How to Test Products Dropshipping & 10 Tips for Guaranteed Success

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Finding the right products to sell is essential for starting a dropshipping business. But there's no way to know whether a product will sell well until you start selling it, which can be daunting. Learning how to test products dropshipping lets you identify potentially profitable items before you risk your time and money on them. In this article, we'll explore the significance of testing products for dropshipping businesses and the best ways to do so. You'll learn how to find dropshipping products confidently, ensuring successful sales and minimized risk.

Shophunter's solution, Shopify sales tracker, can help you get there faster by providing valuable insights on products you've never sold. With Shophunter, you can track the sales of any Shopify store and uncover vital details like the number of sales over time, trends, and more. This data can reveal whether a product is worth testing for your dropshipping business.

Why Should You Test Products for Dropshipping?

Dropshipping attracts many entrepreneurs because it offers a low-risk business model. You don’t have to worry about unsold inventory; your products are directly shipped from the supplier to your customers. The majority of the risk of dropshipping lies with the products you sell.

We can’t stress enough how crucial it is to test products before launching them. Otherwise, you risk losing time, money, and resources on products that won’t generate sales and meet your customers’ needs.

Benefits of Testing Dropshipping Products

Testing a product before dropshipping may be time-consuming, but its benefits are worth it. Here are to name a few:

Saves Your Time and Effort

We understand how time-consuming a process it can be to hunt a new product. But still, you don’t want to rush its launch. Setting up a website, creating a marketing strategy, and getting in touch with suppliers can be a time-consuming process. The last thing you would want is for all your efforts to go in vain. This is where product testing can help you out. It can allow you to decide if it’s worth proceeding with the product launch that you’ve found or if you should look for alternatives.

Protects Your Investment

Launching a dropshipping store requires less investment than other businesses. The marketing costs can still be significant. Most dropshipping businesses run ad campaigns to capture the audience’s attention. And those campaigns can quickly drain your bank account if you aren’t careful. You wouldn’t want to invest your time, effort, or money in a product without the expected ROI.

Determines Product Quality

No matter how solid and well-planned your execution and marketing strategy is, your business will fail if the product isn’t good. At times, dropshipping store owners take things too quickly and do not assess the product quality given by the supplier. This is a significant mistake, and regardless of how many testimonies you see for your supplier, nothing beats personal inspection. Before you ship a product to your customers, you should know if it meets the standards you claim to provide.

Meeting Customer Expectations

As a business owner, you must prove your product idea is viable and that potential customers will pay good money. It’s not enough to simply add a product to your Shopify store to test the waters. You’ve got to sell products that solve your customers’ problems or speak to their desires. The product testing process helps you define your target audience, an essential part of your business strategy.

Identifying Your Ideal Customers: The Key to Successful Product Testing and Word-of-Mouth Marketing

These people will find your solution the most useful. They’re the buyers who will most likely purchase more products from you and spread the word about your brand within their network—and there’s nothing quite like a bit of word-of-mouth marketing to elevate your business.

Thorough testing helps you get your ideas out there and determine if you will sell profitable products. Also, don’t take it personally if shoppers don’t choose your idea. Ultimately, dropshipping is about selling products that solve real problems—and product testing helps you do just that.

Avoids Negative Feedback

Negative feedback is a nightmare, especially for new eCommerce entrepreneurs. The last thing you want is for your first few reviews to be from angry customers demanding a refund. This usually happens in stores that skip the product testing phase.

Store owners do not know much about the product details they’re listing or the quality their supplier offers. As a result, this puts their business at risk because the customers do not get what they were promised.

Foundations of Product Testing

Embarking on the adventure of adding a new product to your dropshipping catalog requires a strategic approach to ensure success. Product validation is the crucial process that helps you understand whether there’s a market for your product before you invest resources into it. It’s a systematic investigation into the potential demand and viability of your offering. Let’s explore the essential steps you need to take to build a solid foundation for product validation.

Identifying Target Audience and Their Needs

The first step in product validation is to conduct thorough demographic research to gather specific information about your potential customers, such as their:

Age range

Gender

Income level

Where they live

For example, suppose you’re selling high-end kitchen gadgets. In that case, you might find that your target customer is likely a homeowner in the age range of 30 to 45 with a middle to high-income bracket and perhaps predominantly residing in urban areas. Demographics alone don’t provide the complete picture. You also need to delve into the psychographics of your target audience. This involves analyzing their values, attitudes, interests, and lifestyles to understand what motivates their shopping behavior.

Leveraging Psychographics and Pain Points to Tailor Products for Your Target Audience

For instance, if your demographic research points to young professionals, psychographic data might reveal that they value efficiency and design and are interested in smart home technology, which can directly influence the products they’re likely to purchase. Key to ensuring your product provides the solution they seek by understanding your target audience:

Pain points

Major frustrations

Unmet needs

For example, if customers express dissatisfaction with the durability of existing pet toys in the market, a product that offers increased longevity could meet this unmet need and resonate well with pet owners looking for a more robust option.

