Can’t decide what to sell on the Internet? You’re not alone.
Many people who want to start an online business get stuck at this stage because they can’t find the right things to sell.
You could get lucky and have a great idea at some point. But if no one wants your product, you probably won’t be successful.
How do you gauge demand? Well, it’s a whole process that could take anywhere from a few weeks to a few months to complete.
If you don’t have a lot of time but want to start a business, the best thing to do is find popular products to sell online.
The idea is that if you start selling popular items, it will make doing business easier and more fun for you in the near future.
In this post, I’ll talk about some of the best ways to find popular items to sell in your store.
By the time you finish reading this article, you’ll be an expert at finding and identifying popular, high-demand items that keep you busy managing and filling orders.
How to Find the Hottest Items to Sell Online
Now that you know the main reason why you should sell trendy items, here are some of the best ways to find them.
Conversations on social media are a gold mine because they tell you what’s popular right now from the point of view of consumers.
You just have to look through the comments and sub-sections of the most popular networks.
Some of the platforms I think you should check out are:
There are a lot of smaller groups on Reddit, called “subreddits,” where people talk about popular products.
Joining a few of them will give you access to active conversations where you can find out firsthand what people think about new, popular items.
I think you should check out the following subreddits:
- Stop talking and give me my money
- It’s on Amazon.
- Purchase it for life
The conversations in these subgroups can help you spot up-and-coming brands as they start to make waves in the consumer world.
For example, this Llama-shaped pepper spray is the topic of a conversation on the show Shut Up and Take My Money.
That’s a good idea for a popular product right there.
Pinterest and Fancy both
Pinterest is one of the social networks that is growing the fastest. It has more than 250 million active users every month.
Make sure to look through the “popular” section to see what people are interested in right now.
If there’s nothing interesting on Pinterest, try looking on Fancy.
Fancy calls itself a mix of a magazine, a list of things you want, and an online store.
Even so, it has a lot of trending product ideas for you to think about.
Searching for relevant hashtags on Instagram is another quick way to find popular products to sell.
If you’re selling in the “men’s fashion” niche, for example, you could search for hashtags like #mensfashion and #mensclothing to see what’s popular in your market.
Also, keep an eye on thought leaders and people with a lot of influence in your niche to see what products they talk about or recommend in their Stories, posts, and videos.
With their social networks and connections, Instagram influencers often start trends and shifts that lead to a lot of sales.
The main point? Find people who have a lot of influence in your field and see what they are promoting.
Check out sites that review products.
Did you know that there are blogs and magazines that help business owners find popular items to sell?
These websites are great for getting a better idea of what’s popular right now, whether it’s through data-packed blog posts or curated images.
Here is a list of some of the best websites that review products that you should visit every day or every week:
- HiConsumption
- Uncrate
- Bless This Stuff
- Cool Material
- Huckberry
Trend magazines are another type of resource you can use.
These websites can help you figure out where people are buying things in general, which can give you some great ideas for products.
For example, if you have an online store that sells art-themed items, you can sign up for Cool Hunting.
This trend-finding website has won awards and shows what’s new in art and many other fields. Check out their “buy guides” to get more ideas for things to sell online.
UberCool and Trend Hunter are two other cool trend magazines that might be worth your time.
Make the most of YouTube
Many experts will tell you to look for popular products on Google, but we shouldn’t forget that YouTube is also a big search engine.
Find out what people are looking for now by searching for “best (your niche) products” or something similar.
For instance, if you search for “best fitness products,” you will get the following results.
As you can see, there are a number of videos about fitness. If you watch a few of them, you’ll get new ideas for products to think about.
Some popular items are also shown in unboxing videos, so try searching for “unboxing (your niche) products” as well.
Don’t forget to take into account how many people watched the videos and what they said about them.
The more views and comments a video has, the more likely it is that people will want to buy it.
Use the search filter on YouTube to make sure you’re not looking at old or out-of-date videos. Choose “this year” or “this month” as the upload date because the products in these videos are not likely to be trendy.
