The Dropship Unlocked Podcast

How We Find The Best Dropshipping Products for 2025 (Episode 114)

• Lewis Smith & James Eardley • Season 1 • Episode 114

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đź—Ł In this episode, Lewis Smith and James Eardley reveal the exact strategies they use to find winning products for their dropshipping businesses, specifically in preparation right now. 

Discover how to approach product research, validate niches, and identify the right products that could drive consistent profits this year.


👉 Prefer to watch this on YouTube? Check it out here ➡️https://youtu.be/1_1Un0tyQwQ


Topics Discussed:
Niche Brainstorming Process: How we use personal curiosity and market awareness to kickstart the search for profitable products.

  • Niche Validation Criteria: Our step-by-step process to assess a niche’s market potential, including using tools like Google Shopping and Keywords Everywhere.
  • The Importance of Price Range: Why we focus on products priced above ÂŁ300 for a more profitable, sustainable business model.
  • Search Volume Insights: How high monthly search volumes help us identify markets with enough customer demand.
  • Avoiding Fads and Seasonality: How we use Google Trends to ensure our product choices are stable and profitable long-term.



Links and Resources Mentioned:


Key Takeaways:

  • Start with Personal Curiosity: Look for products that intrigue you, and pay attention to the everyday products that stand out once you begin thinking like a product researcher.
  • Price Above ÂŁ300: Products in this price range offer better margins and require fewer sales to become profitable.
  • Find the Sweet Spot: Use tools like Google Shopping, Keywords Everywhere, and Google Trends to validate demand and ensure a product isn't seasonal or trending downward.
  • Avoid Undercutting on Price: Consistency in pricing and avoiding price wars can help build a profitable, sustainable business.


Learn More:
➡️ If you’re ready to get started with finding winning products and building your dropshipping business, head over to dropshipunlocked.com/start for a clear path to success.


FOLLOW:
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Twitter: https://twitter.com/DropshipUnlockd
LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/company/dropship-unlocked
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/dropshipunlockedlewissmith
Website: https://www.dropshipunlocked.com/


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The idea of this episode is that we'll be sharing our exact strategies and methods for finding the best drop shipping products for the year ahead. Whatever you do, don't choose drop shipping products purely based on a guess. Something we use is a very, very clear method to find drop shipping products that we know based on data, will be a huge success. This might just be one of the most important episodes that we've ever recorded. With this proven process, I know that we can find winning products without making massive mistakes. You welcome to the dropship unlocked Podcast. I'm Lewis Smith, the founder of dropship unlocked, and with me is our client success coach. James Early. Now, when we're not recording podcast episodes or running our own e commerce businesses, you'll find us helping aspiring entrepreneurs launch their own high ticket drop shipping stores. So if you're ready to build your own six or even seven figure online business, then head over to dropship unlocked.com. Forward, slash, start now, sit back, relax and let's unlock your potential with the dropship unlocked podcast. Today's episode is going to be one where Lewis and I are going to go back and forth, chatting about how we find winning drop shipping products, because it's that time of year where a lot of people are getting started in drop shipping, and one of the first questions on your mind is, well, what am I going to sell? I'm going to start drop shipping, but I have no idea what products I'm going to sell. How can I possibly do that without knowing which products to sell? So that's the purpose of this chat today. Lewis is to go back and forth, because it really is the backbone of any successful e commerce business is the products that you sell. And we have an exact method, an exact strategy that we go through every time that we want to find a new product to start selling online. So first off, Lewis, tell us a little bit about getting started into this process. I know it starts with a bit of brainstorming. So how do we get started with that? My process on this is make sure that you start with a very creative open mind, because that's key. I think we can be too quick to rule things out based on assumptions. So I always start with a mix of personal curiosity and also, you know, overlay some of the market awareness that I have about what might or might not be a good, high ticket niche. I did a video on this on YouTube where I was literally driving around in the car, like looking at things and being like, Oh, look, there's a, you know, electric gate on someone's house that's probably a few 1000 pounds. And then I was like, oh, there's a really, like, premium lanterns outside with someone's house, you know, probably at least a few 100 pounds. And and when I first start brainstorming for drop shipping niche ideas, I simply, I remember, like, just walking around the high street shopping centers, just looking, and I call it wearing the niche research glasses, because it's literally, like, someone's given you kind of like, these special X ray super Terminator glasses that, you know, overlay all the data on everything, and you're just seeing things. And you're like, I find I'm in conversations with, like friends at bars, and I'm like, they're talking, and I'm looking above them at, like, the patio heater system. And like, the, you know, the kitchen table, like the parasol, umbrella thing that's in the middle, and like, the kind of corporate seating they've got in the corner. And I'm just like, yep, yep, that's probably a few 100. That's probably a few 1000. Like, sorry, what were you saying? Again, you know, you find yourself getting lost in this world of research. And those were the days before things like chat GPT existed as well. You know, I used to get inspiration from switching on Netflix shows like selling sunset, where there's these premium American apartments and like, real estate, you know, tours of houses. And I'd see all the things in there, I'd be like, Yeah, that's great. That's great. That's great. Jotting them down. So I'd usually aim for a minimum of 50 ideas before I even think about the data, because then you're not ruling anything out. I'm just throwing ideas into the mix, right? Exactly. Yeah. So initially, it's just about getting ideas on paper, isn't it? And when