How to Choose Best Products for Dropshipping on Shopify
In this new post, I’m going to change gears a bit. I’ll show you how to choose your market, and how to choose best products for dropshipping within that market that you’re going to sell within. In my previous post, I showed with videos how to build a Shopify dropshipping store.
How to Choose Your Market
Now, I’m going to show you how to find profitable products within that market. Once we have those products, of course, later on, I’ll show you how to add them to your site. There’s a lot of great knowledge here that I’m about to give you.
The first thing that I want to say is that…
1. You don’t need to find the next amazing trend when it comes to markets.
The classic rookie mistake or the classic beginner’s mistake (which I made in the past), is that you believe somehow you need to seek out the next greatest trend and be the first person in. Then, you know, as this kind of huge wave of demand washes over you, you’ll make an absolute fortune.
Now, I’m not saying that this doesn’t happen. It does, but it is few and far between. So, what I’m doing here is managing expectation. The chances of you finding the next amazing trend is sadly minimal. I don’t want to discourage you. I’m just being realistic.
So, the next thing I actually want you to do is to…
2. Sell into established markets.
We want to find markets where there is already a demand because demand is proof of concept. It shows that people are interested in that market and it shows that people want to buy products within that market.
In the world we now live in, markets don’t exist unless people want to buy stuff from them. That’s the fact of the matter, right? Nothing exists in this world unless there’s a demand for it, whatever it might be. So, we want to enter into a market that’s already established and take out all of the guesswork.
Now I’m going to show you exactly what I do so that you can benefit from my years of experience of doing ecommerce. What I do is we use two websites: AliExpress.com and Amazon.com. So, go over to the first video below and study how I use both of those sites. You will learn how to choose a market, or in fact, how the market will actually end up choosing you.
After seeing this video, I hope you agree with me that you should choose a market where you either solve a problem or you fulfill a passion. For example, people spend literally billions on their dogs a year globally not solving problems, but just simply indulging and fulfilling passion.
Solving problems and fulfilling passions are incredible motivators. We’ll talk about this more and more as we proceed. I will try to give you the best tips I possibly can to choosing markets and finding fantastic products.
In the next section, I will delve a bit deeper into the whole thing, because I want to show you how to find the best products for dropshipping, that is, those products that are going to give you the maximum amount of profit.
How to Choose Best Products for Dropshipping: The Golden Rules
You’ve seen in the last lecture how we can find markets and find really exciting products within those markets, but it’s almost as if it’s overwhelming. There are so many products out there. Which ones do we choose? Well, this is where my golden rules come in. The diagram below shows the golden rules that are going to help you decide what you’re going to sell.
The golden rule #1 is the price. This really is the main key point. You can see from the diagram that I wrote buy at $10 or less from AliExpress and sell it $25 to $30 on your site. Then I put impulse purchase after that. I’ll come back to that in a moment.
Now, why are we marking it up in this way? Well, clearly, we are in business and we need to make significant profit. This is exactly how we do it: we buy at a lower price on Aliexpress and sell at a higher price on our site. Now, you might think to yourself, well, that’s perhaps a little bit dishonest or not quite right, or whatever it might be. But that’s the way e-commerce works.
Think about any store that you go into, whether it’s offline or online, the price you’re paying has been significantly marked up by the merchant. They have bought it from somebody else at a lower price and now they’re going to sell it to you at a higher price. That’s how the whole world of commerce works. And that’s exactly what we’re doing here.
Now, to come to the point of impulse purchase, this is really key and, in my opinion, it’s really worth the price of the whole book because this is going to make a massive difference to the success of your business. What you want people to do when they come to your site is to buy products on impulse. Or put it another way, we don’t want them to overthink necessarily about whether they want to buy this or not. We just simply want them to buy it.
Let me illustrate it another way. If we had products on our site selling for $500 or $1,000 (something like that), when you have products at that price point, people will hesitate. They’ll go to other sites, they’ll do research. They may come back to your site, or they may not. It’s a completely different buying process. So, by pricing at this range of $25 to $30, we are absolutely in the range of an impulse purchase.
Now, others might say that an impulse purchase is higher than this. $50, or maybe 100. But in my experience, this price point ($25 to $30) works incredibly well. It’s for that reason that I’m advising that you go for very much the same.