Setting Up Your Unique Value Proposition

Once you’ve identified your target audience and their needs, the next step is to research and analyze competitor product offerings. This will help you identify any gaps in the market that your product can fill. For example, if competitors are offering eco-friendly packaging but at a high cost, there may be an opportunity for your product to be positioned as a more affordable, yet still sustainable, alternative.

Determining the key differentiators that set your product apart from competitors is vital in addressing customer needs. Whether it’s a unique feature, a better price point, or superior customer service, these differentiators should be clearly stated in your unique value proposition (UVP).

Crafting a Strong UVP: Strategies for Communicating Your Product's Unique Value

Your UVP is a concise statement that communicates your product's unique benefits and value, convincing customers why your product is the best choice for them. Developing messaging and branding that clearly states your UVP is essential. This involves crafting compelling descriptions, visuals, and marketing materials that highlight your product's distinct advantages. For instance, if your product offers an innovative design that simplifies a common task, your messaging should focus on this benefit and explain how it makes the customer’s life easier.

Setting up your UVP also includes offering strategies for communicating what makes your product better than existing alternatives. These can include sharing customer testimonials, providing detailed product comparisons, and demonstrating your product’s effectiveness through videos or interactive demos.

Researching the Market

When you’re preparing to expand your dropshipping catalog with new products, conducting extensive market research is essential. This process involves analyzing what’s currently available in the market, understanding customer preferences, and identifying opportunities where your product could meet an existing need or desire.

Conducting a Thorough Competitor Analysis

Start by examining your competitors’ product offerings in detail. Look at the:

Features and specifications of their products

How they’re priced

Who their target customers are

Pay attention to how they present their brand across different platforms, including:

Social media

Advertising campaigns

Own websites

Conducting Effective Competitor Analysis: Identifying Strengths, Weaknesses, and Market Gaps

This will give you a comprehensive view of their strategy and market presence. Evaluate how healthy competitors are reaching and keeping customers. Are they dominating certain market segments? What strategies are they using to keep customers coming back?

Observing both strengths and weaknesses in their approach can give you insights into areas where you have the potential to outperform them. A key aspect of competitor analysis is identifying market gaps.

These are areas where existing products need to address customer needs or preferences fully. For instance, if a recurring complaint about the durability of a commonly sold item occurs, offering a product with enhanced durability can address this gap and appeal to that customer base.

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Step-by-Step Guide on How To Test Products Dropshipping

A pre-launch landing page gives you the first opportunity to introduce your MVP to potential buyers. This page should communicate your product’s value proposition, showcasing the main features and benefits that solve customer problems. For example, if your MVP is a durable, leak-proof travel mug, your landing page should highlight this alongside other key selling points, like temperature retention and ease of cleaning.

Split testing is a critical practice for optimizing your landing page. This involves creating different versions of your page with variations in:

Content

Visuals

Pricing

Optimizing Landing Pages: A/B Testing and Marketing Strategies for Maximizing Engagement

By analyzing which version drives more sign-ups or inquiries, you can determine what resonates best with your audience. For instance, test two different headlines to see which leads to more email subscriptions or compare the performance of pages with other images or color schemes.

To drive traffic to your pre-launch landing page, utilize:

Search engine optimization

Social media marketing

Targeted ads

These strategies help attract potential customers to your page and enable you to measure their interest. The number of visitors who engage with your page indicates the level of demand for your MVP.

Collect Real-Time Insights and Analytics

Collecting analytics on how popular your chosen product is among customers is crucial in the testing phase of any dropshipping business. Plenty of tools like Google Trends can help you collect this data. But you don’t have to limit your options to just that.

There are also other ways, such as:

Making Use of Social Media: Search for the product you plan to sell on Facebook or Instagram. Once you enter the keyword, you will see how frequently the product is mentioned, and it will also give you an insight into how many people are searching for it.

Inviting Customers to Check Your Product for Free: You can then ask them for feedback on the improvements you should make and how much your customers would be willing to pay for the product. Although it may require more investment, that would also allow you to decide the profit margin you should keep. Plus, you can work side-by-side with the supplier.

Considering taking pre-orders: If you think you’ve found a unique product, try this step. The waiting list of the pre-order will determine the demand for your product. If the order number isn’t too high, don’t feel discouraged. It might mean you must market your business better and reach more people. Collecting real-time feedback can indeed be time-consuming and even costly. But in return, it can save you a lot of time and resources and potentially set you on the right path.

Analyze Your Competition

Studying your competition doesn’t only mean counting the number of store owners selling a particular product and its price. You should keep your options open and see how your idea compares to other stores.

