welcome to this complete tutorial on what makes a winning Drop Shipping product for those that don't know me I've done over $800 million in e-commerce sales and product selection is the most important part in today's episode we're going to cover the 13 most important factors When selecting a product we're going to cover metrics to look at when trying to select your product how to identify what saturation actually looks like to make sure that your product is viable and strategies about how you can make your product unique by using things like positioning and branding so sit down put on Do Not Disturb get your notepad out and let's learn when I first started e-commerce I didn't know my dick from my elbow I didn't know what I was doing I didn't know how to launch ads I didn't know how to Source Products but I got lucky I picked one product and it was the perfect timing I was basically just boosting posts on Facebook and I was making so much money and 10 million in my first year and a lot of people are saying yeah you're you're amazing at e-commerce but the truth is early in those days I was not and I just got lucky and that's what I want for you so I since then I've launched hundreds and hundreds of products before and I think I've just stealed these 13 points from a lot of failures as well this story isn't like uncommon getting lucky there are a lot of people in Daily Mentor my seven figure coaching group that quickly did $3 million in their first year because they just picked the right product they picked the right trend so without further Ado let's get into it so the first one this may sound Tred overused but it needs to solve a big problem you know I had a lot of ego and I thought I could pretty much sell anything online I decided to sell coolers so like esis they were uh motorized and you could take them down to the beach and they were portable now for anyone that knows that industry one the problem that you're solving isn't that big you're just keeping beard is a little bit colder which isn't a huge burning desire for certain people compare that to something like back pain or um planta fasciitis like foot pain like these are big problems that big avatars are facing compared to something quite small so long story short that business blew up in my face and it was largely because of two things the first one being that I was struggling to communicate the value of the product and and create instant demand and then the second reason for it was that it was actually saturated which I'm going to touch on I think it's Point number six but going on to um point two I like to really reflect on the marketing channel that I'm actually going to use to acquire customers as well so right now there are two main ways of targeting customers for e-commerce that I that I actually recommend the first is obvious it's Facebook ads this is where I've created all of my wealth and it is the most powerful marketing tool that has ever existed realis ially providing that your product follows a lot of the other framework across uh what I'm talking about today Facebook ads is going to work for you the second point is this organic viral content strategy that I'm going to probably try to teach you guys um with my product selection as well making sure that I can cover both of these areas because that product will probably work on Facebook but the product that works on Facebook might not be able to go viral because it needs a visual element so that brings me to my next point which makes a really great product is there it needs to be some kind of visual element for those that have been following me for a while they know that I launched I've done this challenge before I launched a brand and I made decent money with the drop I got it viral and it was a yellow cleaning scrub which was similar to the pink stuff which is a pink cleaning scrub and the reason why that that product works very similar to high smile the reason why that works is because it's just a different color and there's pattern Interruption on these organic feeds so they're scrolling down and they're like why is that cleaning product pink and then they watch the video and that can go viral so the next point that I think is a really important factor is really good gross margin you really want your gross margin to be over 60% if possible so a lot of the tools that I'm actually going to show you how to find winning products will calculate this margin for you as well but I'm also going to give your manual calculation sheet as well so you can make sure that you've got over 60% now this brings me to my other point which is you want to have preferably an average order value of over $100 now because we're Drop Shipping due to one the product being being quite small and probably the materials being quite cheap you know in terms of just how many atoms the material uses there is a good chance that we're not going to be able to sell the product for over $100 because it's going to be competitive and there's going to be lots of versions and the price is going to be down so but realistically all of the products that I have scaled very very well have had an average order value of over $100 and that's why I think that it should be on the list if you break that those two things down together if I'm selling a product for $100 and I've got 60% margin maybe I spend $40 to a k the customer and then I make $20 net profit which is great unit economics now the next thing is saturation now I am a firm believer that if you are an incredible marketer that saturation is a good thing one of my friends they decided to test themselves and they found the most saturated product that they possibly could with Drop Shipping and they are very good marketers by the way and they launched it and within I think 6 months they were on a $40 million a year run rate so they on track to make $40 million over the future 12 month period just because they pick the most saturated product and there was already demand for it and they just annihilated their competitors because it is a little bit of Like a Winner Takes most Market when your creatives are dialed in whe whether your website's dialed in whether you've got the best margin so you can spend a little bit more it definitely if you think about a distribution curve if you you know 20% better on those ads you definitely don't just take 20% of Market J you take a lot more now that being said for you you the beginner I want you to pick the least saturated most Niche possible so that I I can get you early success and profitable customers without wasting too much money there is a lot of like iterative process and a lot of wasted spend when we go into a really competitive thing and also because