40+ Best Product Research Tool Ideas for Effective Market Research

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When running an e-commerce business, it's easy to become overwhelmed by the many tasks required to keep things running smoothly. Product research is one of the most critical. With it, you could save time and money launching the wrong products, an experience no store owner wants to encounter. In this post, we'll explore the best product research tool for your e-commerce competitor analysis and how it can help you ensure successful product launches and stay ahead of market trends.

Shophunter's Shopify sales tracker is an effective product research tool that helps you get the insights you need to make informed decisions about your product development. This tool's sales information can help you quickly identify trending products, uncovering opportunities for your store before the competition.

What Is a Product Research Tool?

Best Product Research Tool

Product research gives you the information you need to make confident decisions about your products before you invest. It can help you identify opportunities, reduce risks, and increase your chances of success. But instead of jumping into product research once you’ve already developed your item, it’s best to conduct this analysis early on and throughout the product development lifecycle. This way, you can refine your product to meet the needs of your target audience and market it effectively to ensure a smooth launch.

What Questions Can Product Research Help Answer?

Product research helps you answer critical questions about your product, such as:

Will the product succeed in the market?

What are similar products in the market?

What’s the best way to develop and sell the product?

Product research doesn’t just ensure you choose the right products for your audience; it also helps you:

Prioritize your ideas

Test and validate different ideas

Experiment with product names and packaging

Sell at a competitive price

Understand your competition

Monitor product-market fit

Improve your product and marketing

Businesses that perform regular product research stay ahead of competitors. Product research also helps develop innovative, high-value products because you’ll always know what’s on trend and which trends grow sustainably.

What Is a Product Research Tool?

A product research tool helps ecommerce businesses identify and analyze potential products to sell in their online stores. These tools are designed to make the product research process faster, more efficient, and more accurate by providing data-driven insights on:

Market trends

Product demand

Competition

Profitability

An ecommerce product research tool can be a great addition to any ecommerce business because they:

Save Time

Instead of manually researching potential products, you can quickly use the tool to find products that meet your criteria.

Provide Accurate Data

Ecommerce product research tools provide data-driven insights to help you make informed decisions.

Identify Excellent Products

With the help of a product research tool, you can identify products with high sales potential.

Help you Stay Ahead of the Competition

Ecommerce product research tools often provide insights into your competitors.

How Do Product Research Tools Help Product Teams?

Best Product Research Tool

Collecting Data to Drive Product Decisions

Product research tools excel at gathering qualitative and quantitative feedback from various sources. For instance, data can come from:

User surveys

Website analytics

Usability tests

This feedback serves as the foundation for many product decisions.

Understanding Customers' Needs and Preferences

Tools designed for customer feedback and sentiment analysis provide valuable insights into what users like or dislike about a product. They illuminate areas for improvement and enhance product discovery.

Keeping Tabs on the Competition

Product teams can use specific tools to monitor:

Competitor products

Their features

Updates

Pricing strategies

Market positioning

This aids in staying ahead or differentiating from the competition.

Prototyping and Usability Testing

Tools like Figma, InVision, or Sketch allow teams to create interactive prototypes to:

Test product concepts

Gather feedback

Make iterative changes before full-fledged development begins

A/B Testing to Validate Product Assumptions

Beta testing different versions of a feature or a product page helps product teams understand which resonates more with users, allowing them to optimize for better performance.

Prioritizing Research Findings

Tools designed for feature voting or road mapping can assist teams in prioritizing features or improvements to work on next based on user demand, strategic fit, or potential impact.

Boosting Team Collaboration

Many research tools have collaborative features, allowing multiple team members to share insights, annotate feedback, or jointly analyze results. This fosters a collaborative approach to product development.

Analyzing Trends for Product Innovation

Product teams can use these tools to identify:

Market trends

Emerging technologies

Shifting user behaviors

Documenting Research for Future Reference

Research tools often offer ways to document findings, organize data, and create reports. This ensures that insights are easily accessible for future reference.

Improving Efficiency and Speed

Automated research tools can quickly gather and analyze large volumes of data, drastically reducing the time required compared to manual methods.

Mitigating Product Development Risks

By validating assumptions and hypotheses early on using research tools, product teams can reduce the risk of making mistakes or misdirections in the product's development.

Empowering Product Teams with Data-Driven Insights

In essence, product research tools arm product teams with the information and insights to build better products that resonate with users, achieve product-market fit, and stand out in the market. ShopHunter's Shopify sales tracker offers a unique tool for e-commerce founders, particularly those in the Shopify ecosystem. At its core, it is a custom algorithm that estimates sales for entire stores and specific products, helping users quickly validate product potential.

