How to Find Dropshipping Products That Boost Sales

With the global dropshipping market steadily growing each year (it’s estimated to exceed $300 billion in 2024), there’s never been a better time to launch an online store. People love shopping online, and wholesale suppliers are ready to provide the trending products. 

As a store owner, you play a key role in this equation by offering a platform where shoppers can find the items they want.

But to draw buyers’ attention, you’ll need exciting products to sell. In this article, we explain how to find dropshipping products for your store and how to know if you’ve settled on a winning product.

Let’s get started!

What makes a winning dropshipping product: 9 key characteristics

First, let’s look at the elements you should consider when doing product research. Pay attention to these product characteristics to ensure your dropshipping business can thrive selling items customers love.

1. Problem-solving capabilities

At the core of any best-selling product is the problem it solves. Whether it’s a handy kitchen tool to help you cook, a stylish sweater to keep you warm and make you look great, or a phone case to prevent your smartphone from damage, each item serves a particular purpose. Ideally, it’s something that people not only want but also need.

Source: TikTok Creative Center

When you identify products you might want to sell, consider how you would present them to your customers later to convince them they need to buy. Your dropshipping store, ads, social media, and all other marketing you create will have to make a case for this item. One of the most effective ways to convince someone to spend their money on something is to explain how this item will solve a particular problem they have. If you struggle to explain what an item does or why someone needs it, it’s unlikely to become a winning product.

For example, look at this adjustable rolling pin sold on Amazon. It solves a common problem many bakers have faced—how to ensure the dough you roll is the correct size and thickness.

Source: Amazon

By identifying the problem your dropshipping product solves, you also gain insights into who your target audience is and how to market the product to them. Once you’ve found a top-selling product with clear value, you can look into other items in the same dropshipping niche. You’ll already understand how to position your item for this audience, and you can build your brand around this concept.

2. Potential for impulse purchase (the wow factor)

If you’re a dropshipping business that’s just starting out, you’ll need to catch the audience’s eye with something special to convince them to give your store a chance. It can be some top-selling products that everyone’s buzzing about, a novelty item they’d like to try, or a unique twist on a familiar product (a custom design, for example).

Shoppers are surrounded by ads all the time, from social media platforms to simple Google searches. You need to offer something interesting enough to stand out in users’ feeds. At the same time, the product has to be simple enough to understand without diving into deep research.

This also means you must carefully consider the prices you set for your dropshipping products. Depending on the niche you target, the amount of money customers would be ready to spend on impulse buys can vary, but it’s not likely to be very high. At the same time, you don’t want to sell your products too cheaply because buyers might question an item’s quality.

Source: Amazon

This moon lamp is a dropshipping product that checks all the boxes. It’s an eye-catching variation of a familiar product (a desk lamp that resembles a moon), and the $20 price tag is not too steep to immediately drive you away as you browse products online.

3. Clear target audience

Once you’ve settled on the product ideas you like, you need to envision the ideal target audience for these items. Thorough market research will give you a clear understanding of who would be interested in products in this specific category. This information will help you write product descriptions and other marketing copy, target ads, and even determine where to sell products. Different shoppers prefer different online marketplaces and have unique online shopping habits.

Source: Amazon

For example, this levitating flower pot would appeal to plant lovers and make a good gift. It’s also an interesting novelty item that appeals to people who enjoy trying something new. 

4. Strong market demand

Although the dropshipping model doesn’t require you to invest money in stock, you still want to make sure you spend your time and effort selling products in high demand. After all, the more sales you make, the more money you’ll earn.

An excellent trend and product research tool you can use is Google Trends. It’s a free tool that lets you see how often people have searched for a particular keyword over a set period. This can give you valuable insights into market trends and how well the dropshipping product you’ve chosen might perform.

For example, the novelty effect of fidget spinners has clearly worn off, so this product is unlikely to become one of your bestsellers now.

Source: Google Trends

Google Trends also lets you compare the search volume of several keywords against one another to see which performs better. Seeing what’s more in demand can allow you to predict which product has more potential to achieve high sales volumes.

