This is the most comprehensive guide to finding dropshipping products on the internet.

In this new guide you’ll learn all the methods that nobody talks about.

Let’s dive right in.

Does Dropshipping Still Work in 2021?

The most common question we get asked is if dropshipping is still possible in 2021.

The dropshipping business model has been around for decades and will only continue to grow.

So yes, dropshipping is still alive and thriving in 2021. The pandemic situation has only increased online consumerism, and people are now more than ever willing to shop online.

Furthermore, the best way to find winning dropshipping products nowadays is through the Aliexpress Dropshipping Center.

We will go over the Aliexpress Dropshipping Center and how to use it, but there are many things you should know beforehand about finding products.

Test, Test, Test, and Then Test Some More

There’s a few key factors we need to look at and remember before we dive into how to find the best dropshipping products.

Throughout this process, you need to remember that everything is a test and learn situation.

Testing products means choosing a product, listing it on your store, running advertisements, and then looking at the results.

Testing is the main task you will be doing to gain experience and knowledge in dropshipping. Finding a winning product right off the bat rarely happens, so you need to remain vigilant and patient as you test products.

However, we will significantly increase your odds in finding a great product by showing you what to look for and the key attributes a winning product possesses. 

Who Are We?

We, at Verum Ecom, have been running dropshipping stores for 4 years and have been able to generate over 8 figures in revenue.

Furthermore, we have a YouTube channel with 100,959 subscribers where we teach in-depth dropshipping content for completely free.

Click here to check out our YouTube Channel.

We also have a Facebook group with 53,189 active dropshippers who discuss various topics daily.

Click here to check out our Facebook group.

The biggest lesson we want to teach you is that be successful in this space, you need to be willing to fail.

We have seen much more failure than success, but through each failure there’s always something to be learned.

Our goal is for you to create a long-term sustainable dropshipping business. We will go over many key things to know before getting into finding a good dropshipping product. We want to go as in-depth as possible so you are left with everything you need to begin your business.

Keeping an optimistic, yet logical mindset can increase your chances of success a hundred fold. For this reason, let’s take a look at what truly defines a good dropshipping product.

What Makes a Good Dropshipping Product 

Keep this mental checklist in mind when searching for dropshipping products. 

Does it Solve a Problem

Products that are unique and solve a common problem are considered the best dropshipping products. Two successful stores we showcased on our YouTube channel sold a back brace for posture and a mosquito trapper. 

The back brace was able to sell because people with back pain are fairly common.

We thought about it like this:

Most people understand what good posture is but fail to actually stand or sit with good posture. That’s why when they were presented with a random advertisement about a posture fixing brace, they were enticed to actually purchase it.

The back brace solves a problem that many people face. Whether severe or mild, the majority of people in the world could benefit from a posture brace.

We solved a problem that most people face, but not many people take action to fix, making it a perfect example of a product that solves a problem.

The mosquito trapper is a small electronic device that lures mosquitoes to it with an LED light and then sucks them into the machine.

It’s the perfect way to eliminate mosquito problems because it is odorless, inexpensive, and solves a common problem.

When people who face this mosquito problem see our enticing video advertisement, they don’t even think twice about purchasing the product.

We helped them solve a problem with a product they didn’t even know existed before. This is another perfect example of a unique product that solves a problem.

Profitable 

Profit is obviously the most important metric you care about and the easiest to look at when testing products.

The price you list the product on your store for will generally depend on how much the supplier sells it for.

Although the perfect price will always vary, our basic guideline is to always price the product at least 3x the price you are getting for it. 

Try aiming for products you can sell for at least $25-30 dollars or more. If the supplier is selling the product for $6, it is perfectly ok to go more than 3x and sell the product for $25 or $30. If the product is able to sell at this price, you will be able to sustain consistent profit margins.

Keep in mind that shipping will cost a few dollars too, so make sure to calculate that into the total product cost. You will want to 3x the total cost including shipping.

We don’t recommend selling products for less than $20 because it will be hard to sustain profit margins with the Facebook ads cost included. 

In Demand

If a product is trending and popular that means that a lot of people are buying it.

Many dropshippers shy away from hot products due to their fear of saturation, but we think the exact opposite.

Product saturation is usually exaggerated because Facebook advertisements allow you to reach literally everybody on the planet.

There are always unexplored markets and areas you can find and the Facebook Ads machine learning is highly capable of finding customers. 