The next golden rule is that you don’t want your products to be too heavy. The reason for this is because you don’t want to pay a lot for shipping. If you start paying a lot for shipping because it’s heavy. For heavy items, we will pay more for shipping. If you start paying a lot for shipping, that’s going to eat into your margin and therefore decrease your profit.
The next point is, we don’t want it to be too fragile. The reason for this is if we start shipping fragile products, they could well break in transit. Of course, if they break, that means more refunds, more returns, and more unhappy customers. So, we don’t want fragile products.
Golden rule #4 is that we want high quality images to advertise our products. I talked earlier about the importance of just generally images on your site. It’s exactly the same thing with the products. Very soon, you’re going to be adding a product, the first product to your site. I’m going to show you how to get those images from AliExpress.
But when you’re looking on AliExpress, you always want to have the highest quality images you can get because it’s images that sell. A lot of people think they have to write very lengthy descriptions when they sell products, it isn’t necessary.
High quality images will draw a customer in. It gives them confidence and makes them buy. The description is important. But if you want a rule then I would say 80% of the whole process of buying is more to do with images than it is to do with the description of the product.
Now, here’s the golden rule #5. It’s a big one and it comes up all the time: avoid all branded products. Now, this is kind of a bit of a grey area as well. But there are clearly some products that we know the brands extremely well. A few examples are Harry Potter, Adidas, Nike, and so on. These are global brands that we know. You do not want to sell their products.
As tempting as it might be, you don’t want to sell them because often you need a license to sell products like theirs. You could start selling them, but then you might have problems later on down the road. So, you want to avoid all branded products.
Now, as a little aside to that, often you’ll see things that look a bit like a brand on an AliExpress product, but it isn’t really a brand. What you can do there is simply Google the name, and see if you can find a website. See if you can find anything that talks about it. Often it won’t really be a brand. It might just be a made-up name from the supplier. They literally just made it up and stuck it on the image and at that point you might want to consider it. So, generally speaking, avoid all branded products.
Next up, we have can’t be found at Walmart. In other words, you can’t find it easily elsewhere. So, I’m not literally saying that it can’t be found at Walmart. Walmart being, you know, the world’s biggest mega store. The point here is that you want your product to have a certain uniqueness, or perhaps to put it another way, you don’t want a product that it’s just literally everywhere.
All over the Internet that might be a trending product right now, for example, that you’re seeing everywhere. You don’t want to just jump on that bandwagon because people can find that in all kinds of different places. They’ve seen that product. It’s very easy for them to buy it. You want a certain uniqueness to your products so they can’t be found easily elsewhere.
I’m not saying like they can’t be found elsewhere at all. So, it’s like you want your customer reaction to be something like, Oh, I haven’t seen that before. It’s that kind of reaction. So, I hope that kind of clarifies what I mean by this. It’s a tricky one to explain, but it’s that uniqueness that you want on your site as much as possible.
Golden rule #7: solves a problem or caters to a passion. Now, we saw this in the previous section. Okay, but I want to bring it up again, because I want to keep emphasizing this. There are certain points in this book that are so important, this being one of them. Solving a problem or catering to a passion is a key golden rule for the products that you choose.
Golden rule #8: the supplier. Again, when we start adding products from AliExpress very shortly, you’re going to see this in a bit more detail. So, don’t worry too much if a lot of this doesn’t quite make sense. But we want good suppliers. Suppliers get feedback on AliExpress so we can get a very good feeling straightaway, whether it’s a good supplier or not.
So, we want good feedback. We want them to have plenty of stock because if we choose a product that starts selling like crazy, we want to make sure they don’t run out of stock, and we also want to make sure that we’ve got the best shipping options, which is either epacket or AliExpress standard shipping.
Both of those are fast, reliable and cheap shipping processes from China. Those are the things that we’re looking for. Again, if that kind of doesn’t really make sense, don’t worry. It’ll all become very clear once we start adding products to your site.
Here’s the final golden rule #9, which is so important. I’ve talked about impulse purchases in the first golden rule. We’ve talked about solving a problem or committing to a passion. It’s all wrapped up in this sentence here: trigger emotion to impulsively buy products. This is a big secret.
We talked about the price point. We talked about certain products, not too fragile, etc. Those things are relatively straightforward, but triggering that emotion in your potential buyer because it’s either solving a problem or catering to a passion is what’s going to get them over the line. That’s what’s going to get them to put that product in their cart, go to the checkout and buy your products.