you're basically competing on Facebook it's a it's an auction system so I don't want you to go and start auctioning up against someone like me I want you to find something really Niche that's kind of about to pop now how do we know whether that's happening one of the first things is it already in a department store like it could be you know something like Kmart in Australia could be selling like Walmart and that's a very simple thing to figure out you just search the product category on Google and if you can see it on teu or Sheen for like absolutely Z super super cheap then chances are that's probably already saturated can there be cases where you can take one of those products and brand it better and make a slight variation of the product and and beat them of of course it there is but for this example I want you to spend a lot of time on the product process and try to find something that's as least saturated as possible one other thing that you can do with this as well is it's not just if it's saturated in the US you can use the free tool called search from just write in search from in Google and you can then search the Google ads the shopping ads in other regions so like you can say massage gun or something like that and even though that it's scaling in the United States it might not be scaling elsewhere and I I'll show you a tool to help you with this as well it's a paid one but the interesting thing is there's so many people in Daily Mentor that it's their first business they're selling in Finland Norway all uh Sweden all of these countries that the large Drop Shipping Community or people don't actually try to scale in because one the the duties are confusing two it's a smaller market so we might just if if we do want to do a really saturated product or we're worried about saturation we can go to one of these smaller markets and scale out Drop Shipping there next up we've got um can you make the product different now this is very difficult for a product that we are just getting from China or getting off AliExpress or Alibaba because we're just taking what the supply can give us and anyone can access it there are ways that you can make it a little bit more differentiated you can either work with the supplier to make some customization but a lot of the customization is either going to be in the product packaging or The Branding um which I'm going to show you exactly how to do with Zen drop the tool that we're going to use to actually deliver these products but I think that the other thing that you can differentiate which I don't think anyone has really talked about well is positioning as well so when we're selling a knee brace or something like that in a competitive market everyone is selling it for let's say marathon runners we're going to sell it for to old people and that's obviously not a great example because there's lots of people selling it for both but if we can do enough market research to find new ways to position these products that's going to be differentiated within the branding and it's going to be a really good form of protection with you and it's even like the product imagery is a form of differentiating against the common drop shipper that is just absolutely lazy and doesn't and uses a supply images next up we've got the size now when we launched the Udi one of the interesting things was drop shippers tried to launch the product but because our Fabrics so heavy and thick is that's why it was so popular uh drop shippers had to scale down the product in terms of thickness to actually make it feasible to ship internationally from China so they couldn't really drop ship our high quality product without charging the exact same price as us somewh when you just buy the original so size is a really good differentiator when possible in terms of building a brand but when it comes to drop shipping we need the product on the flip side we need a a smaller product um so we're not going to pick anything really really big in our research process because otherwise it's just not going to be economically feasible the freight is going to be too expensive compared to actually what we can sell the product for the next one is compliance now I want this to be a relatively simple experience for you guys initially I don't want you selling something that uh can harm someone so for example like a baby product there's a large amount of compliance that goes into this stuff and now the typical process is the supplier will give you certifications they'll use a testing agency like SGS or something like that this is the same as if it's electrical they should have all of the certifications and you should site them you should also Al get your products your own products with the custom branding the white labeling that we're going to do tested as well because if any if you start to scale that up any regulatory agency is going to want to see that now this is the thing you a lot of you people are just like oh well that none of that has made sense to me and that's fine like we just don't need to pick those products we can just pick something really really simple for you and this is the same with like counterfeit we're not going to pick a Pokémon product we know we need to pay the license there and we know that the the the longevity is not there and we're just going to get banned off Shopify we're going to get banned off Facebook so yeah don't uh pick compliant products is what I'm trying to say now the next one is a little bit exclusive to me I think and I think people uh don't really talk about it enough my three biggest product launchers when I launched them they weren't on AliExpress which is counterintuitive right it's like one I wasn't Drop Shipping them but it's like how did you even get the product and this is a really good indication of saturation like we were talking about before but the interesting thing is if you can find it on Alibaba and use Zen drop like we're talking about which I'm going to show you how to do you can actually get it dragged across to AliExpress and you kind of got this little Advantage uh as well so realistically a lot of these products are going to end up on AliExpress this is quite rare to find to be completely honest I'm not sure if we're going to be able to find it today but I will show you the process the next one is the product EG just has to work you can easily get a decent Drop Shipping business to $10 million Revenue per year with a garbage product but realistically one that's unethical you're taking advantage of your customers they're going to be annoyed two it's really going to be stressful because you're going to get a lot of chargebacks you're going to get banned from certain things and it's just not