Artem Zmitrovich
When starting a dropshipping store, sellers need to focus on building a profitable product catalog. On that note, dropshippers need to do product research and source their chosen items based on their business goals. Whether we decide to sell in a niche or sell numerous different products, we need to find winning products for dropshipping. By selling proven items, we can ensure we maximize our sales and run a profitable business.
Now, to do so, there are various ways to go about product research and sourcing. With that said, in this article, we’ll look into the differences between manual and automated approaches. We will also learn different ways to do product research and find profitable products. On top of that, we’ll also take a look at the most reliable dropshipping suppliers for us to source from.
Where To Buy Products For Dropshipping
Notably, when sourcing dropshipping products, there are different places where we can buy them. Obviously, we can source from a dropshipping supplier, which is convenient since they often have dropshipping systems in place. Dropshipping suppliers have dropshipping centers that make sourcing for dropshippers easier. They may also have guidelines and conditions to keep both the dropshipper and the customer safe. In fact, dropshipping suppliers offer both the platform and the extensive product catalog to cater to dropshippers.
However, we can also source our products from wholesale suppliers. Interestingly, wholesale suppliers have much lower product prices and enable us to boost our profits. To elaborate, we can add bigger markups to our prices while remaining competitive since we are sourcing them for cheaper. But, we should look out if our wholesale supplier has a minimum order quantity (MOQ).
An even cheaper product sourcing option is to source directly from manufacturers. In this case, we completely cut out the middleman. Plus, sourcing from a manufacturer is the cheapest option since we are eliminating the supply chain and going straight to the source. However, in this case, as well, there may be MOQs applicable that we should look out for.
Another less frequent place to source products from are trade shows. Attending trade shows allows us to see what’s new and up-and-coming in specific industries. Additionally, it gives us the opportunity to build connections and find cool products to sell. However, attending a trade show may require some investment in travel, accommodations, and entry.
Lastly, and possibly the most tedious place to find cool products is to make them. We can embark on a do-it-yourself (DIY) adventure and sell items that we make ourselves. That way, we can price our handmade products higher and make solid profits.
What Is The Best Way To Find Dropshipping Products?
While there are various ways to research products, the main objective of these methods is to find high-profit potential products. With that in mind, here are the best ways to find dropshipping products:
- AutoDS TikTok Spy
- AutoDS Winning Products Hub
- Supplier’s best-sellers
- Social media product hashtags
- Spy on competitors
- Google Trends
If you want to take your business to the next level, for example, by offering branded products, it would definitely benefit you to work with a supplier with a dropshipping warehouse.
AutoDS TikTok Spy
First, we’ll take a look at the super cool and unique AutoDS TikTok Spy tool. The TikTok Spy tools give us a comprehensive and easily legible look into what’s trending on TikTok. It allows us to gain access to a comprehensive collection of trending TikTok ads and videos that are constantly updated. This helps us find ideas for niches and products that are currently trending. In fact, it gives us valuable insights and inspiration for in-demand products.
AutoDS Winning Products Hub
With the AutoDS Winning Products Hub, we access a collection of proven best-selling products. This database of best-sellers can quickly help you find hot products and underlying niches. It also gets constantly updated to ensure we are up to date with recent trends. Plus, it offers in-depth analytics that can give you better insight into a product’s profitability.
Supplier Best-Seller Sections
We can also find products on our supplier’s website. To find trending products, we can search our suppliers’ best-seller sections. In short, most suppliers have a dedicated section that displays best-selling items. For instance, Amazon Best-Sellers, AliExpress Dropship Center, eBay Trending Items, and Walmart’s Top Selling Items are some examples of best-seller sections.
Another way to do product research is to take a look at what social media is buzzing about. To do this, we can easily search the relevant hashtags related to trending products on a social media platform and see what’s popular. For example, on TikTok, we can search for the hashtag #TikTokMadeMeBuyIt and see the trending products generating interest and demand.
Spy On Competitors
Furthermore, we can easily spy on our successful competitors and note what they’re selling. Notably, since a successful competitor has already figured out what sells well for them, we can try selling the same products or similar ones to boost our sales. Plus, it makes it easier to start dropshipping as a beginner when we’re not sure what we should sell to attract customers.
