A Decent Product Hunting Tool For Dropshippers
Looking for an honest review of Dropship Spy? Well, you have come to the right place, I purchased this product to test it out to see how it performs. I have tested a few product research tools for eCommerce mainly because I have always been interested in starting an eCommerce business.
Most of them have been positive, some are better than others (check out eComhunt and Nichescraper), Dropship Spy came to my attention recently and so I decided to give it a try.
Why do you even need a research tool?
Do you know what one of the toughest aspects of starting an eCommerce business is? It is finding a profitable product to sell. You can do everything else right but if you do not thoroughly research what to sell, your eCommerce store will fail.
Researching what products to sell is a long and time-consuming process, fortunately, there are a lot of tools and services that will help you in this area and one such tool is the subject of this review and is called Dropship Spy.
Dropship Spy Review
So, what exactly does Dropship Spy do and how can it help you with your eCommerce business?
Put simply, Dropship Spy is a marketing tool for eCommerce store owners that come with a multitude of features, but its core feature is to help you find a profitable product to sell.
Dropship Spy also lets you research profitable Shopify stores, analyse Facebook ads, search for legitimate social media influencers and even has a feature that will help you build a Facebook audience for ads you may want to run.
Its main feature and the reason I wanted to test it out is its product research tool, as I said, product research is a long and time-consuming process, however, with a software tool like Dropship Spy, you get the data right at your fingertips and the process isn’t as long.
Dropship Spy Members Area
Ok, the first thing that impressed me is its user interface, it’s very clean and easy to navigate, I enjoy using well-developed apps that also, look good.
On the left is the main menu and from here you can access the main features of Dropship Spy.
Product Search
So, the main reason I purchased Dropship Spy is that I wanted to check out its product research feature.
Researching products to sell is always tough, sometimes you can just be perusing through the internet without any idea on what you want to sell or where to even look to get some kind of inspiration.
With Dropship Spy, you get a list of potentially winning products delivered to you every day in the member’s area.
These are products from AliExpress that are selling well at the moment, the idea is that they may also be a good seller for your own store. Although that may not always be the case, they may still provide some inspiration for any products that you may eventually sell.
All of these products have been selected by analysing Facebook ads that have the most engagement.
There are some filters at the top of the dashboard that will allow you to only view products from a certain niche and only ones with a high number of Facebook likes comments, shares and overall engagement score.
The engagement score isn’t from Facebook, but a score developed by Dropship Spy, it takes into account all the other metrics like comments, shares, likes and gives you an overall score on how well the add for that product is doing.
I usually ignore the engagement score; it doesn’t really tell you anything about the actual quality of the product or how well it might sell.
I sometimes use the filters but most times I just scroll the products and see if anything catches my eye.
As you can see from the image below, each product has a lot of details about the Facebook advert, like the number of comments and shares it has. So you can have a quick glance and see if the advert has a lot of engagement, if it does have lots of comments and shares you may want to add it to your favorites list so you can come back later and analyze the full product.
You also get the wholesale price from AliExpress and a suggested selling price along with the potential profit you can make.
If you want to see even more product data, just click on the image and you will be taken to a page like below.
As you can see, you get a ton load of data for both the product and the Facebook ad. A lot of it is really helpful and will come in handy when it comes to creating Facebook ads for your own campaigns.
Another useful feature is the links to the actual advert on Facebook, the Facebook page of the company that is selling the product and a link to their actual store.
This will allow you to properly analyse their advert and see why it is converting so well and also see how their store set up is like so you can get some ideas on how to design your own store.
If there is anyone selling the same product or something similar on Amazon or eBay, there will be a link to the product page. This will allow you to analyse their listing and read any reviews customers may have left so you can see what they like and dislike about the product.
There are also links to the wholesalers who sell these products on AliExpress along with the shipping methods that are available.
As all these products have been selected from spying on Facebook ads, you also get audience targeting data. So, if you decide to sell something similar and want to advertise on Facebook, you will have a good idea and who to target in the audience builder.
You also get a list of recommended influencers on Instagram, you can connect with them and ask them for a shout out to their massive audience for your product. I am not a big fan of paying influencers for shout outs, they used to work at one point, and they may still do but a lot of these so-called influencers have fake followers and their engagement is non-existent.
So, I would personally ignore influencer marketing and just concentrate on Facebook ads and organic traffic through search engine for customer acquisition.
Now, a lot of eCommerce business owners source products from China, especially from popular platforms like AliExpress and Alibaba. AliExpress is used mostly by international dropshippers as the products are usually cheaper than anywhere else.
However, the one issue that keeps coming up is shipping times and sometimes the quality of the product is not how it is described.
So, if you would like to source from places like the USA, Europe or other parts of the world that can ship much faster, I highly recommend you check out the service provided by SaleHoo or Worldwide Brands.
Both provide a massive database of legitimate dropshippers and wholesalers from the EU and USA but it does come with a price. Out of the two, SaleHoo is my personal favourite plus it is the cheaper option and comes with more features.
Smart Match
This feature just shows you related products to the ones you have shown interest in, it’s a nice feature that will give you more product ideas for your eCommerce business.
Facebook Audience Builder
Here you will get a list of the most popular ad categories for Facebook along with targeting details. It’s a useful feature if you do decide to make Facebook your primary advertising platform and if you are selling a product in one of the listed categories.
Approved Instagram Influencers
This section contains a huge list of Instagram influencers in a variety of niches, if you want to advertise your products through influencers (which I do not recommend), this will be a useful resource for you to find legitimate influencers.
Here is a good piece of resource to help you identify the real influencers from the fake ones, but you may still not get the result you are looking for because many of these fake gurus know how to game the system.
Other Features
Dropship Spy comes with several other features, some you may find useful while others are not so much.
These features include the following;
Site scan – You can enter the address of any website and it provides you with data about its traffic. I don’t where they pull this data from, because some of the stats were not correct when I compared them to stats from Similar Web. For example, this is what I got when I entered my own site.
I would love the above stats to be true, but I know they are not.
Store search – Here you can enter any product you want to sell and the software will provide a list of Shopify stores that are selling similar products. You can then check the traffic stats for the store on Similar Web (don’t trust the site scanner) and if it has a high volume of traffic, you can further analysis and see where the traffic is coming from.
Training – I wasn’t very impressed with their training material, it’s not even their products, they have just linked to several YouTube videos on topics related to eCommerce and even have links to Udemy courses. Although the videos are helpful, it would have been nice if some of the material was original and not sourced from somewhere else.
Dropship Spy Pricing
There is no free trial with Dropship Spy, which is unfortunate as some of its main competitors like Nichescraper and eComhunt allow you to test put their service without having to pay.
It’s not very expensive though, I reckon it’s worth trying out for just $20 for one month, plus they are currently offering a 10% discount which means you will be paying $18.
Final Thoughts
This is a good tool that will help you find good products to sell for your eCommerce business by spying on Facebook ad campaigns of high traffic eCommerce stores. Some of the features are really not necessary but the spying tool is very helpful and will allow you to analyze what products are in high demand and the type of Facebook ads that are converting well.