Finding the Best Dropshipping Products for Your Store in 2022
Dropshipping is an excellent business model for ecommerce retailers who are just starting out. However, if you’re new to the ecommerce business, how do you know which products to sell?
Finding your niche is one of the biggest hurdles you’ll face and what you choose will have long-term impacts on your business’s success or failure.
It’s common for new dropshippers to pick a niche out of passion or personal interest. If being interested in your products is your primary objective, this is an acceptable strategy. If your priority is achieving success, however, you must put your personal preferences aside and do your research first.
Types of Dropshipping Products
It’s essential to target the right demographic with your products, as all customers aren’t created equal. The following types of products tend to be good places for new dropshippers to begin.
Office Products
Whenever possible, try to select products that appeal to both businesses and individuals. While business clients are typically more restrained by budgets, they will almost always order in larger quantities than individual consumers. If you land the right client and earn their trust, this relationship can lead to a long-term, highly profitable relationship.
Hobbyist Products
People are passionate about their hobbies and will spend a lot of money on training, equipment, and tools to fuel their interests. Many serious fishermen will buy boats that cost more than their cars and avid mountain bikers will empty their pockets outfitting their bicycles. If you can target the right niche, you can do well by successfully appealing to enthusiasts and their unique needs.
Repeat Purchases
Another profitable niche is products that need to be reordered frequently, such as disposable items. A loyal customer base that returns again and again to purchase products will allow you to reap recurring revenue.
Most Profitable Dropshipping Niches
Trends come and go, but these dropshipping niches are full of top-selling, lucrative products for new retailers entering the market today.
Pet Supplies
People love their pets and they’ll continue to buy products for them over and over again to see their furry friends happy. Products such as pet food and cat litter are popular dropshipping products, as pet owners will return to purchase them again and again.
Beauty
When it comes to beauty products, many consumers are willing to spend money on items they don’t necessarily need—especially to keep up with current trends. Each year, retailers generate almost one billion dollars in revenue on foundation alone. You can be competitive in this niche with a catalog of quality inventory at competitive prices.
Clothing
Clothing is a profitable and low-cost dropshipping option, especially women’s clothing, which is expected to grow 7.2% from 2021 to 2025.
Survival Gear
The global survival tools market size is projected to reach $2,481 million by 2030—a CAGR of 7.1% from 2021 to 2030. Survival products are almost always in demand, especially items like knives, tactical accessories, hiking and camping items, and other gear.
Sporting Goods
Sports-related items are another popular niche, and the opportunities are endless. Consider popular sports such as soccer, tennis, golf, MMA, and basketball. This category also encompasses fitness and weight training products.
Health Supplements and Vitamins
Selling health supplements, vitamins, and remedies is a popular choice, but you must be careful to comply with all restrictions and regulations or risk losing your business. Stay away from items that make specific health claims, and they’re heavily scrutinized by the FDA (and other organizations). You don’t want to unnecessarily expose yourself to legal liabilities.
Other popular dropshipping categories include:
- Office products
- Car accessories
- Gaming
- Kitchen and grocery
- Camera and cellphone acessories
- Home and bedroom decor
What to Consider When Selecting the Best Dropshipping Products
One of the most essential steps to success in dropshipping is product research—how do you define a winning product? Here are some factors to consider when conducting product research for your store.
Marketing Potential
Remember, dropshipping is a fulfillment model—you still have to have solid marketing practices in place to promote your business to your customers. Before you select the products you’ll sell, think about how you’ll market your business. How will you acquire new customers?
Brainstorm various product niches and how easy they will be to market. Reach out to online communities to gauge interest and if you can’t easily develop a marketing strategy, you may want to rethink your plans.
Accessories
Lower-priced items are typically the easiest to dropship, as they typically allow for higher margins than expensive items. While you may only be able to make a 5% margin on a tablet, you could likely make a 150% margin on a case to match.
When making purchases, customers are typically more sensitive about the price of the most expensive item. You may shop around for the best price on an iPad, but you likely won’t balk at a $25 case to go with it. It’s more convenient to purchase the case at the same time as the iPad. These add-on purchases can lead to higher order totals and can become critical to your bottom line.
Product Pricing
When it comes to dropshipping, product pricing is everything. First, consider the price-point relative to your resources. While most people will purchase a $50 item online without asking questions, they’re far less likely to follow through with a $1000 purchase without speaking to someone first. Do you have the time and other resources to field those calls? If not, you should start smaller.