5. Low competition

Although this sounds like a contradiction to the previous point (strong market demand), it shows you the tricky balance you have to strike to create a successful dropshipping business. You want to be able to offer winning products that are in high demand, but you also don’t want to chase trends that everyone else has already jumped on.

If you search for Halloween t-shirts on Etsy, you get thousands of results, so you’ll need something special to stand out. Source: Etsy

To create a successful dropshipping store, you must keep your eye on best-selling products and market trends to spot new opportunities. You need to be aware of the conversations happening on social media networks—most trending products nowadays come from there. If you spot an opportunity in time, you can be among the first dropshipping stores to find suppliers offering the in-demand item and sell it to eager customers.

6. Fulfillment quality and reliability

Although dropshipping is a very popular business model, it sometimes doesn’t have the best reputation among buyers due to the subpar product quality that some dropshipping suppliers provide.

To make sure your online store earns a good reputation and attracts more customers through good word-of-mouth, you need to test the product quality and the speed and reliability of the fulfillment process of your dropshipping supplier.

Before you settle on a product for your store, check what previous customers have had to say about it in reviews.

Source: Printful Reviews

You’ll be able to spot both potential selling points (product characteristics not mentioned in the description, for example) and concerns (things like order fulfillment speed or quality).

If you have the budget for it, order a sample to test the product quality and shipping speed yourself. This way, you’ll be familiar with the entire ordering process and the product itself, and you’ll be able to answer any questions from your customers better. 

7. Size and weight

When choosing your dropshipping products, consider their size and weight as well. This will affect shipping prices—larger items are more expensive to ship. High shipping costs can cause issues with converting customers. In fact, shoppers name too-expensive delivery charges as the top reason for cart abandonment.

If you offer free shipping to entice customers, high shipping expenses for large products can eat into your profit margin or require you to set higher prices.

Source: TikTok Creative Center

If you look at the most popular product categories on TikTok, for example, you’ll note that all of these are relatively small products. Unlike oversized items like furniture, these products shouldn’t have steep shipping prices. 

8. Shipping origin and speed

In addition to the shipping price, you also need to consider where the dropshipping product will come from. Nowadays, thanks to services like Amazon Prime, customers are used to fast shipping times, so if they have to wait for weeks to receive an order, they may complain or choose not to buy.

Printful’s network of fulfillment centers. Source: Printful

During your product search, don’t forget to check how many fulfillment locations your dropshipping supplier has and where they are located. A vast fulfillment network means items can reach buyers faster.

9. Legal compliance

When researching dropshipping products, you should also look into where and how they’re made. Responsible product sourcing can be a significant factor for your buyers, so make sure your dropshipping supplier is transparent and willing to share all the information about its items.

Source: Printful

For example, each Printful product page has a Source tab which contains information about where the blank product comes from. Depending on the product, you’ll also see a link to the manufacturer’s website or other valuable resources. 

How to find dropshipping products: 7 ways

If you’re looking for dropshipping product ideas, here are several product research tools and other suggestions you can try to get inspired.

1. Amazon Movers & Shakers

Amazon is the undisputed leader of the ecommerce world, so this marketplace is one of the best places to start your research into dropshipping products. One option is to check the Best Sellers section, which lists the most popular items in each product category.

Source: Amazon

However, there’s an even better approach that can help you spot emerging trends before they blow up and you have extremely high competition to deal with. The Amazon Movers & Shakers section shows you the products that have seen the highest climb in sales rankings over the past 24 hours. In other words, it highlights which items are spiking in popularity.

Source: Amazon

Like with the other sections, you can browse the product categories that interest you the most, and each product listing displays its current and previous sales rank. It’s up to you to interpret why these particular items are trending and whether it’s worth selling them on your store.

2. Bestsellers on other popular online marketplaces

Don’t forget to check other marketplaces like Etsy, eBay, and Walmart. Browse their product listings and search results to see trending items. While not all marketplaces offer detailed insights like Amazon, which has dedicated bestseller sections, other sites also like to let buyers know what’s particularly popular at a given moment.