Furthermore, if your marketing is clever enough, you can become the authoritative seller of the hot product. Selling an in-demand product really pushes your creativity when it comes to advertising and helps you learn a lot about the psychology of the consumer.

We at Verum Ecom get excited when testing hot products because of the competitive thrill it induces. We think about how we could create a more beautiful advertisement, different angles we could solve in the consumers problems, and different targeting and budgeting metrics inside Facebook ads. 

Easy to Ship

Finding a product that is easy to ship is a big requirement when finding dropshipping products.

Since the suppliers are located in China, shipping large and oversized boxes around the world is a headache and basically impossible.

Shipping fees will be outrageous and there are chances the package will get damaged. 

Here’s an example of a product that is too large.

Although the bean bag chair could potentially sell well, you can see that the shipping cost is $45.40.

This is way too expensive and products this large should be avoided.

For this reason, we recommend products that are smaller in size and don’t demand extravagant shipping fees.

Potential Repeat Business 

Potential repeat business is a factor that most people don’t consider when they first start dropshipping.

Some of our stores have upwards of 10-15% customer repeat buys, which is basically free revenue because they have seen our ads already.

Offering a quality product at an affordable price is the best way to keep customers coming back.

They can also spread the product through word of mouth which will generate free revenue as well. 

Can it be Easily Found in Any Online/Local Store

Products that can be easily found in local or online stores should be avoided.

Let’s say you found some generic looking socks and are looking to open an online store dropshipping them.

You set up the store and run advertisements, but realize nobody is purchasing the socks or even going to the website.

The main reason for this is because people who want socks can easily drive to their local store and buy them.

Furthermore, when people need socks it’s usually a more urgent situation.

They don’t want to wait for the item to ship to them because they can find the socks in less than an hour just near their home. And if they are willing to wait, they will more likely use Amazon or another website to order the socks for guaranteed 2 day shipping.

This is an example of a bad dropshipping product because it can easily be found anywhere.

Keep this in mind when choosing the product you want to sell.

Does it Provoke a WOW Effect

An amazing dropshipping product should have the customer saying “WOW!” Sometimes the product itself can automatically trigger a WOW effect based on how unique it is and its functionalities.

Other times, you need to make a beautiful video advertisement to turn an average product into a product that can induce the WOW effect.

In this modern world of rapid scrolling, people will only glance at the advertisement for a few seconds or less.

So to find a product that instantly captivates their attention makes an outstanding dropshipping product.

An example of this is this video of a slicing device that instantly cuts a watermelon. Most people have never seen this device before and it turns the annoying process of cutting a watermelon into a fun and easy one.

Electrical devices are also great products to sell because most people don’t know the true value of these devices.

One of the trendiest products that we told people to try selling were LED light strips.

These light strips instantly make any room or bedroom more exciting, and people don’t usually think to buy these things.

We’ve had a lot of success ourselves selling them because we realized that most people are willing to improve the look of their home. 

Does it Trigger an Impulse Purchase

A product that triggers an impulse purchase automatically stops people from scrolling and clicking into the advertisement.

These products usually have some kind of novelty factor making it fun and quirky. An example could be an extremely cute onesie or dog costume.

You must make sure your store and checkout process are both professional and efficient, so you don’t risk interrupting the impulsive behavior.

Dropshipping Product Characteristics Conclusion

It’s nearly improbable for a product to meet all the criteria listed above, so use your gut and instincts when choosing one.

For beginners, we recommend you to just go with a product you think has potential and begin testing. The key for long term success in dropshipping is experience, so the faster you get started, the quicker you will learn.

Don’t stress too hard on finding the perfect product.

Pick one and begin going through the process of testing and learning. Always remember, you must test, test, test, and then test some more.

Hitting a home run on the first swing is a rare event. You must be persistent and have a willingness to learn and grow as you proceed. 

Before we take a look on how to find the best dropshipping products, it’s imperative to find trusted and reliable suppliers. Keep reading to learn why. 

Suppliers and Supplier Relations

The most vital aspect of a dropshipping business is your supplier and your relationship with them. Your supplier can and will undoubtedly make or break your business.

You have to rely on them to supply high quality products, good shipping times, and fair prices. 

After you have found a potential product you want to sell, it is imperative to order a sample of the product. Through this, you will be able to see the quality of the item for yourself and see how fast the product ships.