Those are the nine golden rules. What you’re looking at in the diagram is years of experience. What I suggest you therefore do is print these out and keep. You can print this out and have it by your side so that whenever you’re looking for products, you make sure that you know how to choose the best products for dropshipping so that you can build out a fantastic business.
How to Add the Best products for Dropshipping from AliExpress
This is a very exciting topic because at this point, we’re actually going to start putting products on our store, the products that your customers are going to buy. But just before we get into that, I thought this was a good moment to remind you how the business model works, how we’re actually making money, and how dropshipping works.
I’m not suggesting you’ve forgotten, but I think it’s a nice moment just to revise, have a look and remind you how this fantastic business model works.
Getting it All Set up
Of course, it all starts with your store. See the diagram below.
Once we have our store, we’re going to have customers who come to our store to visit. I’m going to be showing you soon, as I said before, free traffic techniques to allow you to bring those customers to your store to buy your products.
Now, customers buy a product from us. Remember, we don’t have any stock. We’re not holding any physical materials ourselves. Everything that we’re selling starts life over on AliExpress. So. what we do is we go back to AliExpress and the supplier to send the product direct to the customer.
This is a very simplistic diagram, but it is really important to understand this concept. I’m sure you do already. I’m just kind of re-emphasizing because the key advantages are numerous. So, if you’re sitting in your apartment right now, for example, and you’re thinking, hang on a second, I’m going to have loads of boxes all over the place and it’s going to be a nightmare to manage. It’s not. You’ll never have any boxes anywhere. You don’t have any stock.
Secondly, you get the money up front. Also, remember the golden rules. Let’s say a customer buys a product for around $30, you’re going to now have $30 in your hands. You haven’t yet delivered the product. You have the money up front. You don’t have a cash flow problem. Many, many businesses have big problems with cashflow. I’m not going to go into it right now, but it can be a killer for you. That’s not a problem.
The money you have up front allows you to go over to AliExpress, buy it for let’s say $5 from AliExpress, and send it straight to the customer, and of course, pocketing the difference, a beautiful $25 in my example of profit.
Then thirdly, you can run the business from anywhere. This is also key. I often get questions related to this where people say things like, I live in Australia, will this business work for me? Yes, it will. I live in Africa. Could this work for me? Yes, it will! Any country you can think of, this business model works.
The other thing I see people getting confused about now and again is that they think they can only sell in their country. Let’s take Australia example, that dropshipper would be thinking that he can only sell to customers in Australia. He can do that, but he can also sell to anybody in the rest of the world.
You could be living in Australia and selling in the United States, the UK, Europe, Indonesia. It doesn’t matter. You could be living in Kenya and sell to any country could possibly think of. There is no limit. You can run your business from anywhere. Those are the key points. I really hope you’ve grasped them. I’m sure you have.
But what you need to do right now is to set up accounts on AliExpress.com and Dsers.com. That’s a key component of our business model. It’s completely free. It’s really easy to do and Tim is going to show you how to do it in the next video.
Welcome back! Now, we have a few more things to do. In the next few sections, you’ll see how Dsers is going to help us bring all kinds of fantastic products into our store automatically.
How to Import the Best products for Dropshipping from AliExpress
In this lesson, you will learn how to add your very first products using Dsers. In the video below, I use a couple of examples just to get things going so that you will familiarize yourself with the process.
Now that you’ve seen in the video how two products were imported, I hope you can already see how powerful and simple to use Dsers. The more products you have in your store the more your potential to earn more. When I started my dropshipping business with the E-commerce empire Academy, I opened my store with only 15 products. Now I have thousands of products and a big store.
Now, Dsers really does give you an incredible advantage, but we do have a lot more to do. For example, we need to do some tidy up. I’m sure you noticed that the product titles are pretty awful. So, what we need to do is to tidy this up to make sure that these products will sell on our site. That’s what I’m going to start talking about that in the next lesson.
How to Tidy up Product Pages
In this lesson. we will have a look at how we can tidy up the products. But just before we do that, I just want to give you an overview of the format of a product, that is, how Shopify displays the product within the admin system:
- Title.
- Description.
- Media, which is typically images, but could also be videos.
- Options, such as the different colors available for the product.
- Variants, which refer to the different varieties available within the options.
