 We all know that dropshipping is really low barrier to entry. It doesn't require much money to get started. It doesn't require much time to get started. And it doesn't really require many skills to get started either. Because of this and the ever-growing communities and content online, dropshipping is getting more and more popular. Alongside this, the amount of advertisers on Facebook, the more savvy influencers are becoming on social media platforms, all of this adds up to growing ad costs as well as more and more people competing to sell the same product. One of the beauties with dropshipping is the fact that you can be anywhere in the world with an internet connection selling to any person in the world with an internet connection. The flip side of this means I can be sat here in the UK selling a product that somebody halfway around the world can also be selling the same product to the same audience on Facebook and therefore competing directly against me. So this begs the question, can a product be too saturated? Can a niche be too saturated? Or is dropshipping just too saturated overall? So when it comes to committing the resources to testing a product, especially for a beginner who might be starting on a low budget, it can be a really difficult decision to make. So to help make that decision easier for you, in this video, I'm gonna go over four questions that you can ask about any particular product which will then help decide how saturated it really is and ultimately how much potential there is behind that product as well. So with that being said, that's the topic of the video. Thank you for tuning in. Hope you guys enjoyed the video. Hope you learned something new and let's jump straight into it. So can a product be too saturated? Before we answer that then, we must ask ourselves four questions. Question number one is how evergreen is your market? Essentially what evergreen means is how many more people are coming into the market for your particular product? So to give you an example of this then, many people would consider the dog niche very saturated. Whilst it's true, there's a lot of people advertising within a dog niche. It's also very true that it's considered a very evergreen audience. And what this means is there's a lot of new customers coming into the audience, which can be captured. So if I just quote the ASPCA for a second, we can see that approximately 3.2 million shelter animals are adopted each year. This is in the US. 1.6 million dogs and 1.6 million cats. So what we can take away from this is that every single year, there's going to be approximately, if I had to guess, around 1 million new people, new dog owners that are going to need a dog lead, they're going to need a dog bed, they're going to need dog bowls, they're going to need dog food, they're going to need dog toys. All of those sorts of products that a lot of people would consider saturated. Yes, there may be a lot of people selling them, but there's going to be a lot of new people also coming into the market who will have seen them for the very first time and therefore more likely to make a purchase. Question number two you need to ask yourself is how big is your market? There's a few ways in which you can do this. Number one is your simple Google search will probably take you to a website like statistic.com. If we look at the number of people participating in golf in England from 2016 to 2020, we can see that in 2016, there was approximately 970,000 people. Over the course of the last four years, this number has stayed relatively the same with it slightly dropping in 2020. If I had to guess the reason behind this, I would put it down to COVID and the fact that here in the UK, golf course is closed during that year. Another method to gauge how big your audience is is you can use the Facebook ads audience insights tool. It's recently been revamped. Doesn't quite give you as much information as it used to, but it's definitely worth checking out. Hit the filter button in the top right hand corner. Make sure you've selected the potential audience tab and then we still have our interests box here. So depending on what niche you're in, just simply go ahead and put your niche in so we can go golf. From inputting the golf interest, we can see the potential audience size is 16 million people. If we want to narrow our results down to a specific country, so let's say we find a product on sell the trend or some other platform and see there's lots of potential for it. And let's say Portugal, which is a big tourist area, especially for English golfers, we can come across into here and put Portugal. The numbers have adjusted and we can see the potential audience size for golfers in Portugal is 1.5 million people. Another way to gauge just how many people are active and how popular your niche is is to use the Google ads keyword planner. You can come onto the site, get search volume and forecasts for different keywords. So again, I can put golf into here. I can hit the comma and find some other niches too. Let's put in dogs. Let's go for gadgets. And let's go for travel as well. Travel is going to be a really popular one in my opinion in the back end of 2021 and early 2022. Once you're putting your keywords, just go ahead and click get started. Google lists them one by one and it'll give you some great information that you can use not only to gauge the size of your audience, but also how competitive it is as well. Starting at the top, we can see the keyword for dogs is 100K to 1 million average monthly searches. This is across the entire Google platform in the UK. We can see that gadget has 10K to 100K. Golf has 100K to 1 million and travel has 100K to 1 million also. In terms of a reflection of how competitive they are, Google does indeed give us a ranking, but if we want a more specific answer that needs to draw your attention to this top of page bid, we can see exactly what sort of money we need to spend in order to compete for these search terms. Now, obviously if you want to get a bit more specific and actually find out if anybody is interested in your product or what the market competition is like for your product and instead of searching for your niche, you can put a particular product in. So let's go for dog water bowl. In the UK, dog water bowl has average monthly searches of 1K to 10K and the competition is quite high. Let's try something else and put travel pillow. For travel pillow in the UK, we can see 1K to 10K average monthly searches and the competition is high with a top of page bid of 16 pence. Another way in which I like to gauge just how popular a certain product or a certain niche is is the Google Trends tool. It's such a great tool, it's 100% free and the amount of information it gives you is really, really good. We can see here that I've put the search term dog toy in. Again, this will be across Google according to the parameters in which you set. In this case, I've set the United Kingdom 2004 to present. We can