Google Trends
Last but not least, an amazing dropshipping product research tool we can use is Google Trends. To clarify, Google Trends is a data analysis tool that displays trending search queries from the internet. Additionally, it also displays keyword-related and location-related searches. So, we can see which specific products are trending by using them as keyword searches. On top of that, we can see how each product performs in different geographies and sell accordingly.
All in all, solid product research is the key to our dropshipping success. This is because if we offer trending products that people have generated demand for, we can boost sales and see dropshipping success.
When conducting product research, consider your target market. Some items are more popular in specific regions. Best selling items on eBay UK or DE might not be so popular on eBay US.
Best & Fastest Dropshipping Suppliers
In the process of building our dropshipping store, we need to fill up our product catalog. To do so, we need to work with reliable and fast dropshipping suppliers that will be shipping our items. Additionally, we need to ensure that our supplier’s business policies align with our needs.
With that said, let’s take a look at the best and fastest dropshipping suppliers:
- AutoDS Warehouse & Private Suppliers
- Amazon
- Walmart
- Sunrise Wholesale
- Costco
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AutoDS Warehouse & Private Suppliers
The AutoDS Warehouse is a great place to source products since it houses lots of private suppliers. This gives us a competitive edge since our competitors don’t have access to these private suppliers. Notably, AutoDS is also a supplier with a warehouse. It offers fast shipping making it a great choice to source from. Apart from AutoDS, the AutoDS Warehouse keeps adding new private suppliers and growing the list, enabling us to enjoy more diversity. And, since it’s linked to the platform, all orders will be fulfilled through the automatic order fulfillment system, Fulfilled by AutoDS.
Key features:
- The Winning Hub – effortlessly discover, source, and import best-sellers.
- Private Suppliers – exclusive products with faster shipping times.
- AutoDS Warehouse – A private warehouse that does quality checks and is filled with winning products.
- Product Sourcing – Improve the usually long Chinese supplier shipping and processing times.
- Customized Branding – The option to add your brand logo to your packages.
Selling Channel Compatibility:
- Shopify
- eBay
- Amazon
- Facebook Marketplace
- Etsy
- Wix
- WooCommerce
Average Shipping Time:
- 3 to 7 days
Amazon
Now, moving on to Amazon. Amazon is one of the global eCommerce leaders. Plus, it has a huge product selection, with millions of products covering every category. Because of this, they are one of the most attractive suppliers to source from.
Moreover, here are the key features of Amazon:
- Fast 2-day delivery
- International warehouses
- Flexible return policy
Undeniably, one of the most attractive traits that Amazon has is their 2-day delivery for Prime members. As such, it ensures its Prime members get their orders at a lightning-fast speed. On the same note, they can offer fast shipping because of their 110 fulfillment centers in the US and 185 centers globally. As a result, we can source from them regardless of the location of our target market.
On top of that, we can enjoy their free 30-day, “no questions asked” return policy. Thus ensuring we maintain clear business policies and an optimal customer experience.
Walmart
Although Walmart is primarily used to source products for the American consumer, it has delightful perks like a wide range of products for dropshipping and next-day delivery. It also gives the option to send your product in gift packaging.
Key Features:
- Dropshipping program
- Wide product range
- Robust analytics
- Price match policy
- Dedicated customer support
Selling Channel Compatibility:
- Walmart Marketplace
- eBay
- Shopify
- WooCommerce
- Etsy
- Amazon
- Facebook Marketplace
- Lazada
Average Shipping Time:
- 1 to 5 days
Sunrise Wholesale
Sunrise Wholesale is a wholesale supplier. They partner with industry-leading dropship suppliers to provide over 30,000 wholesale dropship products. For almost 20 years, they’ve helped thousands of sellers profit with dropshipping.
Key Features:
- Same-Day or Next-Day Fulfillment
- Dropshipper friendly
- Low and affordable prices
- Minimum Order: $1
- Returns and refunds are processed automatically
Selling Channel Compatibility:
- Shopify
- WooCommerce
- eBay
- Amazon
Average Shipping Time:
- 1 to 2 days
Costco
We’re finishing off the list of reliable suppliers of products for dropshipping with Costco. Costco is America’s great wholesaler, renowned for its competitive prices. Our gravitation towards Costco as dropshippers comes from its great deals, lean pricing, and fast 2-day delivery to most US locations.