great third it's just not optimal if we're selling a product that works we're going to get viral coefficient so we're going to get Word of Mouth referrals the friends are going to tell the friends and it's just going to be so much easier we're going to get good reviews and people when studying our product they're going to purchase from us again so we really just want to make sure that whatever we're promising with our products it actually works so the next one is is it part of a really big Trend now one technique that I do here is I go into Google Trends and you can write in something like carnivore diet but often and often you want to just see it going up and to the right if it's tapering off for like a 6mon period that's still sometimes okay providing that it's been kind of parabolic before it but if it's kind of you know been one year growth and then one year slowly coming down or three years growth and then like one year coming down that's when I'm a little bit tentative to go into that space the other thing that you can do is on Google Trends you can search something that is like relatively consistent being searched uh against your Trend and you can see sometimes that that kind of levels it out I don't think the big trend Trend uh side of things is 100% necessary by the way because one it might just be about to pop you might be so early um nobody was searching weable blankets when I was launching udy nobody was searching weighted blankets when I was starting those the Google Trends was like flat and then it was like straight up and and got ahead of them so it doesn't need that much track record but the next point my final point is very very important especially if you don't have a huge amount of budget and you're just getting started everything that you do needs to be very achievable within your circle of competence and let me explain that there's a large amount of content that you're going to need to shoot you're going to need shoot the product imagery you're going to need to shoot Facebook ads you're going to need to write briefs about the creative side of things now as a really good marketer I feel like it could sell anything I could go into any product category I could do and I'm going to give you this research process which I don't think anyone's done very well about how to uh understand positioning how to do competitive research how to understand your avatar but it's that's a lot of work if you are already an expert in something like Fitness or you're already an expert in like chess can kind of skip that stage of like learning the customer and it's actually really much easier to Market because you're just marketing to yourself that's not 100% required again but one thing that definitely is you need to be ready to shoot content for this let's take if you're going to do rock climbing equipment or something like that an Innovative helmet for rock climbing you'd want to hope you can rock climb because otherwise you just going to have to pay other people to do it a lot of this process you're going to be shooting the ODS initially yourself and plus even the the rock climbing shoot even if you're paying someone else compared to someone that needs to you know put a collar on their dog it's going to be way more expensive and laborious for them and this is the same with like really beautifully interior photos this is why all of the wool print businesses that are Drop Shipping like prints have to use AI photos because it's really hard to properly style them now luckily they can use AI photos on Photoshop but if you're going to use something else like a rug it can't be photoshopped you just really need to think about the contents uh process here if you don't have access to like a girlfriend or a mom or something like that don't do a female based product especially in the early stages now if you're a little bit more experienced which I think a few people are and you've got a little bit of a budget to put behind this then chances are you can get away uh from that as well probably uh ignore what I just said there and you can just go for the best opportunity so I'm going to go quickly go through the frequently asked questions again just to make sure I covered everything so if you've got any of these questions you can message it in our Discord but we've got what is a good profit margin for a product you know we want at least 60% gross margin if possible how do I choose the right marketing channel for my product largely it's based on what you think that it's going to work on based out of the Facebook and the the organic but also what you think you're good at like if you're really good at operations if you're really kind of data driven then maybe Facebook is going to be the way to go but if you have already you know if you think you can make viral Tik toks and there's some indication of that maybe you've got a little bit of a social media following on your own page um or you've been studying it lots then maybe you want to pick that channel maybe if you're like 20 years ago if like if you started Ecom back then you maybe you're an SEO person so I would probably lean towards the skill set that I have but at the same time focusing on the the larger channels that I've mentioned so what does it mean to have a product to have a visual element it's basically something that can do patent interruptions or to create the desired outcome there is a visually interesting thing that creates anticipation that is relatively unique like think about colored board shorts to create the outcome you splash water on it and that creates a bit of like a a shock to the brain so why is it important for a product to solve a big issue it's important simply because you can communicate a big burning desire and therefore get people to take action quickly how do I determine a product if a product is saturated when over that Google it and look at how many sophisticated competitors are also the product the trend rocket that I'm about to show you will also allow you to search a lot of these competitors and see how many Facebook ads are running for that existing product which will be helpful um what should I consider when setting the average order value realistically the market is going to determine that as well as the cost of the product so that's going to be in the next step what are some examples of compliance issues that I should be aware of anything that's electrical anything that's selling to babies is definitely something that's going to need a lot of insurance and a lot of testing so now we know all of the theory we can get in and start using these tools and find some products and we're going to build a huge list of products so that we can start selling them