That’s an overview of how the products are presented within the Shopify admin system. It’s the same for every single product. So, what I want to show you now is the process I go through to tidy up the products because, as I said, these are not acceptable at the moment. We have crazy titles and crazy descriptions. Also, we need to sort out pricing. We need to make sure they’re showing on our store, etc. So, in the following video I explain the process that I go through every time.
After following the steps in the video and taking action, you might feel a little bit overwhelmed. You might feel that it’s a little bit complicated, but please trust me. Once you’ve done this two, three, four, five times, you’ll be doing it almost on autopilot. It starts to become easier and easier. So, make sure you tidy up all the products you’ve created so far.
Now, of course, we’re not quite done because we left the description blank on purpose. That’s because I’m going to teach you a great sales tip on how to write copy to get people to come and buy your product. We will have a look at that in the next lesson.
Selling the Benefits, Not the Features
Now, let’s have a look and see how we can write a really great description for our product. As you can see in the heading, “selling the benefits, not the features”. This is a key point which I’m going to expand on as we go through this book.
But before we get into that, one of the things I do want to say is that product descriptions do not have to be complicated. In fact, the shorter and more concise they are, the better. What I often see is people writing very long product descriptions, and really, for the most part, that is not necessary, particularly in our case when we’re selling impulse items.
Imagine you write a very long product description, which you’re expecting somebody to read. We’re trying to sell something on impulse here, and you’re asking them to read through, say 10 minutes of your text. They’re not going to do it. Even if they are, it’s probably not going to have the desired impact that you want.
They want to look at a very concise description that tells them about the product, look at some great images, see that the price is right, and then go ahead and actually make the purchase. That is what we’re trying to achieve.
Now, what do I mean about benefits and features? What do I mean about selling the benefits and not the features? Let’s just think about that necklace that we were looking at in the previous video, the little poor pendant. The features of that poor pendant are things like its chain length, its weight, the overall size of the pendant. Those things are the features.
Now, imagine if you went into a store and the salesman said to you, you’re really going to love this. This product has a chain length of 50 centimeters. It weighs 5 grams, and the pendant itself measures 2 to 3 centimeters across. What would you think at that stage? You would probably think that’s a bit weird. Why is he telling me these things? But they’re all correct, right?
That’s what basically what the product is all about. It feels weird and it doesn’t make you want to buy the product because he’s basically describing the features. But what if he were to sell you the benefits, which in fact is what happens every single time? What he’s likely to say is something like, you’re going to absolutely love this product. It’s such a fantastic way to show your love of dogs. It has a beautiful alloy finish to it and just sits really comfortably around the neck.
See what I’ve done there? We’re talking about exactly the same product, but what I’ve talked about there, literally off the top of my head are the benefits, a huge difference between benefits and features. I hope you can see straight away why that makes such an enormous difference to your sales. That is what you want to sell well. You want to emphasize the benefits and not the features within your product description.
By way of example, let’s go back to my product in the video and actually write out a very concise product description that does exactly that.
This is now a very exciting moment because we’ve just got our very first product published on our site. I hope you agree. Now, we’ve been looking at all kinds of exciting stuff up to this point, but I think it’s time to have a little rest. Let’s sit back in the next lesson, and just enjoy how the product presents itself on our site. Let’s have a look at all the hard work that we’ve done so far.
Time to Take a Breath
Let’s now have a look and see how this product now presents on our site.
It’s also worth noting the price in this video because as you just saw, we’re selling this for around $30, as you would expect with our golden rules. Also with our golden rules, we bought it for less than $10.
Now, I’ve said this before, I’m going to teach you free traffic methods which are coming up soon. This means that your profit margin is going to be somewhere around $20 per item. So, imagine if you’re able to sell 100 of these per month, that would be $2,000 of profit on one single product. I hope you start to see how exciting this business model can be.
How to Create Products Collections
First things first. Between this section and the last one, we took the opportunity to tidy up our other product. We felt like you didn’t really need to watch me do that because it’s basically the same as everything you’ve just been taught.
Now, go to watch the video for this lesson and learn how to create collections for your catalog. You will learn how to create logical collections for your products, drop your products into those collections, create the associated menu, and then decide which of those products you want to feature on your home page.
In this video, you should have seen that you now have an incredibly powerful tool for adding products to your collections at your fingertips, so I’d really encourage you to do what I just did.
Finally, I hope you’ve now learned how to choose and add the best products for dropshipping on Shopify. In the next post, you’re going to start learning how to turn your Shopify store into a real dropshipping business.