How to Crush It With the Hottest Products in eBay Dropshipping

9 min read

The one question I have been asked the most is “what to sell?”

Would you like to find the next product to go on eBay’s best sellers list? 

I am going to share with you my years of experience in finding the best products to sell specifically for eBay dropshipping. 

Ready?

In this article you will learn about two tactics that always generate sales: 

1. How to ethically steal your competitor’s best-sellers
2. How to ethically steal your competitor’s customers

How to Make Sales on eBay? (The Sniping Technique)

Find good products to sell, that’s how. And you can do that using one of the most popular eBay dropshipping product sourcing techniques:

1. Locate other eBay dropshipping sellers that are successful.
2. Sort their hot selling products on eBay by “most sold” or “recently sold”
3. Find where to source these products from (your product sourcing website)
4. Add those products to your eBay store for a cheaper price with the exact same title, or try to use other keywords 

The Sniping Technique is one of the most popular eBay dropshipping product sourcing techniques, it is probably used by every successful seller out there. (by FlatIcon)

Actually, you don’t really have to use eBay only and you can try to snipe trending products not directly from other stores on eBay rather from other stores online. You can look for trending items on Instagram or Pinterest.

You can even search on Google some random keywords related to a niche of products and then look at the store names that appear in the search results and use Facebook ads library to see what products they advertise (they won’t invest money in advertising products that don’t sell, right?).

The Best Products To Sell on eBay

The best products to sell online are the ones that are currently trending. One of the most popular ways to find them is by sniping them from other successful sellers.

What is so great about the sniping technique?

• The products already have a success record – Take a look at the offline world. When you go to a small convenience store in your neighborhood and you see some new products on the counter. If it is a trendy product every convenience store in the area would get their hands on it and try to sell it as well. The widget spinners phenomena in 2017 was a great example of that
• You can post only a few products – The sniping technique requires to add fewer products to your store in comparison to the keywords ranking technique.

But not everything is perfect when it comes to sniping products. If I snipe your products and try to sell them for a bit cheaper price to the same audience, and you do the same to me. What will happen in the end?

Why your product might not sell well?

Even if you snipe best sellers, it doesn’t guarantee they will sell. If you think about it eBay eventually has a limited amount of potential buyers and especially when you are trying to sell trending products the more there is a demand for those products the lower the more tempting it is for sellers to lower the price to get those sales.

It’s called “the competition to the bottom”

Since everyone knows the sniping technique benefits, everyone uses it – every time someone copies the same title and lower the price, as long as the product sourcing price stays the same you everyone just keeps reducing the profit margin until it will eventually make it not worth it to join the competition unless you are going to actually purchase a wholesale inventory directly from the manufacturer for a low-enough of a price. But that’s not relevant for running a risk-free business like eBay dropshipping, right?

Good to know: Products that offer low margins due to such high competition are called “saturated” products. They are also referred to as “saturated niches” or “saturated markets” depending on the context.

How to Make My Products Sell?

Most important is that you understand that no matter what sourcing technique you use to find hot dropshipping products on eBay to sell – every product has a life cycle. Can you think of one product you remember from childhood that doesn’t exist today? Once you understand it you stop being attached to products even if they are best-sellers. So sniping is not a technique that finds forever best sellers, it’s a technique to find trending best-sellers and “ride on the wave” of its success. It is something you have to do again and again while optimizing your store.

One of the things you can do to ensure you have the highest chance to win the competition is related to how you source your products. The most traditional websites used for eBay dropshipping are Amazon and AliExpress. This causes sellers to compete with the exact same products against each other to the bottom.

But there are 50+ other websites you can dropship from when you use DSM Tool and you can easily search products between them using the DSM Tool Chrome Extension. Try to look for similar products on different websites that might offer a cheaper price.

And there is one more powerful tool you must use if you want to avoid “the race to the bottom”. You can try to get your products to appear on the first page of eBay’s search results for other keywords using different keywords in your title or other eBay SEO hacks.

The Best Products Sell Only With the Best Titles

Keyword ranking is when you try to get a product to reach the first search page results on eBay for specific keywords. The idea is to find keywords that people search a lot but don’t have a lot of competition. When you find it, you add those keywords to the eBay title and description of the products you try to sell, so they will get ranked on the first page and start generating sales.

Finding keywords that would work better for your products is quite simple, you measure the competition and success and find out which keywords are better to try to use in order to sell.

Measure the competition

On eBay search for keywords and look at the number of results you’re getting. The more results there are, the more competitive these keywords are. For example, for the “dog toy” search we’ve got 155,684 results while the “dog game” only got 32,460 results. Ranking on the first page for the “dog game” should be easier than ranking for “dog toy”.

Comparing the “Dog Toy” and “Dog Game” keywords, from eBay.com

 

Measure the success

Big win for “dog game” in competition level. But are these successful keywords as well? Here is how you can check it yourself. On the left side of the products feed filter the search results by “sold items” only. 

Then, divide the number of sold items by the number of search results and you would get the success rate of these keywords

29,515 / 155,684 = 0.189

Nearly 19% success rate for the “dog toy” keywords! Now let’s calculate together the success rate for the “dog game”

9,086 / 32,460 = 0.279

 

We have a winner!

Nearly 28% success rate for the “dog game” keywords. Not only it is less competitive, but it is also more successful!

I used this manual method for a long time, it takes time, it’s definitely not optimal, but it worked! What I have come to learn is that like every professional, you need tools.

 

The Secret Tools Professionals Use to Automate their Success 

When I started following the hot selling products on eBay from successful sellers, I used to manually search product titles of best-sellers from Amazon or AliExpress on eBay, just to find sellers I believed to be dropshippers, keep them in a list and check their products every day. I was constantly frustrated by the amount of time it took to find products to sell, and I kept messing the data and lists. 

Then I found it.

It’s called Zik Analytics. The best research software in the world that will change your life!

I became friends with Nahar, the software owner of Zik Analytics and an eBay dropshipping expert. He agreed to create a FREE version of Zik Analytics inside DSM Tool!

Also, he made a special offer of $1 trial for 7 days when you sign up using this link

So put a helmet on, because you are about to have a crazy ride to the stars!

TAKE ME TO THE STARS

I also stopped doing manual keywords ranking research when I found out about the amazing “Title Builder” tool by Zik Analytics. When I find a trend or when I research a general direction I simply type one or two keywords into the Title Builder and Zik analyzes the data for me!

Not only that I don’t have to manually calculate anything anymore, but also it gives me a full range of other keywords I would never think of otherwise! 

The results for the keywords Dog Game from the Zik Analytics Title Builder

One Last Pro-tip for Your Success

You might wonder at this point, how at all did we decide to begin our research with the keywords “dog toy”? 

My secret weapon to get ideas for what keywords to even start with, I am using this amazing tool of eBay called eBay Explore where eBay exposes their best sellers and trending products which usually contain interesting relevant keywords to start the research with. You can also always try to come up with keywords by yourself, the more creative you get, the further you get from the competition into the blue ocean of opportunity.

So go ahead, implement the methods and practice them, I know that soon you will get great results, join the successful eBay drop shipper, and bring money home!