We all know how crucial it is to start your online business by choosing a winning product, right? Well, doing so guarantees you better chances of achieving business success in the e-commerce realm.
Unfortunately, product research processes are often too demanding that many dropshipping store owners settle for non-winning products. However, the increase in demand for more efficient ways to spy on profitable products has led to the rise of incredible product spy tools like Dropship Spy over the years.
Now that you’re here, I’m guessing that you’re already aware of Dropship Spy, or interested in knowing more about the best Shopify spy tools to use when searching for hot selling products. Whichever the case, this Dropship Spy review includes a thorough examination of the software, careful analysis of its features, our honest opinions about it, and a step-by-step tutorial on how you can use it to spy on winning products.
>>> Related post: 15+ Product Research Tools: An Ultimate List
Outline
- What Is Dropship Spy?
- An Overview of Dropship Spy Tool
- Dropship Spy Pros and Cons
- Dropship Spy Pricing
- How To Spy Winning Shopify Products With Dropship Spy
- Final Thought - Is Dropship Spy Worth It?
First, let’s begin by defining Dropship Spy.
I. What Is Dropship Spy?
Dropship Spy is a product research tool for dropshipping businesses. It primarily scans various social media platforms and other significant e-commerce databases like Ali Express to curate a list of high-demand products and pieces them together with more practical details to help dropshipping stores make profits.
Check out our Profit Margin Calculator to determine your product's price.
II. An Overview of Dropship Spy Tool
Finding the right product usually plays a considerable part in ensuring that your Shopify business is booming. The only problem is that the process of finding winning products requires plenty of time and effort – something we all seem to be lacking, right?
To help ease your product research process, Dropship Spy provides a set of excellent tools and features to help you spy on promising products and those that are already winning in minutes. The fact that it also doubles up as a product marketing tool makes it more appealing.
Like any other database, you’ll first need to log in using the credentials that you provided during sign-up for you to access the app’s dashboard.
The first thing that I love about Dropship Spy is that it has a highly interactive and easy-to-use user interface. It’s straightforward, and anyone can easily navigate through the app without any help.
For ease of use, all the features and tools you’ll need for your product research process are listed clearly on the navigation column, with each tab opening to a specific page that’s also well laid out.
Here’s an overview of what to expect:
1. The App Store
As the first navigation feature on the dashboard, Dropship Spy’s App Store is a typical software distribution point for different valuable apps. Think of it as the marketplace for all the handy computer applications that you’ll need in establishing a successful dropshipping store.
Luckily, all the apps are free to install, and they generally include:
- Shopify Connect
- Instagram Influencers
- Traffic Search
- Ali Shopper
- Reviews Downloader
- Description Fetcher
- Profit Calculator
All of these apps support active integration to your Shopify stores, and all you have to do is first click on the blue “Add” button to activate them. All installed apps can then be accessed from the “Installed Apps” navigation tab.
Here’s an inside look at each of the apps:
0.1. Shopify Connect
As the name suggests, Shopify Connect generally offers e-commerce store owners a one-click integration solution for both databases. In simple terms, this feature allows you to connect your Shopify store to your Dropship Spy account easily. The beauty of this spy tool is that you’re allowed to connect multiple Shopify stores to a single membership account.
You’ll have to first install the app from the App Store by clicking on the “Add” button to get started.
Once installed, you’ll now have to navigate to the “Installed Apps” tab to access the app.
To get started, you’ll need to click on the blue “Add Store” button, fill in the blank space with your Shopify site domain, and hit the purple “Connect” button.
Note: Your Shopify site domain should be in this format – example.shopify.com
This action will now take you to your Shopify admin panel, notifying you that you’re about to install Dropship Spy Connect. Simply scroll down and click on the “Install unlisted app” button to complete the integration.
Once done, the respective Shopify store will now be listed as one of your connected stores, and you can easily remove it by clicking on the three-dotted function on the extreme right of its tab. Use the three-dotted function on the outer top aligned with the page title Connected Stores to add your other Shopify shops too.
The best thing about this feature is that it makes it easy for users to import winning products and other essential product details directly to their stores from Dropship Spy’s interface. We’ll take you through using Dropship Spy to find your winning product later on in the article.
0.2. Instagram Influencers
Withover a billion active users per month, many veteran eCommerce merchants will agree with me that Instagram is one of the best social media platforms to consider using in your marketing strategy. However, successful Instagram marketing requires technical know-how, which most online business owners usually don’t have when starting.
Fortunately, Dropship Spy’s Instagram Influencers feature cuts to the chase and compensates for the marketing learning curve by providing you with a complete marketing option for your convenience. This feature mainly provides a detailed list of carefully vetted Instagram influencers for practically any niche out there.
Like any other app, you’ll first have to install the Instagram Influencers app to access the Influencer Categories page. This type of categorization makes it easy to filter according to niche, so click on your target niche to reveal the list of approved influencers.
