Top 5 Best Research Tools for Dropshipping Products to Outperform Your Rivals

Although there is tremendous competition due to the plethora of dropshipping services, tools, applications, and prospects, demand has increased. Ignore the critics. The timing to start a dropshipping business has never been better. Furthermore, building a successful dropshipping business that can bring in six figures (of course, we mean US dollars, euros, or British pounds) or more in annual revenue, finding products, setting up an online store, and interacting with clients has never been simpler.

In order to put together a thorough assessment of the very finest dropshipping resources to help with every facet of your new business, we have spent the last couple of months gathering information from accomplished dropshippers in our circle of influence, consulting with friends, and reading reviews.

Are you ready to start your dropshipping adventure and delve into a life of freedom? You do not need to look any further because we have gathered all the tools you could ever require.

Let us get going!

Nowadays, with so many online vendors, glancing at Google Trends is no longer sufficient. You must dig deep and carry out exhaustive market research in order to launch a successful firm. The usual essential steps to starting a dropshipping business consist of…

• choosing a suitable eCommerce platform, such as through Wix, whose plan prices vary by location
• selecting the goods to sell
• choosing the appropriate dropshipping provider or suppliers
• creating your online store
• establishing with your supplier(s) a flawless order fulfillment process
• promoting your dropshipping company
• adding additional sales channels

… but are no longer satisfactory. Product market research is the missing step, as we said.

For product market research, this necessitates the use of robust dropshipping software; otherwise, it might be advisable to give up on your project entirely. This crucial point will determine whether your entire endeavor succeeds.

It is important to remember the importance of the research phase, though. Since there is no going back, invest in the greatest stuff you can afford in regard to this. The top 7 research tools for dropshipping goods are below.

# 1 AliExpress Dropshipping Center

The AliExpress Dropshipping Center is a new feature that AliExpress introduced a while back. You may use it to research items before you sell them, locate new AliExpress vendors that you would not have discovered otherwise, and find new fantastic things to add to your dropshipping business. All that for free. Even if you are not dropshipping through AliExpress, you are welcome to utilize the dropshipping center.

To make dropshipping with AliExpress simpler, the company created this tool, which is continually updated. They even provide various tiers with unique discounts after you pass a specific point:

What Tools Are at Your Disposal at the AliExpress Dropshipping Center?

Now that you are aware of what an AliExpress Dropshipping Center is, it is time to explore what features they have incorporated into this fantastic free service.

Inside the dropshipping section of AliExpress, you have access to two incredible tools.

- Find Products to Sell

This is a fantastic resource for researching products. It was previously updated, but now it is bigger than before. It comes with three distinct resources for locating dropshipping merchandise on AliExpress.

• “Hot Selling”

With the help of this tool, you can see every popular dropshipping good in a given area or category. For example:

This is fantastic if you need some ideas for a dropshipping niche. You will see all the popular items that are presently in the dropshipping center if you do not choose a specific niche. The goods can even be sorted by price and delivery time:

But it does not mean that for all shipping alternatives, the shipment time is, say, fewer than ten days. For instance:

You can see that although the shipment time may be fewer than ten days, the cost will be higher. Nevertheless, you may arrange the items according to “Ship From” (name of the country) and “Ship To” (name of the country).

If you want your dropshipping business to have quicker delivery times, this is an excellent sorting choice. But there is more. You will have a lot more options for sorting:

The last button (“Analyze”) is also intriguing; if you click it, a new tab will open with the next tool already selected. Here is what you will see:

Please note that we did not manually fill in the URL. That happened entirely on its own. This tool will undoubtedly provide you with a ton of suggestions for items to offer on your dropshipping website.

• “Search by image”

You may locate items using the dropshipping center’s next research feature by submitting a photograph. You may upload a photo of an item, and it will search AliExpress to identify items that are like the product in the image.

As an illustration, we included a picture of the well-known cat lamp. They displayed the identical item that we uploaded with the price, number of orders, rating, and an action to analyze them.

• “Sponsored products”

Sponsored products is the name of the last product research tool in the AliExpress Dropshipping Center. We believe you already have a good idea of this. This will display items from AliExpress vendors who most likely paid AliExpress to be included on this list.

You may immediately get some amazing product ideas on the first page for your dropshipping company. Additionally, you may reorder the goods by category. And, if you are seeking a new AliExpress supplier, that tool might be a great source of ideas.

