How To Find Winning Products?
Your product is one of the most crucial parts of your dropshipping business.
The more high-quality products you test > the higher your chances of finding winning products. Not just any products, but HIGH-QUALITY products. (Products that have the highest chance of being winners). This is why large-scale dropshippers invest in a huge product research time to find and test multiple products a day. However, most dropshippers, often face 2 roadblocks whenever they try to scale their product research process or find more products.
And these 2 roadblocks are often the cause of:
a) Inconsistent revenue
b) Low-profit margins
c) Winning product dry spell – going on a long period of time without any winning products.
But after working with many 6-8 dropshippers in our operations agency, we came up with a hyper-optimized product research process that has been proven to significantly reduce these roadblocks. So what are these 2 roadblocks?
#1: Product Duplication
When it comes to finding more products, most dropshippers just think of hiring more product researchers.
But as you add more product researchers to your team, one challenge you will start to experience is Product Duplication.
Meaning, the product research team would constantly find products that another team member has already found.
The reason why this happens is that as your product research team grows, the chances of them finding the same products over and over again gets a lot higher (especially if your product research process revolves around AdSpy).
So even though your team may have 10 added new products into your product research excel sheet each day…
The truth is, out of the 10 products, only 2 of them are UNIQUE products…
The other 10 of them are actually the same (duplications of each other).
While this may sound like a small issue…
The implication can be HUGE!
Because the opportunity cost for these duplications can be very high.
Like what I have mentioned earlier…
The more high-quality products you test > the higher your chances of finding winning products.
Any time not spent researching new unique high-quality products is time and opportunity lost.
Two duplicated products a day means ten duplicated products a week.
And having ten duplicated products a week means you’re missing out on the chance to test ten additional unique products… which could have greatly increased your chance of finding winners.
Product duplication is one thing you want to avoid at all costs as you scale up your research team.
If you’re not tracking it yet, it would be useful to see how many product duplications your team has on a weekly basis.
We suggest this: Here’s one of the simple but effective solutions that we implement for our clients to reduce the overlapping and waste of effort while maximizing the chance of finding winning products:
Separate your product research team by niches and sub-niches.
For example, one of them could be doing Beauty products. Another doing Gadgets. Another doing Pets. Another Outdoors etc.
As you continue to scale up your team, you can also break it into more sub-niches, with each researcher going more in-depth into each sub-niche.
This way the team members will be clearer and more in-depth on what they should look out for.
And with lesser people looking for the same category (especially when they use the spy tool AdSpy to find products), there’s a lesser chance of overlapping products.
Furthermore, if the product researchers are specialized in the specific niche, they are more likely to recognize what are the common traits of the winning products for that niche and increase the chance of finding winning products in that niche in the future.
As simple as this sounds, this is one of the effective strategies we use to help our clients to scale up both the number and quality of product tests a day.
#2: Drop-in Product Research Quality
Whenever our agency onboards new clients, one of the first systems we always implement is to have a fixed set of KPIs for the team.
The KPIs can be as simple as testing 30 new products a day.
From there we can break it down further:
E.g.
Research 30 products a day
Create 3-5 video creatives per product a day
Then we set KPI for each team member on a daily/weekly/monthly basis.
As you know, what gets measured gets managed. From there we can optimize and improve further.
Oftentimes, just by implementing the right KPIs and Scorecard Metrics for our clients, they would see at least a 2-3x increase in efficiency and output
(e.g. from 3 products a day to 9 products a day. One of our clients are even producing 27 high-quality video creatives each day using the system we created )
Now, the idea of having KPIs for your business and team is quite straightforward and simple.
Most dropshippers tend to already have some kind of KPIs that they are tracking. It’s nothing new.
But here’s a shocking truth…
Just having KPIs by itself without a proper system can actually lead to lower performance and revenue!
Here’s why:
Many dropshippers like to wear the number of products they test each week like a badge of honor (the equivalent to flexing muscles in the gym)
This can be a good thing because more product tests tend to lead to more winning products.