However, if the product has extremely good reviews and the supplier has positive feedback, it can be okay to start selling the product. But we still always recommend getting a sample before selling the product so you can put yourselves in the shoes of a real customer.

You can check the suppliers rating on the top-left corner of the product page.

As you can see, this store has 95.6% positive feedback. We recommend only using sellers with over 95% positive feedback.

Furthermore, if you hover your mouse over the store name, you will see the detailed seller ratings.

The detailed seller ratings display the seller’s overall ‘Item as Described’, ‘Communication’, and ‘Shipping Speed’ ratings.

We recommend finding sellers that have above 4.5 in each of these categories.

If you want to look more in depth at the seller, you can click ‘Visit Store’ and then ‘Feedback’

Here, you will see the sellers feedback page that displays all their ratings in the past 1, 3, and 6 months.

Be sure to do your research on the seller before fully committing to using their products.

We highly recommend getting in touch with the supplier and asking them for their Skype ID or any other form of a communication.

A consistent line of communication with your supplier will dramatically improve your business.

Now that we have knocked out all the important preliminary details, let’s dive into how to find the best dropshipping products in 2021.

How to Find Products to Dropship

In this section of the tutorial we will be going over the best methods we have for finding dropshipping products.

Although these tactics are fairly simple, they are what all the advanced dropshippers are doing to find new products.

Our goal is for you to get results. 

After reading through this section, you will have more than enough knowledge to start hunting for your own winning product.

The main research method is completely free, but there are also some paid tools you can use.

However, these paid tools are not necessary for beginners and should be ignored if you just started dropshipping.

The free methods offer everything you need.

That being said, let’s find some winning dropshipping products!

Free Method

Aliexpress Dropship Center

The Aliexpress Dropship Center is a completely free tool Aliexpress made that makes it easy and convenient to find trendy products.

Go to google and search “Aliexpress Dropship Center”. Click on the first link.

Login to your Aliexpress account and then you will be asked to fill in a few agreements to join the Dropship Center. After completing it, you are officially allowed to use the Aliexpress Dropshipping Center.

Once you’re inside the dashboard, on the left-hand side you want to click on “Find Products to Sell”.

Here, you will see a plethora of products with the order volume, dropshipping order volume, and product rating.

The dropshipping order volume can be negated because its accuracy is unreliable.

The only thing you need to look at is the total order volume and the “Analyze” button that shows daily sales volume.

From this point, it’s quite simple to find a good product to dropship. Sort the products by order volume and all countries. Aliexpress provides global shipping, so we don’t want to pigeonhole ourselves by limiting the search to only the United States.

The spreadsheet will display the products on Aliexpress with the highest total orders.

Once your spreadsheet is sorted, you can click “Analyze” on the individual products to see how many orders the product is selling daily.

You want to look for products that are selling at least 50 units per day. 

This product is not selling at least 50 units per day, so we would skip this one and look for another product

The image above above shows a product that is consistently selling over 50 units per day, which means it could potentially sell well on your dropshipping store.

Products that are selling over 50 units per day signify 1 or 2 things:

1. Normal online shoppers are consistently purchasing the item which means it is sellable.
2. Other dropshippers are consistently selling the item which means the product is sellable.

Feel free to sort products by categories if you’re interested in a certain niche. For example, if you want to open a women’s clothing store, click on “Product Category” and choose “Women’s Clothing”.

Once you have found some products that meet these criteria, use your intuition on which one you want to test. Think about how the product can solve a problem and how unique it is.

KEY TIP:

Be sure to bookmark or copy and paste the product page URLs of products you want to sell. This will save you a lot of headache later on.

Once you’ve chosen your product(s), it’s time to do some research on your competitors and find some marketing materials you can analyze. You can do this by using Facebook and YouTube.

Facebook Search Bar

Let’s say you chose to sell some bluetooth earphones. Go to the Facebook search bar and type in “bluetooth earphone bit.ly”.

A lot of dropshippers use bit.ly links to shorten the URL, so it is a helpful tool to find competitor videos.

Then you want to click on “Videos” as you only want to see the video advertisements your competitors are running.

After you have followed these steps, find the bluetooth earphones that look similar to the ones you chose.

These videos will give you an idea on how to market the product yourself so that you don’t start with a completely blank slate. 

Since you don’t have any marketing materials yet, you can use the examples that you found to structure your own advertisement.

