Making money with Dropshipping is easy, but only when you have the right product. Here are 5 ‘deal-breaking’ questions that you need to ask yourself if you want to uncover REAL winning product opportunities.
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Finding the right “winning” products isn’t easy, but by following these steps, you can do it even if you have no idea where to start.
The best part? One single product can make you as much as $10,000 a month and open the floodgates to even MORE sales.
This isn’t just some theory or big idea—I know it works, because I’m doing it right now…
..And today I want to share with you the mindset practices and selling techniques I use to find money-making products.
But rather than just offer you a bunch of tips, I have made a “checklist” of questions that you need to ask yourself as you start thinking about which products to sell in your store.
- Question #1: Does your product encourage customers to buy more than one?
- Question #2: Is your product small and lightweight?
- Question #3: Is your product strange and unusual?
- Question #4: Does your product have ‘no set perceived value’? (Do customers know or not how much your product costs?)
- Question #5: Does your product have fantastic upsell opportunities?
By asking yourself these questions, you can tell right away whether or not the product you’re eyeing has any real money-making potential, or if it’s just simply a waste of your time.
Now that we have the questions in mind, let’s go in detail with each one, starting with…
Question #1: Does Your Product Encourage Customers to BUY MORE THAN ONE?
Recently, I opened up a new dropshipping “test” store to experiment with things like products, ads, copy and apps in it.
But even though it’s only a couple weeks old, I’ve already scaled and found a winning product that is currently making me money.
All of my products are priced at $9.95 or less, yet the AOV (average order value) is over $25.
Wait, what? How is my average order value almost THREE TIMES the cost of my items?
Well, it’s because a customer usually won’t buy just one of my items. Instead, they will usually buy multiple items — at least two at the same time.
They don’t do this because I’m running some sort of super giveaway, or because I’m offering crazy discounts, or because they’re weird. No, they buy more products from me because I have strategically chosen products where customers want LOTS of them in their lives.
Other products, like this microwave cleaner, make it impossible to ever do this.
The ‘Angry Mama’
It works like this: you’re supposed to fill it with water and vinegar, then stick it in your microwave and run it for seven minutes. When you take it out, all of grease and grime will be easy to clean. FUN!
Now in theory that sounds great. But the truth is you can just do the exact same thing with a microwave-safe bowl, making the Angry Mama cleaner pretty pointless.
But besides being utterly pointless, people only have one microwave. So even if they actually wanted this ugly thing, they would only ever need to buy one.
A much better example of a product you can buy in multiples are cat coffee spoons. You see, spoons need to be washed before they are used again, so you tend to go through them pretty fast.
Plus if you’ve got friends around, you’ll want everyone to have their own cut cat spoon too.
Cat coffee spoons have a much higher potential to make more money than a microwave cleaner simply because customers have a big incentive to buy multiples of these. And when they buy more than one, it pushes up that very important average order value. But do you know why that’s so important?
The higher your average order value goes up, the more money you make.
This is not just because you’re selling multiples so obviously making more money, but also because due to fixed costs, the profit margin on each extra unit sold is substantially higher than the first.
A good example of this would be something like pillows designed around Elephants for Elephant lovers. You wouldn’t just buy one – you’d buy two, three, or even four of them to decorate around the sofa in your house.
Question #2: Is Your Product SMALL and LIGHTWEIGHT?
With my new test store, I started out by dropshipping products from AliExpress suppliers.
Nowadays, though, fulfilling orders for ME are a little different.
You see, after finding a “winning” product on Aliexpress that I was fulfilling, I took that next step: I started dropshipping them out of a USA-based fulfillment center, which helps make my store even more passive. (I’ll probably make a video on that at some point, actually.)
And for this particular store, I’ve chosen a fulfillment center I really like: ShipBob.
As you can see, ShipBob charged me $5.52 to ship one unit of this item to my customer:
Now here is another order from a different customer. This customer bought eight units of this same item, yet the fulfillment cost was the SAME — $5.52.
If your items are small and lightweight, ShipBob will put up to 10 of them in the same package — all for the same price. For each additional item in the package, I incur no extra shipping and fulfillment charges.
What this means is that if you focus on selling small, lightweight products, your expenses are going to be less — and for each sale, you’ll make more money.
Though this is something that won’t matter as much in the beginning, it will definitely have a huge impact later.
Question #3: Is Your Product STRANGE and UNUSUAL?
No, REALLY — this is an honest question.
A few months ago, a good friend of mine (who makes hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in profit selling kitchen utensils with Amazon FBA) told me that they were sick and tired of being chained to Amazon rules and policies.
… And wanted to break from the shackles Amazon had locked him in by opening their own store with Shopify, run Facebook ads to it, and sell their products on that platform.