With the list at your disposal, you can now personally vet them to find the best influencer to help promote your niche product on Instagram. Simply click on any influencers to access all the statistics you’ll need to screen for suitability.
This type of information mainly includes performance records with details about their Instagram account, working rates, previous works (including video samples), bio links, and engagement data.
0.3. Traffic Search
As the name suggests, the Traffic Search feature enables you to spy on your competition. After adding it to your list of installed apps, this feature opens to a page where you’ll be required to fill in your competitor’s website URL then scan to see their traffic data.
Some of the primary traffic data that this competitor spy tool provides includes monthly traffic, traffic sources, bounce rates, pages per visit, overall traffic shares, and average visit duration.
With such information at your fingertips, it’s generally easy for you to understand your competitor’s online performance, evaluate existing business opportunities, and identify thriving traffic sources to target.
0.4. Ali Shopper
To make it more versatile, Dropship Spy features a fully functional spy tool that quickly searches through the AliExpress products database and allows for quick imports directly to your dropshipping store in a click. This product research and spying tool is called Ali Shopper, and it’s readily available for installation from the App Store.
Once installed, you’ll only have to insert the name of a specific product that you have in mind then hit the “Search” button. If you don’t have one in mind, consider inserting the name of your target niche and let the app do its magic.
The search result page will then open, and it should contain a variety of product options.
You can easily access more product details and analytics for an in-depth analysis by clicking the individual item. This will give you a lot of product and seller information, including overall ratings, stock details, and total orders. Once you’re satisfied that you want to include it in your shop, simply click on the blue “Connect Store To Import,” and you’ll be ready to go.
0.5. Reviews Downloader
Positive product reviews are a silent goldmine in the eCommerce realm. Their power is boosting conversion, especially when new buyers need to determine if the purchase is worthwhile. However, copying and pasting actual reviews for your winning products is both hectic and time-consuming. That’s where Dropship Spy’s Reviews Downloader comes in handy.
To conveniently download product reviews for your winning products, you’ll have to fill in the search box with the exact ID or URL for the preferred AliExpress product, then hit the “Fetch reviews” button.
This will fetch all of its reviews ready for both downloading and uploading to the Shopify reviews app.
Note: Before you download, ensure that the product name in your store is the same as the one labeled in AliExpress.
0.6. Description Fetcher
Product description refers to the copy details of any product featured on an eCommerce site. This copy helps a lot in attracting organic traffic and boosting conversions when done right. But, drafting the best manuscript requires in-depth copywriting skills, time, and lots of effort.
Dropship Spy additionally scans the internet for the best copy for your product by using the Description Fetcher to make your work easier. This app is readily available from their app store, and you only need to provide it with the correct product title to fetch top-performing descriptions for your product.
Using our pet example, here are examples of some quality product descriptions for “winter pet clothes”.
0.7. Profit Calculator
Considered one of Dropship Spy’s key utility features, the Profit Calculator mainly helps online merchants determine the profitability of their chosen products.
2. Products
The second navigation feature, the Products tab, mainly provides Shopify store owners with a fully detailed and cleanly laid out search database for online products. At the top of the page, users can easily use the search function to look for specific products on the internet.
With over 5,000 available products, it’ll be difficult for you to quickly find the best performing products to include in your Shopify stores. For that reason, Dropship Spy features a long list of filter options that you can use to refine your search and find a winning product quickly.
You can easily filter your search result by product category, niche, advert type, keyword indicator, sales trend data, profit margins, advert source, engagement ratings, average likes per day, or average comments per day.
Once your search result is ready, you can first choose to get a quick view to see whether its core metrics are appealing. Just like I did for the dog raincoat example below:
For more details, simply click on the product to get a full view of its details, statistics, and performance analytics. What I love most about this option is that it gives you exclusive access to sales trends data, info about supplying stores, sample ad templates, target audiences, and quick links to relevant influencer categories, as well as one for fast imports.
3. Monthly Best
As you would expect, this navigation feature on Dropship Spy opens to a page with up to 4-months of best-performing products. These monthly product overviews are primarily grouped into four main sections, including top-performing products, most favorited products, most imported products, and most viewed products.
What happens is that Dropship Spy generally gets this data by computing the average social media engagement rates for each section. Clicking on any of the highlighted products will display product information to help you gauge its suitability when looking for good choices.
4. Favorites
This feature comes in handy when building an extensive list of dropshipping products for your store. Like you would expect, clicking on the heart-shaped icon on any product you like automatically lists it under this navigation tab for quick access later on after you’re done with product sorting.
5. Import List
Similar to the Favorite feature, the Import List tab opens to your list of ready to import items that you might have built during your product research. You can quickly add a product to the Import List by clicking on the “insert-like” icon on top of the product image.
Note: You’ll need to connect your Shopify store to your active Dropship Spy membership account to start importing.