Furthermore, the Aliexpress supplier sometimes has a video advertisement that you could use for your own.

However, Aliexpress suppliers are known for stealing content from other companies, so do a background check to see if the product is a knockoff, and if the video is stolen. 

Youtube Search Bar

Another method you can use is going to YouTube and also typing in “bluetooth earphones bit.ly”.

Using the same idea as the Facebook search bar method, you can find some examples of videos you can take some inspiration from. 

After building an idea of what you want the video creative to look like, you can order the product yourself and shoot an advertisement from your own home.

The video doesn’t have to be extremely professional for you to make sales. You will be surprised at how much you can sell using a very unprofessional and homemade video.

Nowadays, organic and homemade content perform well because they are more relatable and people can resonate more with the message. 

Marketing Potential

Finding a good dropshipping product is relatively straightforward, but doing the marketing is where the creativity truly begins.

You must keep in mind the potential marketing angles of the product when hunting for products.

Both video and picture advertisements work well, it just depends on your product.

If your product needs a bit of explanation, a video is the much better option.

Based on competitor research and your own intuition, you can test both methods to see which works better for your product.

What Makes a Good Advertisement?

As far as the advertisement goes, you don’t need to state the obvious. You also don’t need to discuss the technicalities and mechanics of the product.

For example, if you are selling a smart watch, talking about the wattage and battery size is boring and unnecessary.

Instead, you want to appeal to the customer’s emotions and the product’s ability to solve a problem.

Let’s say you are selling cool graphic women’s leggings. Rather than just a still image of the leggings, a video where there is a woman wearing the leggings and happily jumping around or exercising could do much better.

You want to convey a feeling of happiness and joy.

People only care about the result and the emotions of the products. Everything else is irrelevant. 

Paid Methods

Remember, these paid methods are completely unnecessary for beginners. Experienced dropshippers looking for an edge are the ones who should be utilizing these tools. 

Seller Pulse

Seller Pulse is a software we recently discovered that no other ecommerce teacher has talked about. We heard about this software from one of our suppliers and mostly only people in China use it.

However, in our opinion, this is the best product research software out there.

We don’t even have an affiliate link or anything. We just truly believe that this is the best software for finding good dropshipping products. 

Seller Pulse has a 3 day free trial and then costs $39/month.

This tool is similar to the Aliexpress Dropship Center in the sense that you are able to use filters to find winning products on Aliexpress.

However, the tool goes much deeper and shows you the dropshipping stores selling the specific product. It also shows you the advertisements that other stores are using.

By looking at other stores and their advertisements, you can easily get an idea of how to design your own website, product page, and advertisements.

The ability to easily complete all these tasks from one location makes it an incredibly powerful tool as dropshipper.

Seller Pulse is well worth you money if you find these things beneficial.

How to use Seller Pulse

If you do purchase a subscription, this how we recommend using the tool.

Once you are logged into the dashboard, go to the right-hand side and click on “By Dropshippers”. This is the main tool you will be using.

As you can see, you can sort products by many different categories and see how many orders are being sold by other dropshippers.

We recommend sorting by all categories and then a minimum of 500 orders for the last 7 days.

The tool then searches Aliexpress and finds all the products that fulfill these search queries. 

Once the list finalizes, you can take a look through them and find products that have potential to sell.

You can also see which dropshipping stores are selling the products by clicking the small orange icon. This is extremely helpful in finding inspiration on how to layout your own website and product page.

Look for dropshipping stores that have well-designed pages and product listings. Avoid the ones where it looks like they only imported the Aliexpress listing without changing anything. 

Adspy

Adspy is another paid tool that lets you see how your competitors are advertising products.

However, this tool is very expensive at $149/month and we do not recommend you to use it if you are a beginner.

Adspy is a social media ad intelligence tool with the largest searchable database of Facebook and Instagram ads in the market.

On the Adspy dashboard you can type in whatever product you want.

They will then find all the Facebook advertisements related to your search term and list them by most recent. It also shows the amount of engagement on the ad and which country the ad is targeting.

Through this, you can find inspiration to design your own advertisements and product pages.

Now that we’ve taken a look at the free and paid methods to find winning products, let’s learn how to find products during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Finding Products to Dropship During Quarantine

COVID-19 has opened up a whole new market of products to sell as a dropshipper.

People are locked inside their homes, more willing to purchase online, and in need of the basic essentials they might not be able to get at stores.