Tool for E-commerce Research

The platform goes beyond basic sales tracking, featuring an ad spy tool that monitors advertising activity across stores. This combination lets users spot trending products and successful marketing strategies early on.

ShopHunter for Dropshippers and Shopify Store Owners

Whether you're a dropshipper, a Shopify store owner, or someone looking to enter the e-commerce space, ShopHunter aims to streamline product research and reduce the risk of investing in low-performing items.

Sign up for a free trial (no credit card required) to our Shopify sales tracker tool to find your next eCom opportunity or to level up your current eCommerce store by learning from your competitors.

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8 Product Research Methods to Help You Build Winning Products

Best Product Research Tool

1. Customer Interviews: Getting Up Close and Personal

Interviews can occur at any stage of the product development process and consist of direct conversations with current or potential customers. You may conduct interviews with a market panel during concept testing and idea screening to validate your ideas, or you may want to speak to current users after the product goes live to gather post-launch feedback. Interviews are a varied and flexible product research method.

During customer interviews, you should ask open and unbiased research questions to gather insights about customer needs, preferences, and experiences regarding their:

Pain points

Your product

Competitors

2. Voice of Customer (VoC) Analysis: What Are Customers Saying?

Gauge what current and potential customers say about your products or competitors online. You can do this using VoC tools, by reviewing:

What people post on social media

Looking at Google Trends

Reading reviews on websites like G2

Continuous Customer Voice Analysis for Competitive Advantage

You should conduct customer voice analysis continuously throughout the lifecycle as it can help you gain a competitive advantage. “Review what’s publicly published, check feature requests, and ask sales, customer success, or support teams for feedback coming from the user,” adds Matthieu.

For example, suppose a competitor gets acquired by a bigger firm and users start to complain about them removing a feature. In that case, you can use the opportunity to develop a similar functionality or improve the one you have. You can also make it more visible on-page and get the sales and marketing teams to use the information to advertise your product.

3. Diary Studies: Understanding Real-Life Contexts

Diary studies involve users self-reporting behaviors, habits, and experiences over a period of time. This is often used during the discovery phase with a competitor product or later down the line with a prototype. By observing how users feel prior to, during, and after using your (or a competitor) product and their experience throughout, you can gather valuable, in-the-moment insights within a real-life context.

Two boxes list different types of diary.

One box is blue and lists digital diaries: mobile apps, digital communication platforms, online platforms, and digital tools.

The other box is orange and lists paper diaries: a physical diary, a question sheet, and a video/audio log.

You can conduct diary studies on paper, video, or online on a mobile app or a dedicated platform. Data from diary research can turn into:

New product ideas

New features

Inform your current project

For instance, if you have a social media scheduling tool and you identify that users open a time zone calculator when they’re scheduling posts, you instantly have a new feature idea, to add a widget with different time zones.

4. Competitive Analysis: Exploring the Competition

Analyze competitors' products and strategies to identify what works for them and identify any gaps in the market. The idea behind competitive product analysis is to:

Explore your competitor’s products in-depth

Use them for a while

Take notes of top features, UX, and price points

You can run competitive analysis during the discovery, concept validation, or prototyping stages with direct and indirect competitors, or aspirational businesses.

Matthieu Dixte, Product Researcher at Maze, notes the value of competitive analysis is in understanding your users perspective: “We conduct a lot of competitive analysis at Maze because it's really important for us to understand if the market is mature regarding a particular topic—and to identify the current ground covered. This helps us understand the pros and cons our customers perceive when they choose between our product or another tool.”

5. Surveys: Getting Valuable Feedback

Surveys can be a great way to get feedback or gather user sentiment relating to existing products or future concepts. You can also use them to dig deeper into the data gathered during other tests, and understand user issues and preferences in context.

For example, if you ran an A/B test and discovered that a certain copy was causing potential users to churn, you could follow-up with a survey with targeted questions around their:

Demographics

Preferences

Personal views

This would help add qualitative insights to your quantitative data, and help understand what your users are looking for from your product. You can create surveys at any stage of the product development to collect data from users in small or large volumes. You can use different types of surveys and survey principles to:

Validate or debunk hypotheses

Prioritize features

Identify your target market

For example, you could ask questions about your product, competitors, prices, or your customer’s preferences and market trends.

6. Usability Testing: Assessing a Product’s Performance

Since conducting product research is also about understanding how well your customers navigate through your product and if they find it usable, you can run usability or prototype tests. Usability testing evaluates the usability of your product by asking test participants to complete tasks on your tool and seeing how they interact with it.

While typically conducted as a pre-launch check, usability testing is now widely understood as a building block of continuous research. Conducting regular usability tests is:

Staying familiar with users

Taking the pulse of your product

Ensuring every new product decision is informed with real data.

