just go off and start promoting furniture as this would confuse your followers.
You can create beautiful graphics and social media share worthy posts using Canva.
You can also find free product video ads on Aliexpress and other similar sites.
I understand that this may seem like a daunting task but I will rather go months grinding by building an interested follower base than without one.
The perks of this approach are that you get to find out what products your audience is interested in, what caption or creative sells the product and on what platform.
You also don’t have to solely depend on ads to make sales.
Running ads or influencer marketing for products that already got organic traction most often result in a better conversion rate.
In conclusion, if you’re able to get one or two organic orders, then its worth building a dropshipping business around that product.
This Product strategy research tutorial is part of our Dropshipping free course so, I’d like to state that somewhere along the course, we have another tutorial on Facebook marketing.
So, if you’re following our dropshipping course then it makes sense to try out your Product strategy research on Facebook or Instagram.
This is because researching a product strategy on Facebook or Instagram before running paid ads on the same platform makes the marketing efforts more coherent.
Happy Dropshipping guys! If you have any questions, please leave a comment and I’d respond shortly.
This tutorial is part of our free dropshipping course. You can check our dropshipping course outline here.