We’ll show you what niches are trending and what to look for. 

Trending Niches:

• Home Improvement
• Personal Beauty
• Cooking/Kitchen 
• Home Fitness
• Home Office
• Kids Toys
• Furniture

You can use the Aliexpress Dropship Center to quickly find hot products in each of these niches.

Corona is still ravaging throughout the world, so it is not too late to use this situation to sell products that people need. 

Using the filters in the Aliexpress Dropship Center, you are able to quickly sort products by category.

For example, if you are interested in the home fitness niche, click on “Product Category” and find “Sports & Entertainment / Fitness & Body Building”.

The spreadsheet will then list all the products from this category and sort them by order volume. This is an incredibly simple way to find hot products to sell during the quarantine season. 

Now that we’ve gone over the methods of finding dropshipping products, we will show you how to increase your revenue and average order volume.

Bundling Items for a Discount

A great way to increase your average order volume is by offering the customer a discount for more units purchased.

For example, you can offer 25% off if the customer orders 2, 30% off if the customer orders 3, and 35% off if the customer orders 4.

We have used this method on all our one product stores and the payoff is incredible. 

The logic works like this. The customer usually intends to only buy one item. However, when they see the bundled discount, they are immediately enticed to buy more and save money in the long run.

This works well for products that solve a problem. We used this for our mosquito trapper store and posture brace store, and were able to massively increase our average order volume.

You’d be surprised how useful and beneficial this method is. 

Upsells

Upsells are a fantastic way to increase your average order volume and overall revenue.

Upselling is when you offer the customer a related product in the same niche. Say you are running a niche fitness clothing store mainly selling workout clothes.

Some good upsells could be a pair of workout gloves, a yoga mat, or resistance bands. We use the Shopify app called OneClickUpsell for all our upsells.

OneClickUpsell immediately presents the customer with the upsell product after they order already.

Since the customer’s payment and shipping information is already entered into the system, all they have to do is press purchase and the new item is automatically added to their order.

This is a fantastic and simple way to generate more revenue to each order. This being said, it is imperative to find good and relatable upsell products.

You can test different upsell products until you find one that customers are willing to purchase. 

Common Mistakes When Choosing a Product to Dropship

Choosing a Branded Product

Never try selling a branded product when dropshipping.

This is highly illegal and your store will be shut down quickly. Furthermore, there may be some repercussion from Shopify.

Although it may seem enticing to sell Adidas or Nike products, you do not have the proper licenses to do it. Avoid branded products at all costs. 

Choosing Knockoff Products

Knockoff products should also be avoided. Common knockoff products include electronics and clothing.

There are many suppliers on Aliexpress that sell fake Apple Airpods, and although it may seem extremely profitable to sell them, it is illegal.

Your goal with dropshipping should be to build a consistent and trusted brand selling quality products.

Don’t try to take a shortcut and sell knockoff Louis Vuitton t-shirts for a quick profit.

You will be caught quickly and banned from Facebook. 

Choosing a Hyper-Competitive Product

Although we said that trendy products are good to sell, hyper-competitive products can be a difficult option.

If there are 100s or even 1000s of dropshipper selling the product, it will be hard to generate consistent profit. For these hyper-competitive products, people are usually using the same advertising creative and copy.

Everyone is just copying each other and selling the exact same thing with the exact same website.

For these types of products, the Facebook ads learning machine will be less reliable in finding customers, thus raising your cost per purchase.

Avoid products that are hyper-competitive that have 100s of sellers or more. 

Choosing a Common Product

We went over this earlier, but always remember to pick products that are uncommon and unique.

Something that a customer can easily find at Walmart or any local store are bad options for dropshipping products. 

Concluding Thoughts

Finding a good dropshipping product may seem like a daunting task, but after reading through this tutorial you should feel much more confident. The Aliexpress Dropship Center is your best friend and a tool that nobody ever talks about. At Verum Ecom we pride ourselves in being as transparent as possible and providing you everything you need to succeed. If you are still having trouble finding a winning product and have any questions, please leave a comment below. We will reply as soon as possible.

Don’t be afraid. Dropshipping and ecommerce is a career choice you made. You should be proud of yourself that you are willing to venture on this journey. The knowledge and potential wealth you will gain are both priceless and you should cherish every step of the process. Learning a new skill takes time and experience, so be patient as you push forward. We will be here to help you every step of the way.