Product tip: Conduct usability tests on a product research tool like Maze and record your participant’s audio, video, and screen with Clips. This offers you a mix of quantitative and qualitative data to learn why participants take certain actions to complete test tasks.

7. Fake Door Testing: Assessing Demand for New Features

The fake door testing method also called the painted door method, validates whether your customers would be interested in a particular feature. “It works by faking a feature that is not actually available and implementing a tracker to know how many people click on it,” explains Matthieu.

When people click on the feature, they see a message explaining it’s not available at the moment. If the click-rate is high, you can assume there’s interest in the feature and conduct further research to identify how to design and develop it. While it’s a quick way to gauge interest, fake door testing runs the risk of frustrating users, so if you’re using this method on a live product, you should be cautious and set a short testing period to avoid creating false expectations in your users.

8. Focus Groups: Generating Ideas Through Group Discussion

Focus groups are when you gather a group of users to try your product and discuss their thoughts on the design, UX, usability, or price. You’ll offer them prompts or ask a series of user research questions to spark conversation, then observe and take notes.

This can be an expensive or admin-heavy method, as you need to:

Rent a space

Find participants who are willing to attend

Compensate them for their time

You can also conduct focus groups remotely through video conferencing tools. These groups are a good way of generating new product ideas or gaining deep insight in a short space of time, as you can hear directly from your users and adjust your questioning to follow up on important topics or opinions which participants mention.

How to Choose the Best Product Research Tool

Best Product Research Tool

Size and Stage of Your Company and Products: Assessing Your Current Situation

Evaluate the size and stage of your company's products and existing product offerings. For instance, a startup business with a lone product manager can pick one multi-purpose tool. The business can broaden the range of tools as it grows its product portfolio. A company with several products and a larger product team may require a vast and highly specialised stack of tools.

Features and Functionality: Narrowing Down the Options

Consider the product team's requirements and identify potential issues and areas for improvement. Once you do this, you can identify a tool that best addresses those issues and requirements. The tool can enable a team to work efficiently and reduce time on complex processes, such as data collection and analysis. For instance, a tool with data gathering and dissemination capability can collect customers' feedback and disseminate it directly to decision-makers, reducing the time required to get approvals.

Usability and Integrations: Finding a User-Friendly Tool

Before choosing a product research tool, determine its usability and how easy it can be integrated into daily workflows. Some tools can be highly technical and specialised, which may require high technical ability to execute. When conducting usability tests, consider which teams are likely to use the tool. You can also consider the level of support the users might require to use the tool. It is important to consider how to onboard new and existing tool users.

Cost of the Tool: Budgeting for Your Product Research Tool

Every product research tool costs the business money. When choosing one, it is crucial to:

Consider your budget and check the fees

Plan finances accordingly

Prepare for any additional costs

Some tools offer a trial period during which you can use the tool for free and purchase it later. This option can be helpful to small businesses or startups.

Customer Support: Getting Help When You Need It

Do you get fast 24/7 customer support and training resources?

Reviews: Learning What Other Users Think

What have people said about the tool, and does it have good reviews? Look for different platforms like TrustPilot.

Elevate Your E-commerce Strategy with ShopHunter's Advanced Analytics

ShopHunter's Shopify sales tracker offers a unique tool for e-commerce founders, particularly those in the Shopify ecosystem. At its core, it is a custom algorithm that estimates sales for entire stores and specific products, helping users quickly validate product potential.

Tool for E-commerce Research

ShopHunter for Dropshippers and Shopify Store Owners

Sign up for a free trial (no credit card required) to our Shopify sales tracker tool to find your next eCom opportunity or to level up your current eCommerce store by learning from your competitors.

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40+ Best Product Research Tool Ideas for Effective Market Research

Best Product Research Tool

Finding profitable products to sell online is often easier said than done. There’s no sugarcoating it: Product research is tedious, time-consuming, and often frustrating. You have to sift through tons of data to:

Uncover trends

Assess competition

Identify market opportunities

The best product research tools help you uncover lucrative products to sell while minimizing the manual labor involved. They do this by automating the process of finding profitable products, unpacking sales data, and even analyzing competitors so you can get ahead of the game. Here’s a look at 44 of the best product research tools for e-commerce sellers.

1. Shophunter: Shopify Sales Tracker

Optimize Your E-commerce Journey

Sign up for a free trial (no credit card required) to our Shopify sales tracker tool to find your next eCom opportunity or to level up your current eCommerce store by learning from your competitors.

2. Helium 10

Helium 10 provides multiple tools and research options for dropshipping professionals. It includes competitor analysis tools that gauge where you rank within your market. You may also analyze keyword data and identify real search terms related to your product.

