If you’re looking to open an online business, dropshipping is one of the simplest business models that you can choose. It allows you to sell and ship products with no inventory, which means you don’t need to worry about how to send a package to your customer.

Yet this model of business also comes with its drawbacks. Among these, picking the right profitable products to sell can be a real headache. How do you know that it will be a good product idea to sell?

Although some may say dropshipping model allows more trials and errors. In other words, if selling a certain product doesn’t work, you can easily switch to another product without worrying about the risk of overstocking. But the truth is, time is money. Every day that you let advertisements run that are not working, you lose money. And you also don’t want to sit around when your competitors already start profiting from their business.

So what is the solution?

TEST YOUR DROPSHIPPING PRODUCTS before you start your large-scale marketing.

Use E-mail Marketing to Test Your Product

Once you have a product chosen and placed on your website, it's time to test it out.

The first method you can use to test the product idea is email marketing. This is one of the most effective and least expensive methods out there.

Set up a newsletter and send it off to your subscribers. Then see what the CTR is and how many sales it generates.

Use Instagram to Test Your Products

The other alternative to testing the idea is social media platforms like Facebook or Instagram. Both platforms require different approaches. For testing products on Instagram, there are generally two ways. One is for free but requires more time, the other costs some money but you get more accurate statistics and also saves much more time.

1) Free way to test your business idea on Instagram

Create a ghost account or a series of accounts around your idea or product, see what versions people respond to, colors, ideas, and themes. Say if you want to dropship necklace. You could post pictures of different necklaces that you love that are similar to your concept, and see which ones get the highest amount of likes and questions on where to purchase.

In this way, you would be able to quickly test out some theories that you may have, without costing you anything actual money. But the drawback is that you need to spend a lot of time managing your Instagram account and posting different posts every day.

2) Use influencer posts to test your product

If you are willing to spend some money on testing your product idea, then the influencer post is a great idea. Here is how to do.

First, you need to find Instagram pages around your niche. You could select 1-3 pages that that fit within your budget. Make sure the engagement rate of these Instagram pages is good. Preferably above 3%.

After your influencer post has gone live, you'll want to look at how many visits you got and what they did on your product page. Here are some factors for you to keep track of:

· how many comments the post garners

· how many visits product page gets

· how many visits convert into sales

· how many people abandon the shopping cart

All that information can tell you so much and help you in your decision-making process with the product.

What’s even better is to have something like a Heatmap (Hotjar has a good free version) to see what your visitors do on your website. Analyze all that information and see if it’s worth testing on the second Instagram page.

Then at your second test, you can also try different variables like images, captions, and so on. It's worth it to do at least three different ads on Instagram so you can better learn whether it's the ad or the product that wasn't doing well.

Use Facebook Ads to Test Your Products

Facebook is another option to try testing your product on to see if it has potential.

1) Facebook video ad

Create a pre-launch campaign where you can test market interest for the product. In this case, a video Facebook Ad with the right target audience can allow you to create a group of persons who have shown interest to whom you can then market your product for sale. This can significantly reduce your cost per sale.

2) Page Post Engagement(PPE) ad

Another cost-effective way to test your product on Facebook is to create Page Post Engagement(PPE) ad for that product. PPE ad is designed to focus on delivering new leads and purchases. It tells Facebook that you want your ad shown to people who are most likely to engage with it. This means likes, shares, post comments, and so on.

To run this type of ad structure, you need to create an Engagement campaign.

What you do now is create 3-10 ad sets in that PPE campaign. But if your budget is tight, keep it lower, around 3-5 ad-sets.

If you set your budget at $5 per day, you’ll likely get around 1000 impressions on each ad set. Now it’s time to analyze your ad sets.

First, look to see if there are many link clicks and how much your CPC (Cost per Link Click) is.

Then look if you have some Add To Cart’s, Purchases, and so on. This is a great indicator of if the audience of that ad-set is loving your product or not because these people are usually only liking, commenting, and visiting your store.

They usually do not go through the whole checkout process. That’s why your CPM is so cheap (Cost per 1000 Impressions).

Also, don’t forget to look at the comments that you got. Look at how positive they are. Do you have comments like: “I need this (Tagged Person)!” Or more like: “Why would anyone need this?”

The more positive the comments are, the larger market potential the product has.

Conclusion

Using E-mail or social media platforms to test your dropshipping products could tell you which product has a larger potential market and is worth devoting your time and money to market it.

It takes hard work before you get to your goals, but you will get there if you don’t give up and believe in yourself!