If you do plan to sell higher ticket items, you should be prepared to offer customer support over the phone. Make sure to build the cost of this service into your margins, or you’ll lose money trying to close the sale. Plus, more expensive items often have a more complex return process.
Also, don’t make the mistake of believing that the best products are the most expensive. Selling higher-priced products can weaken your competitiveness, as other, well-known brands can often outsell you at a better price point.
Size
Consider avoiding dropshipping products that are too large—such as heavy fitness equipment, furniture, and household appliances. You may be able to source the products for a great price, but you’ll end up spending more in the long run on shipping fees. Most carriers have special shipping requirements for items weighing over 70 pounds. The smaller your products, the cheaper your shipping fees and the larger your profit margins.
You should also consider each product’s fragility. Hopefully, your customers will order from all over the world, and the last thing you want to worry about is a product damaged in shipping. Damages will result in higher rates of returns and refunds, which are detrimental to your bottom line. For these reasons, it’s best to stay away from fragile items such as ceramic and glass goods.
Local Availability
Try to dropship products that are hard to find in a specific location—but don’t get too specific. If someone is looking for a screwdriver or rake, they’ll likely visit their local hardware store. But, if they’re looking for a jade face roller, they’ll likely search for the best price online.
One of the easiest ways to determine whether your product is available locally is to perform a Google search for the product and include the name of your city. If you don’t live in a major city, use the name of a major city that you’re closest to. For example, you could search “leather saddles + new york.”
Low Turnover
Imagine a store with thousands of products. Now, imagine removing those products and uploading new ones each time models and trends change.
This can quickly turn into a mountain of work, especially if you’re selling products that are frequently updated, such as electronics or tools. Try to select products with listings that don’t require a ton of maintenance and you’ll thank yourself in the long run.
Choose Useful Products
One of the best ways to ensure success in dropshipping is to select products that solve customers’ pain points. The products you sell should offer useful functions—this is an efficient way to boost revenue.
Does the product serve a passion, relieve pain, or solve a problem? It’s easy to advertise these products, as you can create videos to demonstrate how to use them. These will not only show the potential use case of each product but pique your customers’ interest.
Performing Product Research for a New Dropshipping Business
What exactly is product research, and how do you properly evaluate a product or niche? Using the criteria below will help you garner a better sense of your niche, along with a better understanding of a product’s strengths and weaknesses.
You should perform research based on both product and market criteria—consider some of the following questions when doing research.
What Is the Potential Market Size?
While evaluating market size can be difficult, and determining an exact market size is nearly impossible, you can make an educated guess. For example, a product that caters to females between 20 and 30 years old has a large market. However, a product that caters to females aged 25 to 30 who like classical music is likely too narrow.
Google Trends is a good place to start, as it will help you determine the market demand trajectory of a product.
Who Is Your Target Customer?
While you don’t need to go into painstaking detail when developing your buyer persona, you should be aware of the type of customer you’re targeting and what they purchase online.
For example, if you’re targeting young adults, it’s essential to keep in mind that many teens don’t have credit cards and can’t purchase online. Similarly, if your products appeal to an older generation, they may not like to buy products online.
What Does the Competitive Landscape Look Like?
Next, take into account the competitive landscape for your selected product and niche. Are you the first retailer to market this product? If you’re dropshipping, probably not. So, is the market saturated with competitors selling the same product or targeting your niche?
If a lot of other people are selling the same product, the market is validated, however, you must be able to differentiate your brand enough to make sufficient sales. You must carve out your own spot in the sea of competitors. You can begin to uncover the current players in your ideal market with a simple Google search, or by using SEO tools such as Semrush or Ahrefs.
Are There Any Product Restrictions or Regulations?
Before you move forward with a specific product idea, it’s essential to determine whether there are any product restrictions or regulations. If there are, you’ll want to make sure the restrictions or regulations are manageable. Failure to properly evaluate this can be crippling to your ecommerce business.
Certain food products, cosmetics, and chemical products carry restrictions—from both the countries you’re shipping to and from. If you have any concerns, it’s worth a few phone calls into the country you’re importing products from and to. You should do your research with the Food and Drug Administration if you’re selling food products or supplements.
Is the Product Scalable?
While it’s difficult to think about the long-term scalability of your business when you’re just starting out, you must consider it while you’re establishing your initial business model.
