Are you looking to start a dropshipping business but are having trouble finding a good product to sell? Don’t worry, you are not alone, finding a good profitable product to sell is one of the toughest parts of starting an eCommerce business, fortunately, there are a lot of tools and services that can you help you this task. In this article, I will review Sale Source, a relatively new product research tool for dropshipping that recently came to my attention.
I have always been interested in dropshipping and hope to start a dropshipping business sometime in the future. Hence the reason I keep my eye out on tools that can help with product research as I know it is one of the most time-consuming aspects of starting any kind of eCommerce business.
I have reviewed a few other similar products like eComhunt, Nichescarper, Pexda and Dropship Spy, they are all good and you should definitely check them out if you are looking to start a dropshipping business.
Sale Source Review
So, what is Sale Source and why do you need it? The primary function of Sale Source is to find products to sell for your dropshipping business. This is done by analysing top selling products on AliExpress and Shopify stores with high-traffic volume, you get access to lots of data points that will let you see which products are selling well and which are not.
However, Sale Source offers a lot more features than just product research, you can also spy on your competitor’s Facebooks ads, download Facebook video ads, find and download product-related videos from AliExpress, analyse trending products and conversion-boosting features for your Shopify store.
If you do already have a Shopify store, you can connect it to the software and easily import products from AliExpress into your store.
There is also a Chrome extension that will allow you to analyse product details from either AliExpress or from a Shopify store.
However, my main reason for trying out Sale Source was to check out their product research tool and see how it works, so that is what I will be mainly concentrating on in this review.
Product Analyser
This is where you can analyse any product from AliExpress or a Shopify store by entering the product URL.
Through this feature you will be able to get access to the following data;
Competitors – See which other Shopify stores are selling the same product and get a link to their product page. This will allow you to analyse certain important elements like how their page is laid out, the price they are selling the product for and if the store is a general store or niche-specific. This will also give you a good idea if a certain product is saturated with too many sellers so you can avoid them and only sell items with little competition.
Products – This section will show AliExpress suppliers that are selling the same product or something similar to it. You get a brief description of the product plus their selling price and the number of times it has been sold.
Product videos – This is a pretty cool feature if the AliExpress or Shopify store has a video of the product you are analysing, the software will retrieve it for you and you will be able to download it if you want. I would advise that you never use these videos for your own purposes, instead, try to get some ideas from them and create your videos.
Product description – Pretty self-explanatory, the software pretty much pulls in the entire product description from the page including the images.
Product Search
If you have any ideas for a product to sell, you can look it up here and see what AliExpress has to offer. As you can see you get some details about the products like price, the number of times it has been sold and overall rating. If you click on the analyse button it will provide you with the same details as the product analyser section.
Trending Products
This section is updated daily, you get a list of newly uploaded products from Shopify stores that are in the Sale Source database. These are trending products that have been recently uploaded and so may provide a good opportunity for others to start dropshipping as well. You get a link to the Shopify store if you want to analyse the product further and see how well it is selling via the Chrome extension (more on this later).
Best Sellers All Time
Here you will see some of the best selling items on AliExpress for the current year, although most of these products may be saturated with lots of dropshippers selling them, it may still be worth investigating further just to see which stores are selling them and if there are a lot of competing stores.
There is a section called best selling niches, here you can subscribe to certain niche categories and the software will update the recommended product list on your home feed to reflect the kind of products you are looking to sell
Store Center
One of the best features of this software is that it allows you to spy on Shopify stores and see what kind of products they are selling and the ads that they are running on Facebook.
You can either spy on some of the top-performing Shopify stores by clicking on the top store’s menu or you can enter the web address of any Shopify store that you want to spy on.
Some of the data points you will get include things like the age of the store, its estimated monthly revenue, the Shopify apps it has installed and a list of the recent products they have added. If they run Facebook ads, you get a link to some of the ads they are running.
Chrome Extension
Using the Chrome extension is probably the easiest way to search for products and see if they are worth selling or not. You can use the Chrome extension on AliExpress or any Shopify store. Just go to any product page on AliExpress and the Chrome extension will provide you with the following details;
- Sales history
- Price history
- Review
- Rating
- Supplier details
There is also a link to the product analyser page on Sale Source where you can research further into the product details. The Chrome works in a similar fashion on any Shopify product page, but you will not get details like sales and price history but you will be able to analyse the store and see what other products
Marketing Center
Unfortunately, as I was on the free trial, I did not get access to this section of the software, however, from what I understand, this feature allows you to find products on AliExpress that also has a video in their description.
There is also a tool that will allow you to enter a Shopify product URL and see where the traffic is being generated from. This is a pretty cool tool as you may discover some new traffic sources that you would not have otherwise thought about.
Other Features
This review is just based on the free trial, so I wasn’t given access to many of the other features that come with Sale Source. Some of these features include the following;
- Guide to Google and Facebooks ads
- Access to suppliers that will give you factory prices for higher profit margins
- Conversion boosting features for your Shopify store.
- Extra training videos
Pricing Plans
There are three pricing plans, you can either subscribe to a monthly or yearly plan, however, only the cheapest monthly plan has a free trial version.
Final Thoughts
As I said at the beginning of this article, product research is probably one of the toughest and most time-consuming aspects of starting an eCommerce business. For this reason, tools like Sale Source are needed to make this process to be more efficient and to give you a better chance at identifying good products to sell.
I enjoyed using this tool, its very user friendly and comes with a lot of helpful features the best of which is probably the trending products feature and the store centre where you can spy on other Shopify store for product ideas and see what kind of Facebook ads they run. Not all the tools are necessary and so I would I advise you check out the monthly essential plan that comes with the free trial.