Helium 10 integrates product tracking tools that gauge inventory estimates and help professionals avoid poor investments. You may search a market using various niche terms or identify multiple branding opportunities for your business using its product research suite including branding quality analysis software.

3. Exploding Topics

Exploding Topics integrates various programs and software to identify purchasing trends throughout dropshipping markets. Key features include a simple interface and quick trend identification within multiple niches.

Each category provides search volume and topic growth rates that may help some users identify potentially lucrative products. You may use this tool in the early planning stages for your dropshipping business or when identifying new product options.

4. Jungle Scout

This program suite integrates a user-friendly design and focuses heavily on novice dropshippers. Users may sign up with a seven-day free trial before getting a premium membership. Its programs include:

Click-based interface that uses an advanced supplier database

Various measuring metrics

Identification software

In-depth price-quality ratios

You may use this product on a separate app or the integrated browser extension that automatically calculates your product's success.

5. ZonGuru

Zonguru provides users with a streamlined interface and an intuitive design that may make user interactions more efficient. It integrates multiple tool types that gauge a product's popularity and success. Zonguru focuses on solopreneurs, or one-person businesses, by integrating inexpensive membership plans, comprehensive marketing information and automation tools that may minimize the need for manual work. Features include:

Fraud alerts

Business metrics

Keyword trackers

Review aggregators

Email automation for dropshipping and e-commerce sites

6. SellerApp

SellerApp memberships include product trending analyses, keyword research, keyword tracking, listing SEO tools, indexing checkers, and pay-per-click (PPC) tests. Users may analyze product revenue and sales potential, track competitor data, and gauge product-market intensity. Professionals can pursue different membership plans that offer varying levels of features and tools.

7. KeywordInspector

KeywordInspector focuses specifically on identifying keywords during a product research process. Its features include:

Free keyword suggestion generator

Search terms editor

Reverse ASIN searches

Trending keywords

Niche identification

This tool is helpful for identifying trending search keywords and focusing your research on products with high potential within your niche. Some users may also identify keywords that are decreasing in popularity and shift their dropshipping efforts away from these terms.

8. Oberlo

Oberlo can search various products for your niche and connect your customers with multiple products. You can also integrate automatic order processing and fulfillment and minimize your hands-on work. Oberlo also lets users identify and replace product suppliers when fulfilling their orders.

9. Dser

This research tool lets you search for low-cost products that can ship quickly to your destination, usually within 10 days. You can then seek similar products sold by other suppliers or dropshippers to lower your prices. Users may:

Import products directly to their store

Edit the product descriptions

Earn cash back when fulfilling orders

10. D-Nicheur

D-Nicheur focuses on identifying trending products within a specific niche. Users access a Winning Product Catalog that lists three popular products every day. Each product receives careful testing from D-Nicheur before it offers a suggestion. You may also use free search tools and web extensions when analyzing:

Various suppliers

Social media ads

Other product options within your niche

11. FindNiche

FindNiche collects information from sources across the internet when searching for trends. You can use this information when:

Searching

Filtering

Sorting

Identifying potential product options

You may then utilize the blogging tool to identify better niches for your potential market choice.

12. Viral Launch

Viral Launch provides many product research tool options for the global retail marketplace. Its interface includes photo, listing and product launch searches throughout several international markets. These programs include in-depth artificial intelligence and market analysis that automatically highlights sales and marketing elements during each search. For example, it may identify:

Accurate stocking information

Monthly sales estimates

Current prices

Potential profits

Marketing details

13. ShopInspect

ShopInspect searches different virtual shops and identifies popular or trending products from various suppliers. You can use traffic analytics from multiple shops to gauge product popularity and identify keywords and product listings. Users may also create online marketing videos based on buyer demographics and focus on social media platforms appropriate for their niche products.

14. Sale Source

SaleSource provides marketing and product research tools for multiple online sales platforms. Features include:

Product analysis

Trend assessment

Competition comparisons

Merchant identification

All online suppliers receive detailed ratings and reviews from previous customers, providing helpful information you may use when choosing a wholesaler. You may also save searches and sort information based on past successes.

15. Pexda

Pexda provides product curation options across multiple platforms. Users may:

Detailed reports from various selling platforms

Identify high-converting products

Create social media advertisements

Identify potentially successful products before they become popular

You can adjust this platform and improve its usability by changing various operations and program button designs.

16. Dropship Spy

Dropship Spy integrates multiple product research tools when:

Filtering keywords

Researching a specific niche

Identifying potential products

Engaging with suppliers

In-depth charts

Some advertising options

You may search multiple promising products, identifying those with a high chance for popularity. Dropship Spy also connects users with Smart Match, an automatic search tool that matches users with products they've purchased in the past.

17. Niche Scraper

Niche Scraper uses a software as a service (SaaS) design and provides various research options for dropshippers and e-commerce sellers. Like many tools, Niche Scraper provides an all-in-one product research platform; you can:

Use this program on multiple platforms

Search thousands of production options

Analyze stores and suppliers

Create online marketing videos

Identify low-competition and high-value products

Integrate various social media marketing campaigns

18. AliShark

AliShark provides instant alerts for high-potential products and items buyers should avoid. It includes:

Live stats that analyze multiple product features

Trends and predictions

Advanced filters when seeking new products

You may use this program on various platforms to complete some limited advertising and marketing tasks with the tool.

19. AllFactor

AllFactor provides a competitive analytics platform for various commerce sites. It collects data from unique sources to create detailed market insights and advanced analytics. Features include:

Detailed charts

Tabulations to compare buying and selling trends

You may also use real-time tracking to monitor unique changes within your market niche.

20. CamelCamelCamel

This program utilizes multiple tools to create a product research suite for dropshippers. You can:

Check detailed price history charts from numerous online vendors

Gauge product availability and price drops

Research trending products based on popularity

Integrate multiple browser extensions

Chart potential sales successes

These tools sync this data and provide a real-time environment you may use when charting your next major product purchase or market extension.

21. AMZ Scout

AMZ Scout provides a free membership plan that includes training videos to streamline your program use. This user-friendly design includes various tutorials that give users a chance to experiment with an app before deciding on a premium membership plan. Once you purchase a plan, you can research keywords, gauge product success, predict market potential and utilize key market metrics. Additionally, users may purchase a lifetime plan that provides these features permanently for dropshippers.

22. Sell the Trend

Sell the Trend uses data from multiple online marketplaces and shops during each search. You may use this data when gauging product popularity, market reach, social media marketing and supplier availability. Research tools may identify successful purchase options within your niche and estimate their potential purchasing options. Buyers may choose from millions of products and integrate video-making tools when crafting marketing campaigns for their products.

23. Thieve.co

Thieve.co provides free, dropship and pro membership plans with multiple pricing platforms and program options. High-cost plans include more features, including product searching, automatic result filtering, potential sales charts, curated reviews and currently trending products. In addition, users may adjust their feed when focusing on specific niches, minimizing wasted product search and research time.

24. EcomHunt

You may use Ecomhunt when identifying new products within your potential niche. Its features include product identification, top-selling item listings, trend analysis programs, supplier identification, social media marketing and competitor analysis options. You may use this tool to identify potential products, narrow your supplier list and avoid product commitment risks. The paid version allows unlimited product searches every day, while the free option includes a two-product daily limit.

25. Userpilot

Userpilot is a customer success platform with the ability to create, design, and trigger in-app surveys for user research, either from scratch or by using any of the multiple templates available.

Userpilot brings more than the ability to trigger NPS surveys inside your app for research. You can also create onboarding flows, collect user behavior data, and give access to advanced product analytics, everything to nurture product growth.

26. TikTok Creative Center

The TikTok Creative Center has a top products list that’s free to use—you don’t even need a TikTok account to browse the data. The Creative Center can give you insights on:

Best sellers by region, organized by popularity

Changes in popularity over a time period

The standard click through rate on TikTok ads for a popular product

The typical amount of money spent by advertisers to achieve one sale

The total amount of money spent on ad campaigns for a popular product

Related product categories for each popular item

While much of this data is only directly usable if you’re going to run product ads on TikTok, the ability to search top products by region can be useful for product marketers on any e-commerce platform. There are over 800 million people using TikTok, so it’s a useful source for understanding what types of products people are interested in right now.

27. Pinterest Trends

Pinterest Trends is like the TikTok Creative Center; it lets you see which products and niches are popular among users in your region. You can use Pinterest Trends to research:

Current products of interest

Products of interest by season

Products related to specific consumer interests or keywords

Product interest by user age and other demographics

The weekly, monthly, and yearly change in product interest

Clicking on any trend or product gives you an in-depth look at:

How interest fluctuates over time

Related trends and products

Demographic details about the users interested in this item

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28. Algopix

Algopix is a product research tool for Walmart, Amazon, and eBay sellers. If you're interested in selling through more than one marketplace, then Algopix is a nice choice for building out your inventory and planning product prices.

When using Algopix, you can see a variety of product metrics including:

The best-selling products in any category

Who the highest-profile sellers are in a given channel

Changes in prices, including promotions

Sales rates by location

Algopix can also help you find products that are similar to one you're researching. If you have a product description, you can put it into Algopix and get a list of potential matches.

29. eBay Terapeak

Terapeak is a database of insights about eBay sales. You can actually access Terapeak information directly through your eBay seller account, and see information like:

Product and category performance

Current popular products

Products attracting buyer interest

Average sales prices

Typical item condition

Average shipping costs

Popularity of free shipping

Unsold inventory levels

Most popular listing formats

Terapeak will also show you historic sales trends, so you can begin to make predictions about how your sales may fluctuate based on time of year or other factors.

30. Zendesk

Zendesk is a solution for collecting, understanding, and responding to customer feedback. It allows you to:

Connect with customers seamlessly across platforms, listen to their problems, and gather first-hand feedback.

Analyze and monitor critical customer data with multiple integrations and functionalities.

Create a response plan to address their concerns, and deliver solutions from a unified place.

In the product research journey, you want to understand what customers are feeling right now. And the best way to do that is to have a conversation with them to hear their feedback and concerns about your product.

Customer conversations are an integral part of product research because they give you direct insight into your customer’s thoughts and challenges. It’s how you learn who your customers are and how to keep them happy.

31. Dropship.io

Dropship.io is a specialized product research tool designed specifically for dropshipping businesses. It helps users identify profitable products by:

Analyzing trends

Competition

Demand across various online marketplaces

With its user-friendly interface and comprehensive data analysis features, Dropship.io simplifies the process of finding winning products for your dropshipping store.

32. Spocket

Spocket is a dropshipping platform that connects online retailers with suppliers primarily based in the US and Europe. Unlike traditional dropshipping platforms that rely heavily on suppliers from Asia, Spocket focuses on providing high-quality products with faster shipping times. This makes it an ideal choice for businesses looking to offer a better customer experience through reliable shipping and premium products.

33. Minea

This all-in-one solution’s goal is to simplify every dropshipper’s journey. It enables you to launch winning products in three clicks. This platform focuses on helping you scale your e-commerce business and boost profits. It has a few great features, but a crucial one is that it provides access to the best-performing ads in any niche in real-time, therefore allowing you to stand out with exceptional creatives.

On the other hand, Minea has a tool called Success Radar, which is powered by AI. This tool provides insights such as product trends and ad engagement while helping identify bestsellers and avoid underperformers. With a simplified structure and many options, Minea can be an excellent product research tool for dropshipping.

34. AutoDS Marketplace

The AutoDS Marketplace stands as a vital tool for revolutionizing dropshipping. This platform empowers you to save time by providing an all-in-one solution for:

Discovering

Sourcing

Researching

Importing winning products from private and retail dropshipping suppliers

Working with private suppliers supported by AutoDS opens doors to unique, high-quality products and faster shipping times, which ultimately contributes to customer retention.

Uncover High-Performing Products

This product research tool lets you discover winning products in seconds, rapidly boosting sales with high-rated and reviewed items. Also, it allows you to access a complete product overview, including:

Specifications

Policies

Reviews

Variations

Sales data

Time-Saving Features

Its time-saving features help dropshippers focus on scaling their business or expanding to more stores. Sellers sourcing from Chinese suppliers can take advantage of the Product Sourcing feature. With it, your products will ship through the AutoDS warehouse to inspect the product quality. You can reduce the usual long shipping and processing times for Chinese suppliers. The team processes requests within 24-48 hours and provides options with possibly better pricing or faster shipping.

35. Qualtrics

Qualtrics is a product research tool that offers solutions for companies across multiple industries, including B2B, technology, healthcare, travel, and education.

It offers robust features when it comes to:

Conducting marketing research

Sending surveys

Analyzing data

So given its complexity, it’s mostly fit for enterprises with big pools of data that need to be organized. Some of its core features include:

Versatile market research tools such as market trends, competitive benchmarking, and A/B testing.

Its customer demographics tool enables you to segment your market and discern the best positioning for your business.

Extensive survey-making capabilities and templates, including NPS, CSAT, and CES surveys.

Great reporting with visualization options and data export.

Research services data processing, market analysis, design, and programming.

36. Rapidr

Rapidr is a product research tool that helps product teams understand what customers need by tracking feature requests and ideas, analyzing & prioritizing what to build next, creating a roadmap backed by customer insights, and communicating new features with release notes.

Understanding customers begins by collecting their feedback in a centralized app. Rapidr helps you capture:

Product ideas

Requests

Feedback from colleagues and customers is provided through their customer feedback portal and in-app widget.

For analyzing and prioritizing the roadmap based on customer insights, Rapidr helps you slice and dice feedback by customer attributes and sorting by votes. Inform your roadmap with the most critical feedback, and let your customers know what's new with release notes.

37. Viral Launch

Viral Launch is one of the top contenders if you’re looking for a comprehensive suite of tools to tackle every aspect of your Amazon business. Their product research capabilities are impressive, helping you:

Identify hot trends

Analyze market data, and even peek into your competitors’ strategies.

Product Discovery

Viral Launch’s product discovery tool reveals trending products and niche markets you might not have discovered. This can be a goldmine for finding those untapped opportunities.

Market Intelligence

Market intelligence tools analyse sales trends, estimate potential revenue, and help you understand the competitiveness in your chosen niche.

Competitor Intelligence

Keep a close eye on your rivals with Viral Launch’s competitor tracking features. See what’s working for them, what’s not, and where you can gain an advantage.

38. MerchantWords

Keywords are the backbone of Amazon SEO, and MerchantWords is the undisputed champion. This tool is a must-have if you’re serious about ranking high in search results and driving organic traffic to your listings.

Keyword Research: MerchantWords boasts a massive database of Amazon search data, allowing you to easily discover high-volume, relevant keywords. They even help you uncover hidden “long-tail” keywords that can increase highly targeted traffic.

Competitor Keyword Analysis: See exactly what keywords your competitors are ranking for, giving you valuable insights into their strategies and potential gaps you can exploit.

Market Insights: Analyse keyword trends and seasonality to stay ahead of the curve. This information can help you tailor your product selection and marketing efforts for maximum impact.

39. Sellics

Sellics offers a comprehensive suite of tools for managing every aspect of your Amazon business, from product research to listing optimization, inventory management, and PPC advertising.

Product Detector: This handy tool scours the Amazon marketplace to find profitable product opportunities based on your criteria.

Niche Analyser: This tool provides a detailed assessment of different niches, including their potential profitability, competition level, and market trends.

Competitor Monitoring: Track your competitors’ sales, rankings, and advertising strategies. Use this knowledge to refine your approach and stay one step ahead.

40. Dovetail

Dovetail is a customer insights hub that helps uncover insights from user feedback, customer interviews, support tickets, and sales calls. Dovetail helps teams centralize, organize, analyze, and collaborate on user research data.

Features of Dovetail Dovetail is used for conducting and managing qualitative research as it brings all together in one place:

Research planning

Source data

Analysis

Reporting

The transcript feature by Dovetail is commendable. It helps make research easier to conduct with templates for different project types and track all your participants individually across as many projects as you want. Customers praise their product design, and product adoption is smooth with intuitive information architecture. However, they provide limited text formatting and layout options on insights and data pages.

41. Similarweb

Similarweb is the highest quality, most well-known, and most convenient way to get and compare traffic information about any website you land on, short of having an expert analyst whispering in your ear, which could get awkward. Their free suite of products, including the Chrome extension, is worth exploring and gives you useful, high-level information.

The deep insights come from taking advantage of their database of real-world information on global website performance gathered over time, which they’ve already been building for over 10 years. They have their finger on the pulse of online business worldwide, from sales to sites to stocks.

A Powerful Tool for Competitive Analysis and Growth Strategy

Microsoft, Amazon, and even Google use Similarweb and the insights they provide on other enterprise-level operations down to small businesses. If you want to know how your company stacks up and then initiate a robust research and marketing campaign, these are serious tools that can help you grow.

42. Glimpse

For Max Iskiev, market research analyst at HubSpot, one research tool stands out from the rest: Glimpse. He told me, “Glimpse is my favorite research tool. It’s quick and easy to use, allowing me to design and launch short surveys for real-time insights on trending topics.” Writers for the HubSpot Marketing Blog have also used Glimpse to run short, 100-person surveys for articles.

Not only is Glimpse valuable for doing quick pulse-checks on the latest trends, but it also leverages the power of AI for even deeper insights. “Glimpse really shines when it comes to open-ended questions, using natural language processing and AI to analyze emotion and sentiment, saving time, and offering invaluable insights,” Iskiev shared.

Best for: Those who can invest in AI tools for their businesses but don’t need a decade’s deep dive like Similarweb users might.

43. Answer the Public

Answer the Public is a sister product to UberSuggest, both of which were Neil Patel's brainchild. Answer the Public watches what people are searching for and lets you keep track of how things change over time. By studying the changes, you can be at the forefront of trends, positive or negative, so you can respond to them quickly.

It’s billed as an excellent tool for public relations professionals to give them a heads-up on how their company is faring in the public eye. If you fall on the wrong side of public sentiment, you can be right on top of salvaging the situation and making improvements to regain trust. If you’re doing something right and see gains in positive engagement, you know to keep up what you’re doing and may even want to expand upon it.

44. Make My Persona

HubSpot’s Make My Persona tool allows you to create a buyer persona for your potential new product. In this tool, you pick a name for the persona, choose their age, identify their career characteristics, and identify their challenges. This allows you to pinpoint both demographic and psychographic information. Creating a buyer persona is an early step in the marketing process but an important one to avoid scope creep.

If you’re unsure about details like these and how to use market research tools for your business, let me recommend Hubspot’s Market Research Kit. It’s completely free and helps you build a strong foundation for data-driven decision-making in your future marketing strategies. Best for: Make My Persona is best suited to B2B product launches because you’ll be prompted to document your buyer persona’s career objectives and role-specific challenges.

6 Tips for Effective Product Research

Best Product Research Tool

1. Stay Ahead of the Game with Consumer Trend Publications

Consumer trend publications can expose you to new products and industries you may not have known existed. They also help you stay up to date on the latest trends to remain competitive and discover new product opportunities. One free platform to use is Trend Hunter.

Platform for Trend Discovery

Trend Hunter is the largest trend community, with more than 200,000 people dedicated to finding the latest trends. You can find trends for anything on this site, including beauty, fashion, culture, luxury, and more. For example, if you see that “vegan milk initiatives” are trending, you can center your product search around vegan milk items.

Membership-Based Platform for Retail and Customer Experience Trends

Another trend platform to check out is PSFK. It’s a membership website that produces reports and insights around retail and customer experience trends. Take Inkkas, for example. The brand found the trend for wearing Peruvian textiles and turned it into a shoe business. Inkkas works with local artisan shoemakers in Peru to create the designs, then sells them online.

2. Unearth Profitable Products on Amazon

Amazon is one of the largest consumer marketplaces in the world. You’ll find thousands of product ideas the minute you land on the site. But it’s easy to get lost in all the products and ads if you don’t have a plan. To speed up the product research process, go straight to Amazon’s bestsellers list. You can find profitable products from any category, from toys and games to patio, lawn and garden, and more.

All products on the list are based on sales and updated hourly. So you’ll never run out of product ideas for your business. If you want more detailed information about Amazon products, you can use a product research tool like Jungle Scout. You can easily search for any product by:

Keyword

Category

Custom filter with the brand’s product database, a searchable catalog with over 475 million products from Amazon

Evaluate product ideas in seconds with its Chrome extension. All of this can give you ideas for winning products, whether you’re an Amazon seller or run an online store.

Image curation sites can be a rich source for finding product ideas. Just by looking at likes and trending photos, you can get a sense of market demand for a specific product or niche. A few sites to check out include:

Pinterest: the largest visual discovery engine and curation site

We Heart It: for fashion and beauty product discovery

Dudepins: for discovering and buying products for men.

4. Go Straight to the Source with B2B Wholesale Marketplaces

B2B wholesale marketplaces are a gold mine for finding new product ideas straight from the source. These sites will expose you to thousands of potential product ideas to sell. If you like a product, you can buy it immediately. Two sources you’ll want to check first are Alibaba and AliExpress, which are marketplaces that connect you to manufacturers from Asia.

They have hundreds of thousands of products to explore so you can find almost anything. “The trick is looking at the various marketplaces to see what’s trending, then cross-referencing it with Alibaba to see if you can spin it uniquely,” says Jeremy Sonne, Founder of Decibel. Alibaba is for B2B transactions.

So if you want to order large quantities of a product directly from manufacturers, you’d use Alibaba. On the other hand, AliExpress is available to everyone. If you want to test a product, you can order in small batches from AliExpress. You can also do dropshipping with AliExpress. Other B2B marketplaces to explore are: Faire Tradekey Global Sources Made-in-China Wholesale Central

5. Connect with Your Customers on Niche Forums

Industry and niche forums are another way to discover new products to sell. They are also a good place to connect with potential customers over shared experiences and to discuss relevant topics with them. Some niches, like gaming, have active online communities.

If you wanted to do product research, I could visit websites like GameFAQs or NeoGAF to observe discussions of video games.

There’s also Reddit, which is the forum of all forums. Within Reddit, you can find communities for any topic, such as tech, culture, and environment. To date, there are more than 3.4 million subreddits, also known as communities, where people come together to talk about different topics related to the community’s title.

If you still can’t find any forums around your niche, try searching Google. Type your niche + forum into the search bar and see what results come up.

6. Get Direct Insights from Your Customers

Whether you have five customers or 500, one of the best ways to get product ideas is from the people who buy from you. You can send an email to your customer base and ask for their feedback on a few product ideas you have in mind. For example, Planted Detroit offers customers 20% off their next order if they take a survey in a recent post on X (formerly Twitter).

Winning Hunter

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Nichescraper

Shophunter Alternative

Zik Analytics Alternative

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