And if they’re finding success by selling the same product, what approach are they using? How are they promoting the product and positioning themselves in front of the customers? If you get even the slightest hunch that your competitors are struggling to sell the product, you should reconsider if it’s worth selling.

Do a Soft Launch of Your Product

A “soft launch” is a strategy that involves launching a product ahead of its schedule without pushing it with marketing. It can be a great way to assess how receptive your customers are to that product and collect real-time data. Nowadays, most online businesses do a soft launch before a full launch, as it helps them avoid pumping their money into the wrong product. We especially recommend this strategy for those planning to launch a private-label store.

Test Your Suppliers

The most significant advantage of launching a dropshipping store is that you never have to see the products you’re selling. But practically, this isn’t a wise idea. You need to see and inspect the quality of the product yourself and not trust anyone with this crucial task. It’s too risky to skip this because your dropshipping store will fail if your supplier isn’t reliable.

Many dropshipping suppliers offer product samples; even if they don't, this isn’t a reason to skip the supplier testing phase. You can even place a test order with your supplier to see the product’s quality and gauge their responsiveness and shipping time.

Put Effort into Marketing

Prepare a solid marketing strategy before you mindlessly spend your money on ad campaigns. There are plenty of marketing strategies that you can use, which we’ll cover in the upcoming PS. But in short, test what type of audience is most attracted to your product and only then start pumping money into it.

Test products using marketing channels

Using the same channels you would in your marketing strategy, you can test products and use the results to make informed decisions about what you’re going to stock in your dropshipping store. Some marketing tactics dropshippers can use to test their products include:

Email marketing

This is an inexpensive and efficient way to test products with a real audience. Simply create a newsletter and send it to your existing subscribers. Monitor your email marketing platform analytics to see what your click-through rate (CTR) is and how many sales you get on the product. Even if you don’t make sales, if your analytics show your click-through rate (CTR) and how many sales you make genuine interest in your product, you’ve got a winner.

Testing Dropshipping Products on Facebook

The fastest way to test your product is by creating a Facebook Page Post Engagement (PPE) ad. This campaign shows your ad more to the people who are likely to engage with it. We recommend this because, in comparison to other paid marketing campaigns, PPE is relatively cheaper, with 1000 impressions costing about $5.

This way, only by spending $15-20 can you determine your product's engagement and find your target audience simultaneously. But note there’s a difference between engagement and conversion. Not everyone who engages with your ad would be willing to shop from your store. Nonetheless, running PPE campaigns will bring you closer to your winning product.

Testing Dropshipping Products on Instagram

The first step to testing your product with Instagram is to determine your store's niche. After that, search for pages and influencers surrounding that niche to test your product. That would allow you to advertise your product to your desired audience and help you connect more with the community. Finding the influencers can be a bit tricky.

Usually, the more followers they have, the higher they will charge to test your product. So it has a lot to do with your budget. But just remember that you only deal with Instagram pages with a good engagement rate. Having thousands of followers on a page is useless if the audience hardly interacts with their posts.

What to Avoid While You’re Using Instagram for Product Testing

If you find multiple influencers, only ask some of them to test your product simultaneously. Otherwise, it would be difficult to determine where the traffic is coming from.

Another thing that we’d like to highlight is that you do not make any changes to your store while changing influencers. For instance, let’s suppose you got a shoutout from an influencer with 300k followers, and it generated some decent traffic and a couple of sales.

If you plan to move to an influencer with 500k followers, keep your store as it is. Otherwise, if you don’t get traffic this time, I’d be confused about whether it was due to the changes I made to the store or if the influencer was terrible. As a result, this would also waste the money I’ve spent on the test.

It’s worth learning more about how Instagram shoutouts can be used to grow your dropshipping business.

How to Test Shopify Products for Dropshipping?

Testing products for Shopify dropshipping isn’t different from testing products for any other platform. You can use Instagram influencer shoutouts or run a PPE ad campaign on Facebook.

How to Decide If You Should Continue Testing a Product?

Now that you’ve run ad campaigns on Facebook and taken the help of influencer shoutouts, how do you decide if you should continue testing a product? Well, it’s time to see the traffic your store has generated and if you have made any sales. Note that sometimes I may get a lot of visitors at my store, but I may not be able to convert them. So, this doesn’t necessarily mean the product or influencer was terrible. It could be due to other factors, such as the customers not liking my website, so it’s worth looking into this.

Also, don’t forget to check the engagement on the posts. See how many people have:

Liked

Commented on

Shared it

While doing that, consider both negative and positive comments. If most of the comments are positive, and I’ve also bagged in a couple of sales, my test was a success, and I’m ready to launch the product fully.

Analyzing Test Results and Making Data-Driven Decisions

Monitoring Key Metrics

Understanding critical metrics is essential during the product testing phase. Metrics such as ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) and CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) indicate the revenue generated for every dollar spent on advertising and the cost to acquire a new customer, respectively.

Ensuring your ROAS is significantly higher than CAC should indicate that your testing product is viable. If your product generates a ROAS of 300, and your CAC is 150, you can expect to earn a profit of 150 (300 – 150) when you acquire a new customer. By closely monitoring ROAS and CAC, you can easily scale up your product’s ad spend, eventually increasing your sales volume.

Adjusting Marketing Strategies

Adjusting marketing strategies based on test results is crucial for optimizing product performance. Data from customer interactions (ex, Impression, video percentage viewed ) reveal your target audience's preferences and trends and guide future product development strategies. Analyzing customer feedback could also help refine your marketing efforts.

It could guide you in improving your product and finding your best audience to increase your potential sales. Positive comments and engagement metrics on ads indicate a potential for a successful, viable product. By carefully studying these insights and refining your marketing strategies, you can effectively target your audience and drive more sales for your business.

Scaling Successful Products

Growing successful products is about putting more budget into those top performers based on your tests. This way, you can maximize your winning products and boost their sales potential. Brilliant ad campaigns can help you decide where to spend your budget to keep your dropshipping business growing steadily.

Monitoring how things are going and tweaking your strategies to keep the momentum and ensure long-term success are super important. You can turn your dropshipping store into a profitable and bustling online business by scaling up your successful products!

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10 Pro Tips and Tricks for How to Test Products for Dropshipping

1. Don’t Be Impatient: Product Testing Takes Time

Product testing aims to determine if a product is viable enough to sell in your dropshipping store. So, when you start testing products, don’t be surprised if you don’t get overnight results. Instead, be patient and give your product tests enough time to yield valuable information.

You might have a product that looks great, but I can assure you that you’ll still need to test it. You’ll also need to do market research and build a good brand for your store before starting a business. So, don’t give up too early. There’s a lot of work involved in testing products for dropshipping.

2. Check for Customer Interest Before Product Testing

Before you start testing any product, it’s crucial to check whether customers are interested in buying it. You can do this by checking your sales stats and reviewing user reviews on social media sites like Facebook. If customers are actively talking about the product but aren’t buying it, then there might be a problem with the product itself. It’s also important to look at other stores in your niche and see how similar products are doing.

3. Sales Don’t Equal Profit

When testing products, paying attention to the number of sales you receive is essential. What’s more, important is how much money those sales make. For example, selling products for $100 and only make $5 in profits may not be suitable for your store.

4. Approach Product Testing as a Customer

When testing products for dropshipping, it’s important to remember that you are the customer. This means you must stay objective about everything, including positive comments from friends and family.

You may have a friend who always tells you that what you do is excellent, then remind yourself that their opinion doesn’t matter when deciding on a product. After all, they’re not your target market, so what works for them might not work for your business.

5. Don’t Be Afraid to Experiment With Price

You might have a great product that sells well, but if it’s overpriced, then customers won’t buy it. So, instead of assuming that a higher price will equal more sales, test out different prices and see what works best for each product.

For example, let’s say you’re selling a shirt and want to charge $100, $120, and $140. Test all three prices against each other and see which performs the best.

6. Look for Innovative Product Ideas in Your Niche

Another pro tip for testing products for dropshipping is to look for innovative ideas within your niche. Many stores fail because they don’t offer anything new. So, one way to stand out is to introduce a breakthrough product that nobody else has tried before.

7. Don’t Overlook the Limitations of Automation

Another pro tip for testing products for dropshipping is remembering that automation doesn’t always work. Even though you can use tools to automate your store, it’s important to remember that they’re just tools. Automation is only helpful when used correctly and will never replace human interaction.

8. Find Out How People Talk About Products Online

You need to watch how people talk about products in your niche online. You can do this by looking at blogs and forums related to your niche and seeing what people say about the products. Also, you can look at social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter. Reading our article, 2022’s Top 10 Tips to Find Winning Dropshipping Products on Facebook, will be helpful.

9. Research Product Packaging Requirements

One pro tip for testing products for dropshipping is finding out how customers want to receive their products. For example, if you’re selling a fragile product, people might expect it to be shipped in special packaging.

10. Don’t Forget About Product Competition

Do not forget about your competitors. It’s essential to constantly monitor the market and see what other people are doing, especially if you’re new to dropshipping. Pay attention to your competition and how they run their business occasionally.

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How do you know if the product you're considering for your dropshipping business is worth your time and investment? You test it, of course.

The Shopify sales tracker from ShopHunter helps you do just that. It tracks sales data from Shopify stores, giving you insight into the performance of your dropshipping product of choice. The longer you let it run, the more data it collects and provides on your target item.

This lets you make informed decisions about selling the product or moving on to a more lucrative option.