Growing a successful e-commerce store takes a lot of hard work and constant research and evaluation to find the best and most in-demand products and trending gift items for your retail customers. It’s almost like an exact science, and it takes a lot of testing and retesting of products, website design, images, and branding strategies to figure out what works best for your business.
Product discovery takes e-commerce business owners the most time by a long shot. At Dropship Corporation, we want to help our members have more success stories, and we’d like to share some creative ideas that will help you master the process of finding and researching products.
We are more than just a SaaS solution provider for independent online retailers. We are growth hackers who want you to have the success you deserve. Here are some things that our team knows will help.
What’s selling now and how do you find out what’s selling?
Who can spend hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars to find out what products people want to buy the most? Large stores. The same ones you compete with every day on price, variety of products, and customer service. Front end vetting is the process of looking at the product lines of all retail sellers. Google will do a lot of the hard work for you, though.
Make a bookmark folder with big stores like Walmart and Target, as well as online shopping sites like Amazon and eBay and other sales leaders in your product niche. Check these sites once a week for new products. This will help you figure out what is selling well (or what you can expect to sell well during busy times) and build a list of products to sell in your shop. Also, look for ways to combine a popular item with other useful products that fit with a certain need or activity. Selling the must-have solid shampoo bar that doesn’t come in a plastic bottle and is good for the environment?
Think about getting a cheap anti-fog shower mirror and a loofah to go with it. You’ve just made the perfect inexpensive and cool gift bundle.
Back-End Research and Product Evaluation: What Products and Vendors Should I Choose?
Here’s where things get tricky. You know what kinds of products are selling like crazy for e-commerce retailers, but you don’t know which AliExpress vendor or manufacturer to choose as your supplier. The overall vendor rating on AliExpress is one way to tell how many products a seller has and how good they are. What percent of people who bought them said they were good? Obviously, the higher the rating, the better, to make sure that neither the quality of the product nor its availability for shipping will be a problem. Is the seller given at least 4 stars on AliExpress?
You will also see a total order number to the right of this information, next to the name of the product. If that number is huge, you can assume that the seller sends out thousands of units every month. It’s clear that the product is a winner.
If the number is low, you should be careful and look at similar products from other sellers. With a piece of software called AliExtractor, you can learn more about sellers, products, and how much they sell. Check out the website to learn more about this secret power seller information, which lets you see sales volume statistics, reviews from customers, the total number of units the seller has sold, and more.
It can even help you find overseas sellers who offer cheap shipping through ePacket.
Use seasonal blogger gift guides as a way to figure out what’s going on in a niche.
At certain times of the year, bloggers in all kinds of fields, like beauty, fashion, technology, home decor, pet and animal care, and kitchenware, start writing about the products they think are the best for the season.
These blogs are a great resource for e-commerce business owners who want to get ready for the holiday gift-giving season in the fall or for other important shopping times like Valentine’s Day, Easter, or Back to School. When professional bloggers put up their Gift Guides, they may be sponsored by brands, but most bloggers don’t take suggestions from brands.
The Gift Guides are serious business, and they get a lot of people to read blogs because people trust them to give an honest review. Say, for example, that you sell tech gadgets for people. Your Google search should look something like this: Tech +Gadgets +Holiday +Gift +Guide (if you didn’t know that you can add a plus sign to your search terms without putting a space between them, you’re welcome.)
If you want to get rid of some results, you can use a hyphen like this: Tech +Gadgets +Holiday +Gift +Guide -pets.
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