Key Features:
- Dropshipping support
- High-quality products
- Membership deals
- Reliable return policy
- Superb customer support
Selling Channel Compatibility:
- Amazon
- eBay
- Shopify
Average Shipping Time:
- 2 to 10 days
Discover more options for product sourcing in our guide, the best free dropshipping suppliers.
How To Start Sourcing Products For Dropshipping
The product sourcing process consists of a few steps to ensure you build a product catalog that attracts customers and drives demand. However, we can go about this in one of two ways, manually or automated product sourcing.
Manual Product Sourcing
Manual product sourcing involves finding proven products to sell in our store on foot. We go through different websites to look for products with great potential to boost sales. Although it may sound simple, it’s actually very time-consuming. However, learning and understanding this method will allow us to discover new techniques for sourcing products.
Notably, we need to consider both the pros and cons of manual product sourcing:
Pros:
- Cheap way to find products – You don’t have to invest in product sourcing software to find proven products.
- Access to more stores – Find and look through stores and competitors that are not on automated software.
- Prepares dropshippers with sourcing skills – Learning will help us check the quality of the deals and the salability of the products.
Cons:
- Laborious – It takes a lot of effort, energy, and focus to manually go through countless websites, stores and products.
- Time-consuming – Manually sourcing our products requires a huge time investment since it takes quite a bit of time to go research so many websites and products.
Now, the process of manual dropshipping is quite simple, consisting of only a few steps. First, we start off by looking for online stores relevant to our own dropshipping goals. This is basically like spying on the competition, but we focus on successful competitors.
Then, we need to go to or find a product category we’re interested in selling. Essentially, we’re looking for the niche that we want to sell. For example, let’s say we want to include toys in our dropshipping store. We can start off by going to the online Disney store and checking out the product categories that are relevant to us.
Then, to find similar products for our store, we need to choose a supplier and look for the products on their website. However, before adding the product to our own product catalog, we should check out the reviews on our suppliers’ website. That way, we can ensure that we are selling quality products.
Automated Product Sourcing
As an alternative to manual product sourcing, we can utilize a faster and much more convenient method – automated product sourcing. To explain, with automated product sourcing, we don’t have to manually go through all of the steps mentioned above.
In fact, we can utilize AutoDS Marketplace and Winning Product Hub to gain easy access to a massive collection of proven best-sellers. These tools are consistently updated with the web’s most in-demand products in dropshipping. So, instead of doing all the research and sourcing ourselves, the software has already done it for us.
But we can also rely on the AutoDS product sourcing tool, which helps us source safely from China. It ships our products through the AutoDS warehouse to inspect product quality. Plus, the AutoDS warehouse has much shorter shipping times than most Chinese suppliers.
Now, we can easily use the AutoDS Product Importer to import as many of these proven products to our store as we want with just one click. Then, AutoDS’ automated order fulfillment tool can automatically fulfill and process all of our orders as soon as they come in. As such, we can improve fulfillment times and reduce errors.
At the end of the day, automating our product sourcing process can optimize our business. Plus, it allows us to scale faster because we can easily find and import products in minutes rather than days.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which Is The Best Way To Find Products For Dropshipping?
The best way to find products for dropshipping is to utilize AutoDS’ Winning Products Hub and TikTok Spy tools. They automate the product research process for you by giving you a collection of trendy products and best-sellers. That way, you don’t have to manually research products.
What’s The Main Difference Between Manual And Automated Product Sourcing?
When we go about product sourcing manually, we have to literally do everything ourselves. We have to utilize different stores and suppliers to manually look through them and find best-sellers. Then, you must manually import the product to your store by copying/pasting every detail about the product into your listing. But, by automating the process, you can save a bunch of time and energy and let the software do the work for you.
Where Can I Get Stuff For Dropshipping?
You can get your dropshipping products from reliable and trustworthy suppliers whose business policies align with our own. For example, some of the best suppliers to work with are the AutoDS Warehouse, Amazon, Walmart, Sunrise Wholesale, and Costco.
Conclusion
Ultimately, we can safely conclude that our products and how and where we source them are crucial for our dropshipping success. Of course, other factors like marketing or store layout will also affect our business. But our products drive our business – we attract customers and profit with our products. So, now we know how and where to source them and how to go about our product research most efficiently.
And, to further help us out on our dropshipping journey, check out these super useful articles:
