Guide 101: Product Sourcing for Your Dropshipping Business

In your online dropshipping business, product sourcing is an important step. You have to sell the right products in your dropshipping store to earn profits. Isn’t it? Let's see why product sourcing matters and how to use it in the post:

With inventory as crucial as this, how can you ensure quality, popularity, and feasibility?

In this article, we have shared some unknown tips for product sourcing. Understand how proper research and useful tools can help you source products without challenges.

What Is Product Sourcing

What exactly is product sourcing?

As the name suggests, product sourcing is the process of finding products using tools like Dropispy for your dropshipping store. While the definition seems simple, the process involves many micro-tasks. This means you need to decide the domain, delve into niche products, contact manufacturers or sellers on AliExpress, and then source products for your website.

The process of product sourcing includes:

• Vendor analysis
• Product research ideas
• Negotiation of deals
• Price comparison

Since the task is critical for your business, we have mapped the entire journey of product sourcing. Read carefully to find the right products for your dropshipping store.

Tips for Product Selection

Opening a dropshipping store offers freedom of product selection. You have an open canvas that can be painted in a way you like. It is possible to find trending products or products with a great selling graph for the dropshipping store. However, this also means you need to spend time on product sourcing and selection. This helps surge ahead of the competition.

Therefore, we have explained some tips that will help you with product sourcing:

1. Trending Products

Your product sourcing usually starts from trending products. But, you need to understand trends:

• There are some trends that develop over years and continue for the long term. These are the best kinds.
• Other trends evolve over a short period of time, go on a hike, and dive low. For example, fidget spinners.
• The last category is seasonal trends that come and go every year. The theme of these trends remains the same; more or less.

When you are aiming for product sourcing for your dropshipping store, you need to find the first category of trends more. The second category can be brought in at the starting, but remember to churn it out when there’s no trend of the same. The same is also true for seasonal trends as well. For example, you should start preparing for Christmas trends from October only.

For product sourcing, you should ensure that you check Google Trends for ongoing and upcoming trends. You can evaluate stats and find related trends on this website.

2. Niche Products

The second option for product sourcing is niche products. You may have a niche in mind when starting a dropshipping store. Keeping this niche as a reference, you need to research Google Trends and find related products.

There are several methods to find some niche products:

• Visit AliExpress and search in a particular niche.
• Use Google Trends and explore related products in the niche.
• Check Facebook Ads and Google Ads to know what is trending.

When you are starting a dropshipping store, it is important to find a niche and add products related to the niche. Randomly picking popular products and adding them to your store will not be good for your brand value.

Plus, you will end up creating a mini-version of a marketplace. This is not a good idea in dropshipping, as users want dedicated niche products.

3. Competitor Search

Another great method for product sourcing is to understand competitors. What they are selling? How they are selling products?

You need to shortlist competitors in your niche, visit the website, and evaluate everything. Understand the following:

• The design
• The layout
• Types of products
• Categories of products

Knowing these things helps you understand what sells in the market. Further, you can check the mistakes of competitors and become better than them, which instantly offers competitive pricing.

For example, if you are under a soft toy niche, the competitor is selling minions at USD X, you can improve the pricing or quality. Go to AliExpress, check if you can find minion soft toys at low rates. Now, mark up the prices, but keep it better than the competitor and start selling it.

Of course, when two dropshipping stores are selling a product at different pricing, optimum pricing may be preferred.

While this is just one factor, we can use many other comparison factors for strong brand building and customer loyalty.

4. Social Media Search

On social media, product sourcing is the easiest. We are all on social media and even without searching, you can find trending products. If these products are in your niche, you can add them to your product list. Just check if these products are available on AliExpress.

For example, you can visit Twitter and search for a product. Based on the search results, you can find out the popularity of the product. If you can get an optimum deal on AliExpress for the same, it would be beneficial for your business.

Similarly, check on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and even Quora. Gain insights from all directions for product sourcing.

5. Google Search

The last method for product sourcing is Google search. Using the good old method, search on Google and find relevant products. For example, type niche names like baby products and go to Shop section on Google. This will give you options.

If there are some products that everyone is buying, you will definitely find mentions of this on your Google search.

Product Sourcing

Finally, when you have shortlisted products using the above tricks, visit AliExpress and find products on the website. For dropshipping, AliExpress is the leading marketplace. It has a huge range of product categories and there are so many sellers. You can always find optimum deals on AliExpress.

Therefore, use your research from above and find products to source from AliExpress. You need to look for optimum options.

Fortunately, on AliExpress, you will also find related products, which will help add relevant, unique products to your website.

Things to Remember

While the above tips help you with product sourcing, business owners can easily make a few mistakes. This is why we have explained some important factors to keep in mind for product sourcing:

Don’t Rush!

For product sourcing, you absolutely cannot rush. You have to give some time researching, finding resources, and in competitor analysis. The more time you spend gathering information, the more you increase your chances of success.

Prepare Contingency Plan

Always plan for backout. This means every business needs a contingency plan. If your products are not received well by customers or the quality is not good, what will you do?

Order one of each product and know the quality. Further, understand that you may need to change seller, or remove products, or add free shipping.

Plan for these things well in advance.

Tools to Promote Product Sourcing

Of course, the research and other steps for product sourcing remain the same. However, using the right tool for the purpose can simplify your journey.

For example, DSers is a dropshipping tool. Not only DSers is equipped to help you with product sourcing but also it ensures supply chain management. Let’s explore how:

DSers has a supplier optimizer engine that is powered by AI. Using this engine, you can find AliExpress products through DSers only. You can know about popularity and check seller reviews. This improves the feasibility of product sourcing for dropshipping businesses.

Think about it, after researching and finding the right niches, you can directly visit the DSers tool and look for products and optimum sellers. Isn’t that amazing and so feasible?

You can also use the following features of the DSers tool:

• Add orders from AliExpress to your website directly. Select products and include them on your website with custom pricing.
• When you place orders, these are automatically added to DSers. This makes order tracking and managing simpler.
• Add a pricing rule, which will be used to update the pricing of new products when added to the website.
• Find an optimum AliExpress seller for every order or product, which allows maximizing profits.

Conclusion

Product sourcing is a crucial aspect of dropshipping stores. You need to find products that are relevant to your niche and popular in the market. Since dropshipping stores depend on directly shipping the product from seller to customer, the only place where you can offer value is when you source products.

Hence, use the above tips for product sourcing and find the right products for your dropshipping business. You can also use the DSers tool for maximized efficiency and profits. Read more about it on our website.