you said this to me and putting those research glasses on for me, I lived in a rural area, so I grew up in Shrewsbury, so all of my ideas were like garden sheds, greenhouses, things I was walking past in gardens, gates, bikes, these kind of things came to my mind straight away. To be interesting, if we did a study on our members, the niches that they've got into, is it anything related to what they've got immediately next door, in the in the next person's backdoor garden? VA, there is a correlation, yeah, as to as to where you are based, because, yeah, you could do it digitally, can't you through watching shows and YouTube and stuff. But also, there's probably a kind of a tendency to, Oh, I see a lot of those things around where I live. Therefore there's a higher mental perception of their importance. And you lean towards selling something, you see a lot, maybe Exactly, yeah, let's see if you, if you live, currently, live next to a car sales door or. Maybe a luxury Ferrari garage. I don't know something that would come to mind, but maybe you're going to go into that. But wherever you live next door, I wonder if that becomes the next big idea for next year based on kind of what you're exposed to, because you see things so differently when you have those glasses on. I made this mistake when I first got started, Lewis, before I realized that there was a way to validate your ideas, was that I was just making my decisions based on that initial brainstorm idea. So some of my embarrassing products that I went into selling first that were a complete flop were things like elasticated shoe laces, because I just saw them on AliExpress. And I thought, well, if I can find it on AliExpress and it's five pounds, they must be a world beating products. And how wrong was I? Yeah, exactly. I did the exact same thing with, like, men's ties. I thought, oh, men's ties, like a certain type of men's ties, like, how commoditized of a product is that? How low margin and difficult to differentiate, is something like that, right? But because I'd seen it, and I'd not really, I'd not really opened my mind yet to kind of what, higher margin products, higher profit products, like, not necessarily the products that I see 10 of hanging up in my wardrobe from my old corporate days that were obviously just there in my subconscious, that I just thought, well, that maybe that's something. I think sometimes you've got to get out there and like, right now you're in Madeira, right so you, you know, I bet walking down the street there, you see all kinds of things that you'd never be exposed to at your hometown in the UK, and therefore you'd see something and think, Well, that's interesting, and I don't need to be surrounded by those items for them to be very in demand, profitable, available and popular in the UK. But maybe there's just none of them in where I live, or I don't see them every day, you know, because I'm not surrounded by whatever they are. So I think that's a really good exercise to do. And sometimes, if you can't, I think the best way is get yourself in the environment physically, get like, go and be there, walk around, like, just open your mind, have a note open on your phone and jot down everything you see. But if you can't do that. The next best thing is probably like watching some shows like that, or go down the rabbit hole. You know, it's fun homework, right? You get to just watch Netflix as your homework for building your business Exactly. Or just get into new environments and start noticing things that you didn't notice before, perhaps put yourself deliberately in more affluent areas as well. Or watch these home tours, because that's going to give you a lot more high ticket ideas, which is where we come into choosing the products that we choose. It's all about over 300 pounds minimum, so that you've got the proper profit per order. When I was doing those shoe last shoe laces, Lewis, embarrassing to say, but I would sell them for like 25 pounds, and I could find them for like five pounds on AliExpress, and it's only after I'd decided to start running ads to it and making videos about it, but I realized they were actually very dull products and very difficult to sell. What? How do you How does an elasticated shoelace help my life? Well, you go, it's the fact that you don't know it immediately. Is probably something that hindered me and like getting customers. Yeah, you weren't looking for it. You didn't care about it. Nobody cared about it, clearly. But I thought when I saw it, everyone's gonna need to save that extra 30 seconds of tying their shoelaces so you just don't have to tie it. It just kind of like, like shoes where they're just like, if it's a clip, right? Yeah, okay, there are clips you replace your laces with these elasticated ones that you buy from my store. Okay, but instead of tying them, you just click them and they're elastic, so you can just pull them and clip it together, but it's makes your shoes stay on with that anti tyre. Fascinating genius I know, and I thought that was going to be the thing, but without realizing, I only realized after I spent money on ads, hundreds of pounds on ads, built a website, spent weeks building it to then realize there was no market. And that's the whole point of the niche validation that we do, isn't it? It's about finding the market before we build the store and start running apps. Yeah. I mean, we've all done it, right? There's no shame in it. I did exactly the same thing. You're pouring money. And I remember, I think, I think we were on our honeymoon in like, Yeah, I can't remember. Well, on our honeymoon. No, it was actually when we got engaged. We were away in Mauritius on holiday. And I remember just like, running the Facebook ads on my phone at the time and just being like, gonna set it live tonight. And like, it's gonna go live, I'm gonna start making some sales. And like, seeing the, you know, the spends just go up and up and up, and you're just like, Why is no one converting? And the trouble is, even if they do convert, it's really disappointing, because then you're like, oh, hardly made any profit when I do all the calculations. And usually they're really disappointed in the long delivery times that it takes to get from China, or even if it's fast, and it's like, oh, we can get it to in, you know, four days, because you got a supplier in Europe, or something, usually arise and it's really underwhelming, and you've massively oversold the product. And then, yes, it's just difficult, but yeah, fascinating. Self Tying shoelaces. It's um, imagine if they take off, there'll be a whole generation of children that don't know how to tie their laces, which would be a strange world to live in. But maybe, maybe shoelaces are a thing of the past. Maybe, maybe they are. I mean, based on my sales experience, they look like they are, but if they. Take off, I'll be gutted. I'll have to claim something on this podcast that I've you know, whoever watches this and goes into it, maybe there's something there. But the all of this to say it's always better to do the research up front so you know there's going to be winning products before you start running ads. And there is a path to do that so that you only start running ads and building a store once you've got the products that you know are going to sell, which is what we do now. So beyond the first research stage, then Lewis, we've got 50 niche ideas. We've brainstormed it. We've been walking around. How do you then take it to the next level and start cutting down those ideas so that you're just left with winning ideas? First one I look at is price, because that's very difficult to that's very difficult to kind of create later. You know, you can be a great marketer, but if the average price of the products that you're selling is 10 pounds, very difficult for you to later make those worth 300 pounds. You know, like you'd have to do some serious marketing wizardry to make that happen. So really, I tend to just say, well, let's just go where products are already selling for at least 300 pounds. You know, that's an arbitrary figure. I say 300 maybe your minimums 500 few people in our program sell products for seven and a half grand like it. You know, the obviously, the higher you go, probably the fewer sales you're going to make, and the longer the sales cycle might be. So it might be that, you know, a seven and a half grand customer needs a few phone calls and a little bit of tender love and care to kind of take them through the process. But for 500 quid, people buy stuff like that all the all the time. You know, I had to buy a new iPhone the other day. But it's like, what, nearly 1000 pounds that are ridiculous. And I'm not, like, I'm not buying this unless I can speak to, you know, the management team at Apple. Like, I'm just, I'm just buying it. I'm like, right, okay, I hope it arrives quickly and get moving high ticket purchase in practice, like evidenced right there. The like, Don't get the wrong idea with that. I'm not suggesting that. You know, technology and selling Apple products is a great route to go down. They're unlikely to want to work with a new drop shipping retailer, but there are plenty of amazing suppliers based in the UK who are looking for a route to market, who maybe already work with a network of other retailers who either do hold stock or do a bit of stock holding and a bit of direct distribution. So drop shipping and plenty of them that just happily work with dropshippers. One of our members the other day we were chatting to on one of our inner circle mastermind calls, was like, I feel like the suppliers that I signed almost just said yes too easily. And it obviously got like the script the phone scripts and the email scripts that we give them. But I think he was a bit concerned that he was like, Have I done something wrong? Like, why are they all just saying yes? And I was like, Well, it's because you picked a niche that are happy to work with drop shippers. So you're not in there trying to, like, convince them and twist their arm and try all this, like, persuasive stuff. It's like they just already do it. So you just came in and just took a slice of that market share. And by the way, you can if you pick a big enough market and the products are expensive enough, which I know here's a probably, what, six, 700 pounds upwards. You know, you're making a few 100 pounds profit, probably on every order. So you don't need that big of a market share. A few sales a day, and you've replaced a decent, you know, 40 grand a year income, exactly. Yeah. Also, the the emotional buy in that you have when you're selling expensive products is huge. I wonder if you did this as well, Louis, but when I was well, when I started selling products full stop, I knew that a lot of my products would sell overnight, because I was selling into the US and Canada, initially with my Aliexpress store. So I would wake up first thing in the morning go to where my phone is on charge on the other side of the room, yeah. First thing I'm doing is checking my notifications for Shopify sales, yeah. And sometimes there was a sale, but it would only be for 25 pounds or 15 pounds, which when you first get started, is amazing, but it's nowhere near the level of excitement from when you're sent making sales of 1000 pounds, 1500 2000 pound sales. Not sure how healthy it is to be checking notifications first thing in the morning. I've definitely stopped doing that. But was that something that you did as well? Yeah, 100% fairly, fairly toxic. I think eventually, because you, you know, you become the hamster in the cage who, like, gets the little dopamine hit, you know, and they run those, like lab rat experiments, and they give them, like, a drop of whatever chemical, and it like trains their brain to, like, keep coming back to the little dripper machine. And we become this kind of Yeah. It's like a primitive state, isn't it? Like your whole day revolves around your Shopify hat. Like, did I make any sense? Did I make any sales? And it's Yeah. Eventually, there comes a day where the cha ching noise, you know, as strange as this might sound, if you haven't heard that noise yet on your phone, because you should definitely keep it on at the start. I think there's something special about hearing that first 1000 pound order come through and being like, I just made 350 pounds in profit on that sale. But eventually, you know, if you're in the middle of doing something, or you're calling suppliers and you're doing something, you've got your phone pinging all the time, and you're thinking about it, once you have a virtual assistant in place and assist. System to manage those orders. You're not having to worry about those things coming through. So, yeah, that's why eventually I switched off, because I felt like it was unhealthy. Yeah, it is a gradual thing. I thought when I first got started I would never turn off that Shopify notification noise, because it was the best noise in the world to hear about. Here you make your money with a nice coaching sound that sounds like a cash register to signify that you're making money, but yeah, something that you move away from eventually. So with the process, then we've gone from 50 niche ideas, we've started to take out the ones that are just cheap products. So we're just leaving in things that are over 300 pounds as a minimum. What's the next niche validation criteria that you then apply to the remaining on the list. Yeah. So after you've selected you've whittled down your process of like, okay, well, that products 10 pounds, you know, it doesn't meet the minimum price criteria. That products 50 pounds, it's not quite right. And you've got a list of products that at least meet the price criteria, and I'd look at search volume. And by that, I mean how many times are people in the market that you're selling to, so for us in the UK, looking or googling that type of product, right? And I don't mean the specific brand and model that you're thinking of of the product, but, like generally, you know, so barbecues. Where do I buy barbecue? A barbecue? How? You know, buy barbecue. Now, all of those, I would say, would fall within the search volume of a niche like barbecues, for example. Now this can be quite fiddly, this process of going through it, so we actually have a process that you can kind of track this through. So we put together a niche navigator worksheet. We'll link that in the show notes or the description or whatever below the YouTube video, depending on where you're watching this, and you can get a free copy of that, and that guides you through how to do this. But long story short, what we're doing is trying to narrow down where there's an eager crowd already looking for the items that we are thinking of selling. So much easier to do that than it is to go into a quiet room and try and drum up interest, you know, where they're like, banging the drum, being like, come on, who wants these products that I've got very, very time consuming, takes a lot of energy, takes a lot of money, and there's no result. There's no guarantee you're going to get to the end result. You can stack the cards in your favor significantly. If you just walk into the busy room where people are already queuing for the thing that you're selling, it's bit like if people are queuing up for, like, a hot dog van or a burger van, and you start going up to the end of the queue, and you're like, you know, one of those guys that's got, like, trays of, I don't know, like, food or nuts or something that you're selling, and you start going up to they're all hungry, they're all definitely interested, and we're going in selling the same product, ie, food, to a starving crowd. So again, we're not saying, don't take it literally. We're not saying go and sell nuts or hot dogs. But the idea of this is that you're going to people where they're you're going to market your products where there's already people searching for, how do I buy X or and best seller for why, or what's the best new whatever. And there's tools that we guide you through where you can assess that level of search demand, things like Uber Suggest, or, I think other ones that we've got Keywords Everywhere. Is another tool we use that has, like, an API that plugs in with Google search so you can actually get the numbers to appear below your Google search results as well, which makes it super easy. But yeah, once you've got those two criteria, suddenly your list of 50 is like, okay, maybe it's only 30 that were over 300 pounds. And now it's like, oh, actually, maybe there's only 20 that have enough search demand for me to go into. You know, I typically like industries where the search demand is at least 10,000 searches per month, for example. Now that's not the last criteria I'll look at, but you know, I'm sure you'd, you'd agree, James, that's one of the main ones. 100% Yeah. And just to interject with another failure I've had, but I think it helps to illustrate the point, is going into another product that I thought ticked a few of the boxes that looked like there was demand, but I hadn't actually validated and checked was there actually 10,000 searches in the UK, and this was for a game pad that was Bluetooth controlled. You put your phone on it, and I never searched. If I had searched, I would have saved 1000s of pounds in in wasted ad spend, Shopify, store bills and the time that I'd spent to try and push this product out to the market that didn't exist. So had I? Had I known earlier? It had been a much smoother process, and so it's just a case of using Keywords Everywhere, isn't it that you just, you just search online. I'd have searched Bluetooth gamepad, and I'd realize nowhere near 10,000 searches a month. Yeah, it's a great tool. People don't realize this kind of data exists, but every time we google something or search something on a phone or a computer, that data is being logged. And then they can give us a kind of an aggregate, you know, overall average number of monthly searches for that term. And so then we can use that and kind of whittle down and say, Okay, well, if that market gets 50,000 searches a month and the cost. Four average product price in that market is 1000 pounds. Interesting worth exploring further. Now this is where we'll get onto the next criteria, but you can see how the process now has whittled us down from like the initial list to actually. And by the way, none of these rules are, you know, gospel, right? So you can absolutely go out and sell something that's 200 pounds, if you want to. And you can also go out and sell something that has 2000 searches on a month on average, if you want to. The purpose of this video, and this episode, is to help people who are doing this for the first time and want to get it right the first time. That's that's the key. I think. Once you understand this stuff, you've almost like, you graduate to a level where you can then break the rules once you understand them, because you can, you can be like, well, I know that that market is going to be a bit harder to break into and there's a bit less search demand. But I backed myself now because I've run a successful store already. I know that. I know the challenge I'm up against. I'm going to do it when you're doing this blindly for the first time, and you don't yet know what you don't know. You don't know the challenges ahead. Our experience of coaching hundreds of people through our mentorship program is that if we can alleviate and mitigate the risk of failure at each of those steps, so that later you don't come and say, Ah, you know, I did everything, but then there wasn't enough search demand, or I did everything. I was making sales. There wasn't enough profit. That's why these rules are in place. It's to allow you to never end up in that situation at the end of it, you know. So we guide our members through this like step by step inside our programs. But if you want to kind of tackle this research step yourself, then the niche navigator worksheet would be a worthwhile download and exercise to do, which we'll link below 100% Yeah, and a great kind of comparison that I use to describe the niche navigator worksheet, and how it gets easier as you go through it is like a toilet roll. So as you go through a toilet roll, it gets quicker to roll that the closer you get to the end. I like that. It's the same way I look at the niche navigator worksheet that we work through, because you start with 50 niches, and you look at you have to validate each of them, and then it's 30, then it's 20, then it's 10 niches as we knock off each as you go through each column. So by the end of it, you left with a single winner. That's how I look at it interesting, not that I've done this, but I heard that when you're on an airplane, you know, you take the toilet roll and, have you? Have you heard this where you, like, you put it, put the end of it to the toilet and then flush, and the suction from the toilet makes it go like flying through the system. Not that I've tried it personally, but I imagine it's a similar process to niche selection in that suddenly it's just rapidly spinning, and you're like, Wow, we got momentum. Now we move it, but they do not advocate for doing that on an airplane that way. Yeah. Quick disclaimer to try these are, we're trained professionals at this sort of thing, but yeah, absolutely Don't. Don't do that. There's not going to go well. But it's an image that probably was taking people's mind that they think something to do with toilet rolls. When I'm doing this niche navigator worksheet Exactly, they won't quite remember where it was from. But yeah, each the as you go through each per time, you only need one winner to get started with, but it's it'll go from 50 down to one. We've gone through price. We've gone through demand, making sure that only the niches left have got an average price above 300 over 10,000 monthly searches in the UK. What's next? Lewis, how do we get it down to closer to that? That winner? Yeah. So at this point, if I'm looking at a list of niches that meet those first two criteria. Next thing I'm probably looking at is predictability in terms of price. So I don't want to enter a market where the same product, you know, the same brand and model of of barbecue, is being sold at 500 pound on one store and then 200 pound on another store, you know. I want to know that the brand because ultimately, though, the brands that are making these products are the ones we'll be partnering with. So I want to know that they have some um authority over their retailers in pricing. Now, I don't believe in the UK they can legally enforce this. There's a policy in the US called Map pricing, minimum advertised pricing is not legally enforceable for suppliers in the UK, I don't believe to enforce a selling price, and is certainly what I hear from suppliers. But there's certainly means by which, if a retailer, so another drop ship or another retailer, starts really undercutting everyone else in the market, the supplier might just refuse to sell them because they're just damaging their brand, and they're just eroding price in the market, and they're just training that brands buyers to view them as, like, a bargain discount brand, and they just never buy at full price, and they're just always waiting for some like, you know, clearance discount. So we see that when retailers do that, typically, they don't legally enforce it. They just stop supplying them, and they're like, We didn't like those guys. Their strategy is just to compete on price, and that just ruins it for everyone in the business. And we can't make any money, and therefore we're, you know, everyone eventually will go out of business, if that's the game we play. So, yeah, I'd be looking at price consistency across different retailers. Are the same products being sold for approximately the same price. There'll be. Some variants, but if it's any more than 10% I might steer away from that niche. Again, this isn't, you know, the only way you like we certainly have products that we sell where we are more expensive than other brands, sorry, than other retailers and but we compete on value. We're able to do things like create custom bundles or create, you know, just having way better customer service, a better sales process, more value that we get away with it, because we can do that. And so customers aren't always looking for the bargain basement deal, the best discount that they can possibly get, you know. And so, yeah, I choose not to compete just on price alone. And that's one of the beauties of having this selection process is right now, we're not wedded to any niche or any product, so let's pick a market where we don't have to play that game from the outset before we even get involved. I don't know how you feel about that exactly. Yeah, I think it's just one of those things. Again, it falls into that category of greasing the path so that when you do get started, it's going to make it much easier, especially with the first store to make sales quickly. Completely agree, it's so nice that we can do something up front to prevent us going into a market where we're just competing on price with other retailers. And the win, the winner in that market is the one that's willing to take the least profit per order. It's not, not something that we want to be involved in. It doesn't lead anywhere good. But we can do this up from So how then, Lewis, do you do that? Then up front? How do you find out if a niche has undercutting involved? And how do you make sure that you avoid that? I just go shopping like I would as a consumer, you know, and end up digitally go shopping. I don't usually go to the shop itself, but I'll just search for the item like I'll maybe I'll pick out on my spreadsheet and 10 different particular items, like versions of model and brand, you know, and then I'll just search them on Google, and I'll just open up the first well, I don't even have to open up. I can just see the prices on Google Shopping. And I might open the first 10 organic results and just drop them into a spreadsheet. And then if there's, like, one outlier in there. Then, you know, sometimes that that might just be, like, a sale that's being run by one retailer who's kind of spoiling it for everyone for the short term, but, you know, eventually they'll stop that sale. But if it's like, wow, these are all over the place, you know, it's like, there's some that are, you know, two grand, some that are 1200 it's just like, there's just no consistency across those prices. It's pretty it's pretty easy to see that you can be as systematic as you want about it, but, but really, it's just kind of common sense. You just look at a few and you're like, that doesn't feel good. And you start to get a feel for this. Once you've been through the the first five or six niches, you start to be like, that looks consistent. That one definitely doesn't, you know. So you can put, like, a little we have a system on our spreadsheet that you can download that's like a kind of traffic light system, you know. So I might put an orange in one that I'm like, oh, there's a bit of variance, but I'm not sure. Whereas, if every single