For example, if you browse Etsy’s product categories, you’ll see that some products have a bestseller tag, which means that the product has had a high sales volume over the past 6 months.

3. Aliexpress Dropshipping Center

If you’re looking for a database that has absolutely everything imaginable, check out the Aliexpress Dropshipping Center. You can see what’s currently trending in different product categories, which stores offer the products you might be interested in, how the prices for similar products compare from supplier to supplier, etc. You can use this platform to come up with dropshipping business ideas and immediately source the items you’ll need.

Here are just a few of the options under the keyword “stainless steel bottle.” Source: AliExpress

The items available on AliExpress tend to have very low prices, which means they can be very profitable products for your store, but you need to make sure that the quality is up to your and your audience’s standards.

To help you make the best choice, the AliExpress Dropshipping Center shows you how many items have already been sold, and each product has a detailed ranking submitted by other sellers. You can see whether the item arrives as described, how quickly it’s shipped, and how responsive the supplier is. You can also check each supplier’s total rating and other relevant information to help you decide whether or not to source their products.

4. Meta Ad Library

The Meta Ad Library lets you see what ads are running on all Meta platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and other sites. You can search for a keyword to see all ads that feature it or look up a specific brand to see the ads they run on Meta.

Source: Meta Ad Library

You can explore each ad in detail and see who runs it and where. Meta lets you browse both active and old ads to see how the trends have changed. If you notice that a product is being promoted repeatedly, chances are it’s a popular item that customers are consistently interested in.

Source: Meta Ad Library

You can also check in on your competition. The Meta Ad Library lets you see all the ads a particular brand runs so you can see what products other dropshipping stores consider worth investing in. 

5. TikTok Ad Library and Creative Center

TikTok is not just a social network but a major marketplace, so it offers several tools to help sellers learn about trending items on this platform.

First, you can look at the TikTok Ad Library, which functions similarly to the Meta library. Here, you can browse TikTok ads either by entering a keyword or picking a specific brand whose ads you’d like to explore.

By checking out what other stores are spending their advertising money on, you can learn which products they are betting on or are already selling well. When you have an idea you want to try out, you can start looking for a supplier that carries this item and add it to your store.

Another tool you can use to find winning products on TikTok is the Top Products section in their Creative Center.

Source: TikTok Creative Center

You can browse different categories and subcategories and see how well this type of ad content performs across the social network in a region you’re interested in. Each category and subcategory features examples of ads and suggests hashtags you can look at to get more business ideas.

6. Printful Bestsellers

If you want to stand out in the dropshipping world, one of the best ways to do that is by choosing the print-on-demand route with a supplier like Printful and selling branded products. With print-on-demand dropshipping, each product is customized with your unique design before it’s shipped to the customer. By adding your touch to each item, you can build a more distinctive brand identity and sell products no one else on the market can offer.

The Printful catalog features hundreds of products you can choose from, but if you’re looking for a place to start, check out the Printful Bestsellers category, which highlights the most popular items among all users.

7. Pinterest Trends

The Pinterest Trends section is one of the best tools for spotting emerging trends and seeing what items users are most inspired by and looking to buy. Users who create their mood boards and add pins often follow the latest design and fashion trends. Research your niche to see which types of products appear among its users the most. 

Source: Pinterest Trends

If you want to look up ideas in a particular product category, you can choose something from the Interests section or add your keyword to see what has been trending on Pinterest. You can also select what trends you’re interested in—growing, monthly, yearly, or seasonal. Seeing what types of pins grow in popularity at a given time can help you with product ideas for your online store.

Master dropshipping by focusing on smart product choices

When learning how to start a dropshipping business, figuring out what products to sell is often one of the trickiest parts. Ultimately, success in dropshipping comes from thorough research and an understanding of market demand.

Dropshipping stores have to be constantly on alert for new trends because you want to be among the first stores to offer winning products that everyone is rushing to get their hands on. Finding the right products for your store will take time, patience, and testing. But, if you’ve set clear criteria for what you’re looking for and know the dropshipping niche you’re targeting, product research can be fun.

Hopefully, this article can be your starting point—good luck!