Check out online markets
Product marketplaces are usually one of the best places to find popular items because they have items that are being sold on the internet right now.
But because they are so large, it is easy to get lost in them.
So, I’m going to talk about not only the marketplaces where you should look for hot-selling items, but also what parts of the marketplace you should look at to find those winners.
So, without further ado, here’s how to find popular items in the best online stores.
Amazon
Amazon is one of the biggest online stores in the world, which makes it a great place to learn about products. Here are the parts of this marketplace that you should check out.
- Amazon’s Movers And Shakers: is a list of the products whose sales rankings have changed the most in the last 24 hours. It gets new information every hour.
- Amazon Best Sellers: This is where you can find the most popular items on the site. Every 24 hours, this list is changed. Use the links in the sidebar on the left to look at the best-selling books in a certain niche.
If you have some money to spend, you can use a tool that makes it much easier to find products on Amazon.
You might already know about it. The name of it is Jungle Scout.
Jungle Scout keeps track of what’s for sale on Amazon and makes it easy for paid users to quickly sort through thousands of items to find popular items that are in high demand and make a lot of money.
Using the product database’s custom filters, you can easily find any product. This saves you time that you could use to market and brand your storefront.
eBay
eBay is another place to buy and sell goods. It has a lot of popular items for sale. Here are the tools and sections you should check out to find those hidden gems.
- EBay Watch Count: This tool lets you see how many times people have “watched” (or shown interest in) a certain item. The products with the most views are, of course, the ones that people are most interested in.
- EBay Trending: This section gives you a list of products that are popular right now, as well as the number of searches and URLs for the product pages.
AliExpress
AliExpress has a whole database of consumer goods that are made directly in China.
You can search this site’s “Popular” section to find out more about what’s popular.
AliExpress lets you order smaller amounts of items than its parent company, Alibaba.
Etsy
Etsy is full of unique, hand-made items that people all over the world love.
It’s also a great way to find out what kinds of things are popular.
You can look through Etsy’s “trending products” section to see what people are buying a lot of right now.
Kickstarter
Do you know that there is a group of people who work together to make cool things happen?
I’m talking about Kickstarter.
It’s a great place to find out what creative products hard-working business owners are making and to get ideas for your own store.
On the site’s “Discover” page, there is a list of the most popular items, which can be sorted by how much money they have raised, staff picks, or popularity.
Make the most of Supplier Directors.
Suppliers often know what kinds of products are in demand at a given time, and some of them, in particular, are the best way to find out what’s popular.
Dropshipping wholesalers and suppliers are more likely to offer trendy items to ecommerce store owners than other suppliers because they often have a large inventory and are less likely to carry items that aren’t in demand.
So, if you want to know what items are popular right now, check out the different types of supplier directories, like the ones I’ve listed below:
- Alibaba
- Global Sources
- Doba
- SaleHoo
Using a supplier directory to find hot items is helpful in two ways.
If you do find a product you want to sell in your store, you’ll have a supplier for it right away. What could make this any better?
Don’t Forget to Use Google Trends
With Google’s trends tool, you can quickly and easily look at the volume trends for certain products to see if their demand is going up or down.
As a bonus, Google Trends also lets you see the number of searches based on where they come from.
Say, for example, you want to sell sunglasses made of wood on your ecommerce website.
To start, go to Google Trends and type in “wooden sunglasses” to see how people are searching for them. This screen will show up when you use the tool:
As you can see, there is a small arrow pointing up on the screen. This means that people are looking for the product right now.
On the other hand, a slope that is going down is not a good sign.
If your Google Trends search shows a downward slope, the product you’re looking for is out of date and you should look for something else.
Conclusion
It’s hard to figure out what to sell online.
You can’t build a business that will last if you don’t use a tried-and-true method to test the demand for an item.
Think about it: You only have time to find the best products to sell, but then you need more hours to stock, source, and list them on your store. You also need to tell your customers about it.
If you follow the advice in this article, you won’t have to worry about finding popular items for your store.
Read my post about the best dropshipping products to sell online in 2023 if you’re looking for a faster way to get started.