one of those retailers is selling it at like, 999 pounds and 99 Pence and every single one to the penny is the same, I'm like, green light, move ahead on that criteria Exactly? Yeah, I've done the exact same. So now only the product that I sell. There's at least a very high level of consistency across all retailers. Maybe there's some variance of less than 10% on some products. But would make sure that we don't need to be having a price war. We make sure we don't compete on price. We compete on value by giving more to the customers for the same amount of money, or we answer them for more money, but we clearly justify it by giving more value with every product that we sell. So much better business to be going into, and it's greasing the path before we go into it. So we've now people are following along with us. They've got the niche validator worksheet needs to navigate a worksheet that they downloaded, and they're able to see how we're working through that toilet roll all the way through to the end. So we've got down to 10 products now. Lewis, we've already validated on price demand and on undercutting. What do we move on to next? Lewis, I think there's an important one about competition that we're going to come up to soon, because it's one that people probably get wrong. Yeah, exactly. I love the analogies coming out today. Greasing the path is a good one. It makes me think of, you know, when you're a kid and you go, you have like, a slip and slide, one of those, like slides and then a tarpaulin underneath. And used to put fairy liquid all the way along. And it's like, there's your entrepreneurial path at full speed, no friction, because you applied the dropship unlocked criteria to it? Yeah, competition is probably the one most people come into with the wrong perspective initially, and I certainly did. And might sound odd, but having competitors is actually a really good thing, because firstly, all of the criteria I've talked Well, certainly the last criteria that I talked about so far, of price consistency. How are you going to know that if there are no competitors? You know you're not. And one of the things with competitors is that if they exist, by definition, they must be making money. Because people aren't just doing, you know, running businesses for fun. They cost money. To run. So if they're still there, and they've been operating for some time, likelihood is they're making at least some profit. I'm not saying they're all billionaires, but like, there's at least some money to be made. So again, it's another criteria. It's another factor in kind of us piecing together this puzzle of our first e commerce entrepreneurial venture, like our first online business with this model. If we want to get it right, first time, I'd look for at least a few competitors. And when I say competitors, I'm talking direct drop shipping competitors, so other retailers who also don't take stock. And so there's ways we can do this, and we guide you through this in the in the process. But like, we, I don't want, there's an area in America called, I think it's in America called the barren forest, and it's like, when no trees grow for hundreds of years, and there's all these kind of, like, myths around why it's that way. And it's like, oh, it's cursed, and there's some something wrong with the land and stuff. But it's like, well, if you were going to go and plant a tree, and you wanted that tree to have the highest likelihood of growth. Do you choose to go and be like, Man, there's a good patch of land where no trees have grown for hundreds of years. Let me dig a little hole in the middle and plant mine there. Or do you look over to your right and there's like a lush rainforest where trees are everywhere, they're thriving. There's nutrients and rain. So you go and plant it there. You know, it's kind of obvious, but that's the way you got to view competitors. If there's an abundance of other people making money in that industry, don't view that as like, Oh no, I have to be the unicorn. I have to do things differently. Maybe there's a reason for that. Maybe there's a reason why that forest is barren and there's no trees growing there. Maybe there's something wrong. There's no sunlight, there's no water, whatever it is, perhaps with your first business, you want to make sure there are other people already getting success and getting results. So I would actually seek out at least a few direct competitors, so that when I got to the point of contacting suppliers and making sales, I didn't just get the door slammed in my face by loads of suppliers saying, Sorry, we don't drop ship. And there's like nothing I can do about it. I want to walk into a conversation with the supplier and they say, Yeah, we do that for you know, four or five other people. Actually, it works really well. And maybe we can't offer you as high of a margin. Maybe it's like 30% instead of 40% margin that you get, or 25% instead of 35% because you don't hold stock. But then, remember, as an online business, we don't have, like, premises that we have to pay for rental leases on, or, you know, staff that we have to have in a fulfillment center or warehouse, so our overheads are lower as well. Exactly. Yeah, I think it's funny. This is something that's not common sense or not common wisdom. It's like, I think you almost imagine that whatever product you're going to sell, you almost have to create this new market, or find a product that is really under served for the market. But it's just not the case. Is it at all? Is. Why do you think that the common wisdom, then, is to go into a product where there's no other competition? Why do you think that comes to people's mind. I think because society tells us that being entrepreneurs are, you know, is like a like we're conditioned to want to stay with the herd, stay with the pack, aren't we? Stay in the nine to five roll out. Oh God, for, you know, so many businesses fail when they first start. Those are the stats that get thrown around on the news, you know, and anyone that kind of decides to leave. It's like the crabs in the bucket analogy, where they're trying to, kind of call them back in and be like, Oh well, you know, if it doesn't work, you can always come back like, because they don't want to feel bad about themselves not taking a risk. And so if you feel that way, if you're an entrepreneur, and you feel that that's normal, but you must have to shake that belief when you then enter entrepreneurship and start building your business. Because if you're trying to be the the one off the the unicorn, the, you know, single success story in a you know, plethora of failures, you're fighting an uphill battle. From day one. You made it really hard for yourself at the start purely because you thought you had to be the the one actually, when