• “Product Analysis”

This is a great one. When you click “Search”, a graph containing a lot of data from the product you want to examine will appear. You may enter an AliExpress product URL at the top of the goods you want to analyze.

You may, for instance, view the “Sale Volume” for that particular product. Personally, we believe that they only display an interval from 0 to 100 rather than the actual sales statistics. In other words, the more desirable the product is, the higher the number! Similar to how Google Trends displays a graph of search data.

Even the dependability of their logistics is visible. This indicates how likely it is that the item will arrive on time. We believe AliExpress accomplishes this by fusing all the data that it possesses (such as customer reviews, tracking data, and so on).

How Can the Dropshipping Center Tab Be Added and Activated in Your AliExpress Account?

There are, in our opinion, three ways to add the dropshipping center tab to your AliExpress profile. We will present the simplest.

To register for the AliExpress Dropshipping Center, just visit login.aliexpress.com. To join the AliExpress Dropshipping Center, all you need to do is get into your AliExpress account, accept their conditions, and fill out your name. This is the simplest and, to our knowledge, is open to everyone.

• There is no monthly fee.
• To determine if it is worthwhile to pay AliExpress to list your items, look up Sponsored products and their costs.
• Look up a product using its image.

• It is only helpful if you dropship from AliExpress.

# 2 Commerce Inspector

Commerce Inspector is the next tool on our list. For dropshippers, Commerce Inspector is a one-stop shop where they can find the greatest things to offer, acquire product information, find effective advertising, and learn about the most recent sales trends.

Although they do offer a premium service, their free Chrome extension is also great. You may uncover the monthly sales data for any product, the advertising that is driving the traffic, the monthly volume of searches, and much more with the Commerce Inspector Chrome addon. They will display to you the most popular and recently added items in a store.

In order for you to view their adverts, they are also linked to the Facebook Ad Library. Additionally, they will display the applications that the shop uses. “Dropshipping Trends“ is a wonderful new function that they recently launched. If you do not want to spend a lot of time researching items, just look at the Trends tab to see what ready-to-sell successful products are available, along with their pricing, sales volume, and overall profit.

We have reached the tool’s greatest feature: the competitive analysis. The most effective tool for keeping tabs on your rivals, the finest dropshippers, and popular brands is definitely Commerce Inspector. Sales information is accessible from the biggest dropshippers as well as from over 800k premium brands. You may examine each brand’s traffic, units sold, and advertisements separately.

Price Information

With restricted permission to view the product and sales data, the Chrome plugin for Commerce Inspector is free to download. You can choose from the Start, Grow, Scale, or Conquer premium programs for more in-depth research.

Start provides unrestricted information from up to three retailers and is priced at $29/month/$348/year. You may spend $59 or $149 on the Grow or Scale plans, respectively, if you want to keep an eye on additional locations. If you are an experienced dropshipper, you may pay $299/month for the top plan, which gives you access to data from all the retailers.

• An excellent tool for researching competitors.
• Every day, 1-3 winning product recommendations are ready to market.
• Free add-on for Google Chrome.

• The price of premium plans is somewhat more than that of the rivals.
• Beginners can find it difficult to use every one of the resources and capabilities.

# 3 Niche Scraper

You may configure a totally free account with Niche Scraper and maintain it for as long as you like. The free account alternative is fantastic to use if you do not currently have a large budget, but if you want additional features, you must purchase an upgrade for your account. With their free-for-life plan, you will receive the following:

We recommend reading the remainder of our review if you are curious about what Niche Scraper offers when you pay.

In terms of cost and use, Niche Scrapper is a product research tool that is good for beginners. You can monitor the low-hanging fruit on Shopify and AliExpress with the robust product finder. Similar to Ecomhunt (next on our list), there is a daily list of winning items to assist you in finding product ideas.

This product research tool’s powerful product scraper, which offers you the top-selling items on AliExpress and Shopify, is its major draw. Additionally, you may filter the results by taking into account a variety of factors, like the number of orders, price of sale, competition score, weekly growth of the product, etc.

Things get much more fascinating for you if you dropship on Shopify since as a user of the platform, you can easily utilize the dropshipping filtering to search items solely from dropshippers as opposed to all the sellers.

Price Information

There is, of course, a free plan which we mentioned above, that gives you successful ideas for products with a three-day delay.