Is your product handmade or does it contain materials that are difficult to find? How will you scale if your dropshipping venture takes off? Is it possible to outsource manufacturing if this is something you create in-house? If your order volume spikes, can you take the heat? These are all questions to consider before settling on your product niche.
Is the Product a Fad or Trend?
What is the difference between a trend and a fad? While sales may spike for fads, riding a fad can be a dangerous move for retailers. Understanding where your product selection and niche lay in the market is critical to your success.
A fad is a product that grows in popularity quickly and then dies out just as quickly. Examples of popular fads include fidget spinners, mood rings, and Chia Pets.
Trends are similar, however, they stick around for a much longer time. They don’t grow as quickly as fads. Sometimes, trending products can lead to growing markets, although it’s nearly impossible to predict whether this will happen. Gluten-free foods are an example of a group of products that were initially labeled a trend, however, they’ve remained popular for the last ten years.
Dropshipping Product Research Tips
Whether you’re just starting your ecommerce business or working to expand an existing catalog, you can use the following tips to guide your dropshipping product research.
Check Out the Product on Amazon
Amazon is an ecommerce phenomenon and can be a fantastic place to conduct product research. However, you can quickly get overwhelmed if you don’t have a plan to start.
Check out Amazon’s bestsellers list to research profitable products from all categories—from lawn and garden to household goods, toys, and more. You can easily search for products among the marketplace’s 400+ million product catalog by category, keyword, or custom filter. When performing research on Amazon, take note of product variants, listing reviews, and advertisements.
Follow Consumer Trend Publications
Consumer trend publications exist for retailers to stay up to date on the latest industries and product trends you may not have known existed. This is an easy way to uncover new products and niche opportunities.
An example of one of these publications is TrendHunter, which provides a free annual trend report. The online community of over 200,000 people lists trends for every industry, including fashion, beauty, luxury items, and more. You could take a single trend and create your next winning business idea.
Monitor Niche Forums
Another popular place to look for bestselling dropshipping products and niche ideas is online industry forums. These forums are also a great place to connect and discuss relevant topics with like-minded retailers and potential customers. Some niches, such as online gaming, have thriving online communities where you can observe discussions around the most popular games.
You can also search larger forums like Reddit by keyword and identify communities related to a specific topic, such as environment, culture, and tech. These communities, called subreddits, are a popular place for consumers to come together and discuss populate topics.
To find online forums, try searching “[your niche] + online forum” on Google.
Ask Your Customers
Whether you have one thousand customers or five, one of the best ways to find out what your audience wants is to ask your customers. It’s as simple as sending an email to your customer base or posting on your social media platforms and asking your audience what they are interested in.
Other Dropshipping Tips for Success
Becoming successful as a dropshipper starts with picking the right products, but requires business sense and strategy along the way. Here are a few of our top tips to help your ecommerce business succeed.
Keep Track of Inventory Levels and Fulflil Orders Intelligently
As a dropshipper, you’ll likely work with multiple suppliers, which gives you a huge advantage. Having many suppliers to source from and overlapping inventory is a great way to boost your order fulfillment ratio. If one supplier runs out of a specific item, chances are another has it in stock.
When working with multiple dropshipping suppliers, it’s essential to know which supplier to fulfill an individual order from. There are several ways to route orders, including:
- Route orders based on location
- Route all orders to a preferred supplier
- Route orders based on price
- Route orders based on availability
There is no right way to route orders. The routing rules you put in place will depend on your suppliers, business resources, and personal preference.
The best way to keep track of inventory availability and order routing is by implementing robust dropship automation software to track inventory across the order fulfillment process.
Provide the Best Customer Support
As your business grows, you’ll need more than a single Gmail inbox to manage customer support. Without the right resources in place, customer service can quickly break down, leading to lapses in support and other problems.
Perhaps the most helpful thing you can do in the beginning is to create a customer support section of your website, complete with an FAQ article. Try to answer your customers’ questions before they write you an email, which will free up your staff for more pressing business issues. As your business grows, consider help desk software to help make it easier to assign issues to employees and maintain co
Build a Successful Ecommerce Business With the Best Dropshipping Products
How can you be sure that you’re selecting the best dropshipping products to sell online?
Unfortunately, it’s impossible to know 100% what will work for you, but you can use the guidance in this blog to make a more informed decision. The best way to know what works is to dive in and try something. If it doesn’t work, you can quickly pivot to the next thing, thanks to the flexibility of the dropship model.