you when you kind of transition from the dark side to the light side, and you're in an entrepreneurship kind of environment, you realize it's actually fine to be around competitors. That's healthy, that's like, that's how everyone grows. And you can better yourself. You can see what's working. You can model it. You're not copying, but you can kind of apply the same principles. And success leaves clues. If you see people succeeding, don't just try and reinvent the wheel from the start and be like, I'm going to be the first person to sell this niche. Go in and I'm going to do what's being done, but better. I'm going to offer better customer service, better value to customers, a better overall experience, educate the market. And I don't think I'll get 100% market share, but I'll certainly get my slice of the pie. And from that, you can create an amazing online business, exactly. So it's like a different mindset, different approach. When you decide that you're going to improve an existing market rather than create one, it's a lot less expensive, and you give me some much better odds to be able to do that, rather than be that unicorn who can create the new iPhone. It is much better, much, much better. I think, as well you. With this, with society, and the way that society views success, especially in the UK, is that for you to succeed, somebody else must fail. There's almost like you've done well, but you've taken money from somebody else in order to succeed. I don't know where that's come from. I don't know where it's come from, actually, but I just think that's a bit of a if somebody has succeeded, they must have taken something from somebody else to succeed. There's not really, like an abundance mindset, yeah, that people view it like a zero sum game, you know, whereas actually it's not, you could both win. People love buying. They don't necessarily like being sold to, but they love buying. It's like the fear, if you've ever bought something and you're really excited about it, and you're like, this anticipation builds up, and you big it up, and you think about it for ages, and then you go for it. The process of going through that is amazing. And you're like, it feels really good. And obviously the person you're buying from that helps their business as well, right? So it's kind of a win win in that scenario. So it's not like the person who bought lost and the person who sold gained. You can, you can have a win win transaction in sales, and it works. Yeah, it works really nicely 100% I think that's probably the foundation of why our community is such a it's such a nice place to be in because we don't have that zero sum mindset. It's we know that if we've got all of us in a room together, all of us in a digital community together, we can all of us succeed and create businesses alongside each other based on the support that we give each other. And there's no there's not an idea within the community at all that somebody, if somebody if somebody succeeds, that somebody has to fail, to give them that chance to succeed, is the opposite of that, and it's coming from a different mindset. It's coming from a place of knowing that everyone can succeed, and not one person has to fail for somebody else to succeed. If we can instill that in people, knowing that competition is a great thing, because it shows others are succeeding, and you can also follow in their footsteps. That's something that people can take away from from this episode, definitely. Yeah, that's why it works so well at the in person events as well. So everyone's there chatting, talking about their wins, celebrating you feel like you're with your your tribe, you know, and everyone who's on the same journey as you, they're not there being like, Oh God, you made sales. That means I can't. It's like, we will. We're all doing this and taking our share of the different markets that we're in. Yeah, exactly No. It's fantastic mindset to have and a good group to be around. So to summarize, I mean, we've gone through the start of how we find winning products, and it's the way that we'd get started over again to find more winning products. I hope we've explained it well, and I think it'd be good now there's to kind of summarize about where people can go next to to get started, because I don't want people sat there only remembering a few things from the conversation, sat at their desk with a toilet roll in their hand and a laptop, thinking that some niche ideas are going to come out of them. Yeah, they've kind of remembered one part of the conversation and not the next. So where would you Where would you direct people to to get started? That last sentence is going to be so out of context when it gets clipped up and used as a short and not and in the context of the long format, I think firstly, if you so the end result of this process, if you've downloaded the niche navigator worksheet, which, by the way, you must do is in the description, and you've got that you've gone through the process, you're fairly confident on the niches that you are kind of your finalists, as we call them, you might then be like, Well, okay, I've got them. What do I do next? How do I sell them? So we did a whole episode on this episode, 26 of the dropship unlocked podcast, where we go all in on what it means to actually sell high ticket items. And, yeah, why we feel that it's the right move. And also, if you are ready to take the next step, then just head over to dropship unlocked.com forward slash start, and that's probably your clearest path to get started. Are you enjoying the podcast? We'd love to hear from you leave a comment or a review, and we might feature it in an upcoming episode, and for detailed show notes and resources, visit dropship unlocked.com forward slash podcast. If you found value in any episode of this podcast, please, could you take just 10 seconds to leave us a quick five star review on your favorite podcast app? It helps us more than you can imagine. And who knows, you might just hear your comments read out on the show. Thanks for being a part of our community. Your support helps us keep delivering new episodes to you every week. Okay, now it's that part of the episode when we're going to answer a question that we've had in from a listener. So Lewis, I'll put that question across to you now and a quick reminder, if you're listening now and you have a question that's come up from this episode, simply comment beneath the YouTube video version of the episode. It'll get answered in the comments, but also it might just get answered on an upcoming episode. So that is exactly what Wendy Wolf Man has done. So her question is, hey, Lewis, I'm considering signing up to your course. But out of curiosity, does your course recommend selling products with standard Google Shopping ads