But in order to hit those numbers, what actually tends to happen is this:
They intentionally reduce their criteria when researching for products.
Here’s what I mean:
Top dropshippers know that in order for them to have a higher chance of finding a winning product, they’ll have to follow strict product research criteria.
Oftentimes in order for a product to be added to their “list of products to launch”, the product has to first fulfill over 5 criteria.
This ensures that every single product in the list is of the highest quality and has the highest chance of becoming the winning product.
But as they try to scale up the number of product tests each day to hit a certain KPI…
Many of them start to find that they are unable to consistently hit those KPIs at high quality.
(Whether it’s because of duplication, or inefficiency or ineffectiveness of system)
So what they end up doing is this:
A lot of them start to lower the number of criteria on the checklist (just so that their team can hit those KPIs)
E.g. Instead of 5 criteria, they might lower it to 4. Or just 3.
Even though this makes finding products and hitting the daily quota much easier…
It will drastically affect the quality of the products added to the list.
So on “paper”, even though they have like 10-15 product tests a day…
Most of them are low quality.
Which not only significantly lowers their chances of finding a winning product…
But also often result in burning cash to test these low-quality products and reduce the overall profits.
So, how do we create a system to test more products a day while still maintaining high quality?
We suggest as this: Use a Scorecard Metric to measure both the Quantity and Quality of their product research.
First, get your product research team to upload all of the products that they’ve found onto just ONE centralized sheet to keep things clearer.
When our client first came to us, he had his team upload their products in multiple google sheets and platforms.
This meant that the product researchers had to constantly refer back to several different google sheets to see if the product has been added previously.
Because of the extra steps, his team wasn’t able to test more than 3 products a day.
Here’s what we did to 4x the number of products they test:
At our agency, we created a customized system for his team by streamlining his entire product research process.
One of the effective things we did was to integrate a google form TOGETHER with the google sheet.
We then got his product research team to upload the products into the google form which then automatically adds the product into the google sheet.
A product research team leader will then vet through the google sheet and remove any products that are duplicated.
This will prevent the product researcher to constantly refer back to the google sheets, and focus on finding as many products as they can.
We also created a Scorecard Metric that shows the product researchers how many unique products they have found each day (after removing the duplicates). So that they know how many more products they need to search for at any time.
At the end of the week or month, this Scorecard Metric will also show how many of their products they found turn out to be a winner.
That way we can track both the quantity and quality of each product researcher.
If they are not hitting their numbers, then we improve on the process and system to make it more efficient.
If the quality is not good enough, then either we review their process, their skills or find a replacement if they are not suitable.
That way, everything is tracked, measured, and continuously optimized.
Using this customized system we built, our client was able to scale his product research team and went from testing 3 products a day to up to 12 products a day EVEN when they had to follow his extremely strict 5 step product research criteria.
This allowed him to find winning products consistently and he is now on his way to crushing 7 figure months.
Hope you find these two strategies useful!
These are 2 of the many strategies that we use as part of our Optimized Product Research System which we implement for our clients.
While they may sound very simple, it’s often the small and simple things in the systems that can create a drastic difference in results. The 20% that creates the 80% results.
Try these out and let us know how it goes!
Note: It’s important to note that it’s impossible to fully eliminate product duplication. When your team is doing 3-5 product tests a day, duplications do happen. This is why it’s very important to continue to customize and optimize your Product Research System to reduce inefficiency so that your business can scale faster.
Sourcing Product Easy company established in 2008, based in Shenzhen city. As a professional China sourcing agent, we buy good products for customers. Over the past 10 years, we have visited more than 1000 factories throughout China. We have huge factories resources and logistic networks. We are good at consumer electronics, shapewear, hardware, etc. . We can provide customized products or print on demand also. We own a fulfillment center in China, provide a one-stop Shopify dropshipping solution.