6. Tools
Dropship Spy currently features the following product research tools:
- Engagement Calculator
- Audience Builder
Here’s a sneak-peek of the Dropship Spy tools:
0.1. Engagement Calculator
All products on the Dropship Spy database have an engagement rating usually computed from its overall performance across Facebook, Instagram, and Tik Tok.
As you can already tell, the engagement calculator provides you with an efficient means for assessing if a product is generally doing well on social media or even if it’s already going viral. Having such information makes it usually easy for online retailers to choose top-performing products and build effective social media campaigns for promotions.
To calculate an engagement score for a product, you have to provide the tool with ad-specific data for likes, comments, shares, and ad date depending on the social media platform where you advertised.
0.2. Audience Builder
Celebrated as Dropship Spy’s main unique feature, the Audience Builder tool is particularly significant if it’s your first time trying to build a Facebook ad campaign for your products. The reason why I’m saying this it’s because this tool practically gives ready suggestions for more than 60 categorized niches.
This kind of targeted suggestion makes it much easier for new Shopify store owners to start creating distinct FB audiences. Furthermore, each selection is further divided into subcategories making it even easier to target specific audiences.
The good thing is that no matter what your target niche is, you’ll be able to find a quick live example to use in your Facebook marketing strategy.
III. Dropship Spy Pros and Cons
Pros
- Good for spying on profitable products on AliExpress
- Spies on effective Facebook ads to help you make targeted campaigns
- The Facebook Audience Builder is suitable for shaping your Facebook marketing strategy
- Features Instagram influencer database
- Allows for Shopify store integration
- Good for sourcing promotional resources for your winning products
- Its user interface is both interactive and straightforward
- Excellent tool for complete newbies to dropshipping business
- Offers world-class customer service
- Has affordable pricing
Cons
- No free membership
- Most of its products are only good for dropshipping
- Doesn’t offer refunds
- Add five new winning products daily. With a lot of subscriber, this feature could potentially increase the chances of market saturation for just a few winning products
IV. Dropship Spy Pricing
Dropship Spy’s current pricing model primarily spreads out its Pro plan, aiming to fit nearly everyone’s budget. The available pricing plans (at the time of writing this review) includes:
- Pro/month - $39
- Pro – Special Offer/month - $19
- Pro Yearly - $200
Despite not having a free subscription plan, I still believe that Dropship Spy’s pricing model is affordable. Pro currently costs $39 per month, Pro – Special Offer costs $19 per month, and Pro Yearly costs $200 per month.
Given that all of the existing plans offer complete access to Dropship Spy features, you can easily save up to $260 a year with Pro Yearly. In my opinion, this is the only option that seems to offer the best value for your money at the moment.
It’s also worth noting that you can easily cancel your subscription anytime you want.
V. How To Spy Winning Shopify Products With Dropship Spy
Assuming that you’re now more familiar with the different Dropship Spy features and can easily connect them with your Shopify store, you must be eager to learn how to spy on the hottest Shopify products. But before we get to the step-by-step tutorial, you must know the difference between promising and winning products in Dropship Spy.
Well, winning products widely refers to those items that are currently prevailing in terms of profits. In contrast, promising products are those that have great potential of becoming winning products in the future.
As promised, here’s how to spy on winning products using Dropship Spy:
Step 1: Navigate to Products and click on the Winning option under the Product Category
Step 2: Refine your search by filtering the results with your target niche
If your target niche isn’t included in the niche list under the Filter Results column, consider typing it in on the search bar and click “Enter,” just like we did in this example for “pets.” The good thing is that each search result has a general overview of winning metrics to help you identify the best-performing ones for your online store.
Note: Depending on your target niche market, searching for more specific terms enables the product spy tool to narrow the search to your liking.
Step 3: Start spying on the winning products
Once your search results are ready, you can start spying on the different winning products of interest by clicking on them. This will give you access to a full range of heavily detailed marketing and performance titbits, a set of valuable features like the one for quick imports, and handy tools such as the profit calculator.
My favorite part is the sales trend chart that gives a general overview of how the product performs over time. Of course, the winning social proof ads allow you to snoop on the most engaging social media ad for the product.
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VI. Final Thought - Is Dropship Spy Worth It?
Overall, I can firmly attest that Dropship Spy is an excellent product spy tool for dropshipping beginners who don’t know much about social media marketing but are eager to start strong. Paying for the service is entirely worthwhile, as you’ll be able to keep track of winning products as they emerge constantly.
However, adding five new products per day raises concern for possible market saturation – depending on how many subscribers will pounce on similar opportunities. To ensure that you start your business off on the right footing, consider building and optimizing your online store for more sales with PageFly.
In general, Dropship Spy provides you a blend of convenience, affordability, and efficiency when hunting for the following hottest selling product to include in your Shopify store. And we hope that this Dropship Spy review will not only help you find the hottest selling products but also enable your online business to upscale.