or by using the smart ads? Yeah, great question. Wendy, so I think, I mean, I've used both, I've used all of them, right? But because the new stuff didn't exist when I first started in like, 2017 with this stuff, so I had no choice but to use basic Google Shopping, which, by the way, if anyone's not familiar, are the image ads that appear at the top of Google if you Google on. A phone now, or on the computer, gas burner barbecue, you're going to see a load of photos at the top of Google and prices on them. They're really good types of ads because they kind of commercially. They qualify for commercial intent because the people clicking them know it's a shopping ad. They know the price already, so they're not likely just browsing around. They're actually quite interested. But yeah, to answer your question, in recent years, few years ago, Google bought out a campaign type called performance max. And this, the idea of this was to kind of leverage a lot of the AI data and technology that Google has at its disposal, which, by the way, is an unbelievable amount, like more than you could ever imagine. And they kind of allow you now to simply link your product feed up to your Google Shopping or your Google Merchant Center, and then within Google ads, start running these ads, and they you know that one of the great things about them is it's kind of an all in one solution. So it's very simple to set up. There's not a lot of like management that needs to happen once it's set up. You go in and optimize things occasionally, once every couple of weeks, once every month. But really it's a great first point to get some data on which brands work well, which brands are selling well, where's my highest return on investment happening? Now, of course, all of these things are just tools in your advertising and marketing toolkit. So there's a place for Google Shopping ads directly. If you find that one brand is doing really well, and you just want to kind of isolate that brand and put it just in a Google Shopping campaign, to just have that inbound search intent traffic coming to it, and it only show there. You can absolutely do that. We still do that. We split out some things into individual shopping campaigns, and what you find is that performance Max kind of is like a bit of an all in one. It does everything from like, display the ads on websites where it thinks people might be interested. It shows them as shopping ads. It sometimes shows like The ads as retargeting ads as well across the internet. It will even, like, create YouTube videos for you of the kind of products that you're using, and then dynamically insert the product that the person who viewed the product on your website was looking at. So they're seeing, like, specific stuff for them around the internet. That stuff can all be done manually, but it just takes a bit of time and a bit of management. So we find best way to start is performance Max ads, because you can get Google's AI driven capabilities. The Machine Learning Stuff allows the ads to dynamically reach a much wider audience. It doesn't require as much manual tweaking, which, when you're a first time e commerce entrepreneur, you're not you know your time is limited, right? Especially if you're working a full time job, so you probably don't want to be in there, like tinkering with the ads every day you're out there, signing suppliers and dealing with orders, but later, we can use that to make more specific, targeted search text ads. For example, which are the text ads that appear on the search engines? And that's a really good way to Once you know which brands work and which keywords convert to sales. You can really start to fine tune things and turn up the machine. So yeah, we find that performance Max ads give us loads of data. They're pretty cost effective. You can very clearly set your target return on ad spend so you're hitting your profitability goals. And then, yeah, over time, for a more scalable long term strategy, you can start branching out. But that strategy, by the way, has changed since we started, but we're always adapting and adjusting based on the data that we see in our own businesses. Doing this first hand, because James and I run these types of stores working best. So if something's working well, we're going to recommend it to our members. So that's the way we do it now. Exactly. Yeah, no. Perfect question Wendy, and we've delved into this topic as well with experts that we brought onto the podcast. And we've got an expert session coming up next week, I believe, with marketing agency. So definitely subscribe if you are interested in specifically how we generate the sales after you've listened to today's episode of how to find winning products up front. Okay, so thank you for that. Also, we're going to highlight a recent review that we've had for the podcast. So as well as the question, we like to highlight a review so that anyone listening feels very involved with this post podcast. So a big thank you to J C Amon for leaving your thoughts on a recent podcast episode. So JC, said, Thanks, Louis. I've successfully registered my company, and I've started to build a drop shipping Shopify store. I've been desiring to see a step by step demonstration of how it's done, and today, you've answered me Excellent. Well, thank you very much for returning the favor and leaving us a nice review. JC, we really appreciate it, and glad to hear that you've been enjoying the podcast and sounds like you've dived into some of the more in depth content as well now around step by step demonstration. So thank you for listening. And if you're listening to this and you've enjoyed today's chat and you found value in it, maybe you could share it with a friend or a colleague. It's a great way for us to spread the knowledge. Of entrepreneurial ventures, and maybe even help someone else out who's just at the beginning point of considering their own e commerce journey. And we really appreciate every bit of support, so share it if you can. Thank you for joining us on this episode of the dropship unlocked podcast. We hope you are leaving with new insights and inspiration to fuel your entrepreneurial journey, to kick start your E commerce business, head over to dropship unlocked.com forward slash, start. It's the perfect place to start and get access to resources that will help you build your business from the ground up. And don't forget to hit that subscribe button for more episodes packed with strategies, tips and success stories, plus, if you enjoyed this episode today, a five star review would mean the world to us, and you might even get a shout out on the next episode. Thank you for choosing to spend your time with us today. We can't wait to bring you more insights on the next episode of the dropship unlocked podcast. You