A few months passed, and we met up and talked about the store he’d opened. And as I expected it, his reply was: “Yeah… it didn’t work.”
Guys, here is the thing. Kitchen utensils are a common item. Take this item below, for example: a simple, plastic silicone cooking spoon.
Sure, you can use it to whip up a mean lunch. But apart from using it for THIS, it’s just a normal boring item that we use in our day-to-day lives.
And we only ever really buy common goods when we need them. What happens when you run out of toilet paper or bin liners? You go to your local store and buy it.
That’s because when you need them, you need them now. So what are you going to do? Well you’re not going to buy them from AliExpress and wait a whole to 2-4 weeks for them to arrive. Hell no!
You’re going to go to your local mall, or Amazon, or somewhere you know you can get them FAST.
The bottom line is that common goods don’t sell well in Dropshipping stores — and they never will. The key to a highly successful store is focusing on fun, unique, and exciting products that people didn’t even realise existed. THAT’S how you make money with Dropshipping.
Question #4: Does Your Product Have No Set PERCEIVED VALUE?
This goes hand-in-hand with my previous point.
Think about it. If you’re showcasing exciting, unique products to people who never even realised they existed, like this “camera” mug lens…
…it’ll be pretty darn hard to tell the exact price of it because you’ve never really seen anything like this.
But if I asked you, “Hey, how much does a spatula cost?” You’d reply something like, “Well, when I went to Walmart and bought mine, and it cost me two or three bucks.” So that’s what it’s worth, right? Two or three bucks.
With common goods, you have a point of reference. You’ve probably bought a spatula before, so when you go and purchase it again, it’ll most likely be the same price.
But with this mug, chances are if I didn’t outright tell you what it was, you’d probably think it was an ACTUAL camera lens.
That’s because unlike common goods, you have NEVER seen this before. And even if you have, you probably haven’t seen it enough to know what the price actually is.
This is a big, BIG advantage when it comes to dropshipping. Since there is no set perceived value, you can basically set this item at any price you want.
OK, not any price. People have common sense when it comes to what is a reasonable price, so if you want to be cheeky and price this mug at $99, chances are people are NOT going to buy it.
But say you price it at $19.95 — hey, why not? That seems pretty fair.
Now the ball is in your court. You also have the added benefit of increasing your profit margin by setting your own price. And alongside added upsells, cross-sales, and bumping up your AOV, your store can suddenly become SUPER lucrative.
Question #5: Does Your Product Have GREAT UPSELL OPPORTUNITIES?
An “upsell” is a product you sell directly after your initial product.
McDonald’s is a classic example of what an upsell looks like. You order a big mac, then what do they ask next?
“Do you want a drink with that?”
What they’re doing is upselling you — they know that if you’re eating a burger, chances are you’ll want a drink after, so they take advantage of this to bump up the order value.
We use the same method in dropshipping, and it works exactly the same.
For example, let’s say a customer comes to our store and adds this cute cat coffee mug to their cart…
When they arrive at the checkout, they’re shown a “limited” offer for these cat coffee spoons — the perfect upsell that goes hand-in-hand with our mug.
So, obviously, if a customer is interested in buying a cat mug, they’ll be more likely to buy some cat spoons to go with it.
And just like that, this single upsell has bumped the order from $9.95 to $20-25 — that’s DOUBLE the value of sales per customers. (And remember: you aren’t even spending money to advertise these upsells.)
This is why upsells are so powerful: they can LITERALLY double your profits overnight.
But of course, upsells only work well as long as you carefully select your initial product.
In my new store, I didn’t pick items that wouldn’t have potential to make great upsells, like the Angry Mama in Question #1. I chose products that I KNEW would go well with upsells.
When choosing products to sell in your store, ask yourself: Will this product encourage and push your customers’ average order value up? Because that is the way that you are going to truly make money dropshipping AliExpress products.
At the end of the day, it all comes down to finding products that offer incentive to make even MORE sales. It’s not about going wide and finding several money-making products, but going deep and finding the best way to maximise your average order value. Using this checklist, it’ll be hard not to spot a money-making product.
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Six steps to building a six-figure Dropship store
In this eBook, I’ve included:
- How just one “winning item” can earn $10k/month. Yep. A lot of people don’t realize this… but most stores make the majority of their money from just a handful of items!
- The right way to choose AliExpress suppliers. Picking the right AliExpress dropshipper is crucial to drastically reduce things like refunds. Learn how to pick the right suppliers.
- Why long shipping times DON’T matter. A lot of people are scared to start Dropshipping because of “long” shipping times. You’ll learn why this doesn’t matter.
- Why six-figure stores take ONLY two hours a day to manage. You’ll learn how they utilize apps like Oberlo to make your stores semi-automated, making managing orders super simple!
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