The Pro Plan, on the other hand, costs $49 a month and offers full access to all the research and monitoring tools. Yes, the cost is a bit steep, especially for new users, but there is typically a reduction on the listed price, making the Niche Scraper available for as little as $13 per month.

• Unlimited free accounts with restricted privileges.
• An intuitive interface that is ideal for novices.
• A powerful method for finding winning products is product scraping.

• Insufficient sales data.
• Costly without any discounts.

Ecomhunt

This tool is probably already familiar to many of you who are reading this, but we still felt it was important to mention it.

Every day, Ecomhunt strives to add a few purportedly “winning products“. What is wonderful about Ecomhunt is that you can sign up for a free account there, just as with Niche Scraper. Although it will once more just offer a few restricted features:

However, if your money is short, we do not believe you will care too much about the restricted features. Ecomhunt places more of an emphasis on hand-picked goods. Every single day, they update the platform’s list of the top-selling items together with some important statistics like the price of sale, product rating, etc.

Ecomhunt may be a huge assistance if you are new to dropshipping and unsure of which product category to pick. You may see the sales analysis from eBay and AliExpress if you want to know how the product performs across several platforms. In addition to the hand-selected items, you may look at the item’s selling price, production costs, and anticipated profit margin. Furthermore, you may discover the quantity of shops that dropship the identical item.

As another great characteristic of Ecomhunt, you may read information about the best-selling goods, anticipated CPA (Cost Per Acquisition), Facebook interaction statistics, and product reviews. The list of prominent influencers from the same topic that Ecomhunt displays is our personal favorite feature.

Price Information

Free, Basic, Pro, and Suite are the 4 options offered by Ecomhunt.

The Free plan included 10 live trending product updates and restricted access to the product database. The entry-level Basic plan, which costs $29 a month, offers you complete access to the product database. You may use the research and analysis tools with more freedom and a larger number of daily searches with the Pro and Suite plans, which cost $49 and $69, respectively.

# 5 Similarweb

The most comprehensive online platform for competitive intelligence data is currently Similarweb. Reputable businesses like Google, Booking.com, and Walmart use it as their primary competitor analysis tool.

By using Similarweb, you can take advantage of actionable information gleaned from PPC, social media, SEO, and influencer marketing tactics to improve your marketing plan. This gives you the capacity to recognize the areas where your rivals are weak and take advantage of those opportunities, or you may use reverse engineering to copy their profitable strategies.

The following uses of Similarweb are available to dropshippers:

• Comparing their own performance to industry norms to identify the tactics that are most effective
• Identifying the most successful marketing strategies across numerous channels, including paid search ads, social media, and email
• Better content creation based on popular keywords and competitive websites
• Locating affiliates of rival companies
• Discovering the highest-converting ads and networks utilized by rivals to optimize paid advertising tactics

Similarweb is not a good choice for new users because it is expensive. Look elsewhere if you are looking for something easy-peasy. Although a restricted free version is accessible, it does not have many advantages. You must upgrade to the Professional version.

The benefit is that Similarweb may be customized to fit your dropshipping store’s particular requirements. The drawback is that the bare essential monthly expense will probably exceed several hundred dollars.

Vital characteristics of Similarweb:

• Unparalleled industry data collection
• Dependable for large brands
• Detailed information about every element of your business
• More measurements and information than rivals

Final verdict: The ultimate competitor analysis tool.

Final Thoughts

Before you embark on the dropshipping mission, the evidence gathered below demonstrates that this strategy for business to find creative ways to provide the best services and products for online shopping is the ideal response to that problem.

As per Printful, these are some of the fundamental dropshipping figures for 2023:

• The global dropshipping industry is expected to have grown from $225.99 billion in 2022 to $243.42 billion in 2023.
• Dropshipping can boost an online store’s profitability by up to 50%.
• Profit margins for dropshipping companies typically range from 10% to 30%.
• In their first year, just 10–20% of dropshippers are profitable.
• One of the most compelling markets for dropshipped goods is fashion.
• TikTok is where 20.6% of social media regulars make purchases.

The most skilled dropshippers avoid inventing the wheel. Instead, in order to acquire an advantage over rivals, they research profitable techniques, copy them, and strengthen their weaknesses. Why labor too hard when the hard work has already been done for you?

One of the most common blunders in the sector is failing to reverse engineer successful rivals. You will be driving blind and firing in the dark if you do this. Consider it an outlay, not a cost, but a necessary investment. Pick one of the seven tools presented by us that suits you best.