Today, I will show you several methods to find winning products on AliExpress. I have been dropshipping products for a long time. As such, I have enough experience in tool selection, picking products, analyzing red flags, and more. 

Here are the things you will learn today: 

• Important factors for product selection
• Tools you can use to find winning AliExpress products 
• Ways to use the tools

Here are the key takeaways:

• Not all products that sell a lot of units are worth it
• Know your suppliers will before committing to endorse their products 
• Always use data to make informed business decisions

I will no longer discuss the factors to look for in a supplier, as we here at Dropship.IO have already published a long post about that. Ultimately, this article would give you a basic foundation for looking for winning products. 

Let us start!

What to Look for in a Winning Product on AliExpress

While it is true that many software programs can find winning AliExpress products, it does not mean that each product will sell well in your store. It would help if you considered some factors, and I will discuss these factors in this section. 

1. Product Quality

Sure, you may have seen a product that has over 1,000 sales. Naturally, you want to sell the same thing in your store. However, you need to ask yourself one important question: what is the quality of this product? 

I once bought 100 items from an AliExpress seller. The product I purchased was a ring. Online, the product looked great, and it was cheap. When it arrived, I realized the product quality was not as it seemed in the images. 

Here is the image online: 

Now, here is the actual image of the product in real life:

The ring in the sales picture is more detailed and vivid. The real one is bad, plus the quality of the material is not what I expected. It was lighter, and the material they used was cheap metal.

From this experience, I can say without a doubt that you must investigate before you buy. If anything, I suggest that you buy one sample first. Once you have the item, you can decide whether or not the product is good enough to sell.

Sadly, I ordered 100 pieces at once. I hesitate to sell them in my store because my customers may leave a bad review. 

As a dropship, you will incur this loss. However, your customer will be unhappy, which will reflect badly o you. 

2. Market Relevance

The second thing you want to look for is product relevance. Is the product still in demand today? Does it belong to your niche? 

Remember these things?

There was a time when the world was so crazy about fidget spinners. As you can see from the screenshot, the fidget spinner has sold more than 5,000 units.

It would seem that it is a winning product. However, this product is dead. Nobody wants to buy this product anymore. The world has moved on.

If you decide based on the total sales alone, I can tell you that you may get burned. To find out whether or not it is worth selling, go to Google Trends. 

Take a look at this:

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There was a massive interest in 2021, but the interest in this product fluctuated as time passed. Maybe you are saying it is okay since you do not buy inventory for dropshipping anyway. 

Still, you wasted your time listing this product. Worse, you would lose money if you advertised on Facebook, TikTok, or Instagram. You are promoting a product that no one is interested in buying.  

3. Product Originality

You must never dropship counterfeit items. It takes only one complaint, and you can get shut down. If you go to AliExpress, you will certainly find many counterfeit items. 

Take a look at this: 

All these items are fake. The wristwatch sold over 1,000 units; you may tell yourself it is a winning product. Yes, it is a winning product. However, are you willing to take the risk? 

If you dropship on Amazon, it takes only one complaint to get your store shut down or penalized. The same thing goes with Shopify. If someone files a complaint, Shopify may close your store.

Selling a replica product or a counterfeit item is a bad idea. The only exception to this rule, of course, is if you are dropshipping to an economically challenged country where the people or the government do not tackle the issue of counterfeit goods. 

For example, people in China do not mind buying fake Louis Vuitton bags. The same thing goes for other Asian countries like the Philippines. 

4. Shipping Time and Cost

The fourth factor you must consider, and one of the most important, is shipping options, time, and cost. You must take the time to check this detail in AliExpress. 

For every product listing on AliExpress, you can click on the seller’s name, and you will see some ratings, as shown below: 

As you can see, the seller’s shipment time is below average. I can say that this is still acceptable, as it is above 4.5 out of five stars.

The shipping options link is above the Buy Now or Add to Cart button. Click this for more details about the shipping choices, cost, and timelines. 

Free shipping is great. However, keep in mind that free shipping always takes time. Since these products come from China, expect the shipment to take 30 to 60 days. The alternative is to choose a seller of the same product who offers reasonable shipping costs and timelines. 

5. Product Reviews

The next factor you must consider is product review. While the product may have a lot of sales, what do the customers say about it? Beware of fake product reviews.

Here is a sample review: 

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From here, we can see a real picture, not one that the seller put under many lights or in a studio. The buyer said the ring has an accurate size as described in the product listing. 

Read the reviews and take the time to browse through the images. These reviews will tell you a lot about the product and the seller. If the review is too good to be true, it probably is.  

6. Price and Potential Profit

The last factor to consider is your price and potential profit. One big problem with Chinese manufacturers is that they sell the products in a B2C market.

What does this mean? It means the supplier posts the products in online marketplaces, especially Amazon.

This bag sells for $35 on Amazon, and shipping is not in the price yet:

The same bag sells in AliExpress for $22.85, and shipping is free. 

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From here, I can say that it is a good product to dropship. You have room to make a profit. However, you may come across a problem. 

If you look closely at the AliExpress listing, the product used to be $65. If the supplier decides to go back to that price, there is no way you can sell this product anymore. 

There will be situations where the AliExpress supplier is also selling on Amazon. If this happens, you cannot beat their prices. The best thing to do is to walk away and look for another winning product. 

How to Find Winning Products on AliExpress: Best Tools to Use

1. AliExpress Filters

AliExpress is the cheapest way to find products that sell. The platform works like Amazon, where you can click on categories on the left or use the search bar for specific keywords. 

Below is an example where I looked for a drone product. 

As you can see, there is an area where I can refine my search. I can choose the minimum and maximum price, the star rating, where the product ships from, and whether the shipping fee is free. 

If you look at each product thumbnail, you will also see how many times people bought this product already. The second one from the left has more than 1,000 units in sales. So, let us click that and see how we can dig deeper. 

Here it is: 

The seller’s details, which you will find on top, can give you an insight into the performance of this dropshipping partner. The feedback rating is only 89.9%, and I can tell right now that this is not good. 

We can also see that the seller has more than 70,000 followers. The product rating is 4.4 stars with 211 reviews. There are several product variants and shipping to the United States is free.

From these details, we know that the product is good and that customers who bought this item are satisfied. However, if I hover my mouse over the seller’s name, I can see now that the performance is below average. 

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All three aspects of what makes a seller reliable show that this seller is below average. The item is not as described, and the communication is also low at 4.5 stars. Although shipping is free, the shipping speed is also poor.

Because of this, I know I have a product that may have sales, but it is not a winning product. The reason is that this seller is not as trustworthy as the product rating may imply. As such, I will decide to move on.

As you may have observed by now, this process is too tedious. You will spend so much time browsing products individually until you find something good enough. 

The better option is Dropship.IO, which I will discuss in detail below.

2. Dropship.IO

Dropship.IO is a product database tool that allows you to spy on Shopify stores. Our system gives you the ability to do the following: 

• Find products and know their sales performance
• Track stores and their sales performance
• Search your competitor and spy on them
• See if the competitor has ads on Facebook

Let me take you to the product database tool so you can see what I am talking about. After using a keyword for drones, I got these results:

Now you can see that we have a long list of winning products. I highlighted the sales column to show you the sales count for each product. To be clear, you see sales per product per month!

In addition to this, I can click on the store, like the first one on top, and get this: 

The name of the store is My Shop Genie. I now know how this seller presents this product to the target consumers. If I scroll down, I can see the product description, the other images they used to market the video, and many other things.

Going back to the tool, I can track this store and see that store is doing well: 

From the data, I can tell that they made 6,000+ sales in a day. Every week, they can sell as many as 154,000 units of various dropshipping products. 

One important question: are we sure My Shop Genie is a dropshipper? Yes, and I found out through Google reverse image search. 

I took a screenshot of the drone product, uploaded it to a free reverse image search program online, then got this: 

As you can see on the right, there is an AliExpress supplier for this toy. The toy is also available on many other sites like Walmart and eBay. 

3. Dropified

Third on our list is Dropified, a dropship supplier tool that you can integrate with other online marketplaces. 

Dropified, unlike other dropshipping tools and platforms, provides insights into a product’s profitability. As you can see below, the company offers its users a list of the best-selling categories and products in AliExpress. 

What I like about this approach is that you can see: 

• The cost of the item in AliExpress
• The possible retail value you can sell it for
• Your potential profit

Once you click this link, you will find yourself on the AliExpress product page. What’s missing here is the analysis part of whether you can rely on the seller or not. It would help if you returned to the method I taught you earlier. 

The good news is that you can import this product with the Dropified tool. You do not have to copy and paste the product images and details manually. 

Another thing you can leverage with Dropified is automatic fulfillment. With it, you no longer need to go to your Dropified dashboard to place an order. The system automatically sends the order to the supplier. 

Because of this, orders can be on their way even while you are sleeping. On top of locating the best-sellers, you can also have an assurance that your store will process your orders even if you are not around. 

4. Spocket

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Fourth on the list is Spocket, also a dropship supplier database. Spocket has wide coverage in terms of suppliers. You can find suppliers from AliExpress and independent ones in the US, the UK, and the EU.

You can use the search bar to search for a winning AliExpress product. For this example, I searched for “drone.” Beside the search bar is a filter option, and I filtered the “ship from” to China.  

After a few seconds, here is what we have: 

I highlighted the important factors on this page, such as:

• Listing cost – the price you pay to the seller
• Shipping – the price of shipping to a particular country; in this example, the USA
• Retail price – this is the average price you can get the product in your store
• Shipping time – the number of days it would take to ship the item to your customer

Now, if I click on the product page, this is the information I get: 

From this page, I can make a fair assessment of whether this seller is trustworthy or not. In addition, I can also see more details about the shipping timelines. 

What I dislike is that I cannot see the reviews about the product. Because of this, I need to go to AliExpress and manually search for this product. 

You may have noticed that the images do not show the number of items sold. If you want this information, go to Winning Products from your control panel. However, this feature is only available to premium users who pay a monthly subscription to Spocket. 

5. Amazon

No, you will not look for suppliers on Amazon. What you want from Amazon is data. You want to check your competitors and see what products they are selling. Once you know what items on Amazon are in demand, you can start looking for a supplier in AliExpress.

Take a look at this screenshot: 

I searched for “drone,” and these are the results. As you can see, the first product on the left has 17,512 reviews. All these have sponsored ads, and the sellers have the means to pay for this sponsorship because their products sell. 

In addition, the first product on the left has over 3,000 views in the past week. It tells us that this product has a high impression rate (maybe because of the sponsored ad), and people click the thumbnail to see more details. 

So, we know that this drone is in demand. How do we find a supplier? The key here is reverse image search on Google. If you copy and paste the product name and search for it on AliExpress, the website will not yield any results. 

However, with a Google reverse image search, you will see this: 

See the one I highlighted? Click that, and you will see this on AliExpress:

Unfortunately, this item is no longer available. But you get the idea. You must do the same for your other target products. If you dropship on Amazon, you can leverage this information and sell your items at a lower price.

If you dropship from your website, like your Shopify store, you can re-write the product description from Amazon and present your product similarly. If it sells on Amazon, it will sell on your website.

6. Sell the Trend

Sell the Trend is a product finder and also a dropshipping tool. The people behind it consider their software program the all-in-one tool you need for dropshipping. 

Aside from helping you find winning products, you can also use the tool to build your website or store. They call this tool SHOPS. Like Shopify, there is no need to code. 

For product selection, you will have access to a list of winning products and those that are rising in demand. The product thumbnail shows you the following things:

• Suggested retail price
• Profit margin
• Total product revenue
• How many stores are carrying the product 

The system also has a competitor research or comparison tool. They call it Store Intelligence. In it, you can view who your competitors are and what they are doing. You will find details such as their top-selling products, what products they recently added to the store, etc. 

For product research, the tool shows you where a product ships from and how a particular supplier performs. You can integrate the tool with AliExpress, CJDropshipping, Amazon, and other marketplaces where you can find suppliers. 

7. SaleHoo

SaleHoo has two main products. The first one is the directory, and the second one is a dropship importation tool. What you want for now is the directory, as it shows you the potential earnings from a product. 

What makes SaleHoo different from other companies is that they have a vetting process. The management of SaleHoo has a standard to determine which AliExpress supplier to allow on the platform. 

Currently, there are over 8,000 approved AliExpress suppliers in the SaleHoo directory. There are over 2.5 million products you can choose from.

SaleHoo is pretty much similar to how other tools work. In the search section, you will see the cost of the product, how much it retails online, and how much profit you can make. However, you have a guarantee with SaleHoo that the supplier you are working with is legit. 

How to Find Winning AliExpress Products FAQ

Is Alibaba better than AliExpress? 

Yes, Alibaba is better than AliExpress. However, Alibaba is for wholesale. They do not dropship. You must order the product and keep your inventory. 

How do you tell if a product is a winning product?

Look at the stats, the sales count, cost, possible profit margin, and reviews. There are so many factors that you must consider, which I described in detail earlier. 

How do I find the winning dropshipping product?

Use our tool at Dropship.IO to find a product you want to sell. From our tool, you will see the units sold and for how much. From here, you can visit the store that dropships the item and get some idea of how to do it in your store.

How do I find similar items on AliExpress?

Just type the keyword or do a Google reverse image search. AliExpress is one of those websites that will consistently appear in Google searches. 

Summary

So, what is the next move? The next action is to try these companies and see who would fit your business well. Of course, I strongly recommend trying ours, Dropship.IO. We offer a 7-day free trial from which you can test our system and how it would help you. 

You saw earlier how our tool can deliver winning products to you. It is easy to use, and you can find out who sells the product, their website, and how they market it. Try it now, and I guarantee you will not be sorry!