see currently the search time of dog toys currently at number 52, pretty much in the middle of the range with it spiking towards the kind of end of Q4, which makes sense. Dog toys make a great Christmas gift. If you're sat here now watching this video thinking of certain product ranges to sell coming into Q4, it's just around the corner. Then dog toys may be something for you to look at. Another great feature of Google Trends is if you have say a couple of different niches or a couple of different products in mind, we can compare them against each other. So let's say you're in the dog niche and you're considering a dog toy for Q4 or you wanna sell a dog collar. Google Trends pits them against each other. It gives you a trending chart to show just when they spike and when they dip in popularity and we can also see which one is more popular versus the other. So in this case, if we'll take August 2021, the information suggests that the term dog collar is a lot more popular, a lot more people searching for this over dog toy. Question number three you need to ask is how covered is your product? What I mean by this is how many other resellers can you find of your product? This one can sometimes be really difficult to really narrow down on, but one of my favorite methods is simply to go into Facebook, use the search method, put in your product followed by buy now, put in just your product's name, see what results come up. Use the filters on the left hand side. I typically go for videos because most people use videos for their ads and then we have a couple of different sorting options. We can go by most recent to see if there's anybody new coming into the market for this product and we can also go by date posted as well. When the results have loaded, basically what I'm trying to do is find as many people as possible that are selling the product in question. The products I'm actually considering testing. When I'm scrolling through the results, the most important thing I'm considering at this point is the amount of views. So as an example, let's take this plush dog bed. If you've been involved in drop shipping for more than two minutes, you've probably seen this all over the place. So at the top we can see 1.4 million views for this bed. Here we can see basically a million views for this bed. Here we see 200K views for this bed. Scrolling down we can see 150K views for this bed. We can keep going 50K, 50K, 40K. What this tells me is there's a lot of people selling this product because there's a lot of videos featuring this product but not only that is the product in terms of how covered it is or how many people have already kind of significantly sold this product which is indicated by the amount of views. This tells me that this product would be really difficult to break into the market into unless we can do something significantly and drastically different to separate ourselves from the competition. And this leads me into point number four. Can you do it better than everyone else? Doesn't matter what industry you take a look at, there's always gonna be some big names and big time players but that never stops a smaller, lesser known company from breaking into the market and also becoming a big time player. The way they do this is by out doing their competition by doing something better than them. So if we go back to this dog bed as an example and we're really convinced on this bed it speaks to us and we really want to commit to becoming a market leader for this product we need to do research into people who are selling this. We need to look at what content they're using. We need to look at what price they're selling it for. We need to look at the features of the product and then we need to out do them in as many ways as possible. Can we sell a softer, larger bed? Can we sell it in different colors or with patterns on? Can we get some form of a famous dog or influencer to feature the product? Can we get faster shipping? Can we offer better customer service? All of these things stack up to help convince the customer to buy it from us versus somebody else. Another great tool to use which many people don't know about is the Facebook ad library. It lets you not only search for specific products to see if you can find anybody advertising it but you can also find the ads for specific Facebook pages. So for instance, if you're using sell the trend and you go to the Shopify stores tab and you find some products which are selling really, really well. They get lots and lots of traffic each month. Just an example, we can take a look at lifehacker.com at the top of list which is estimated at 58 million views per month. Or we find a store like charging duck stations on the exchange marketplace which if we scroll down did over a million dollars in revenue selling this product. We can then find these guys on the Facebook ad library see exactly what Facebook ads they're running and again, this gives us great inspiration or great examples of ads that we can then replicate and it also helps us set a benchmark of what we need to improve on and how we can improve it. Finally, if you're still unsure whether to commit the resources to test in a product then the best thing you can always do is just test it. At the end of the day, you will never ever know whether a product is gonna be 100% a good one or a bad one until you go ahead and test it. To test a product, you don't have to commit too much money or too many resources or even too much time. My recommendation would be to start with one campaign, two ad sets, just one interest per ad set go for broad audiences anywhere from 1 million to 5 million. Take your time to invest in three different ad creatives you could perhaps order the products yourself and film some content. You could use an ad creator if you go on Fiverr you'll find loads of freelancers or you can just Google drop shipping ads to people like Viral, Ecom ads which can sometimes be good, can sometimes be bad. There's band of ads, there's in video ads there's loads of different services you can use or you can use my favorite method of actually sending the product to an influencer small-time influencer who will film you some user-generated content of them unboxing it of them talking about the features and more importantly actually using the product. In terms of budget, my recommendation would be two times the retail price. So if you're selling the products for let's say 50 pounds try and spend a minimum of 100 pounds per ad set actually testing the audience before you completely write it off. As a final note, do not skip corners when you're testing the product. If you don't run a good test it doesn't matter what the results are you won't be able to make an accurate judgment on a false test. Spend the money investing in a good ad buy the products yourself. Yes, it might put you back a couple of 100 extra pounds or a couple of weeks but if the product works out and it goes on to be a winner for you the payoff can be 10, 100, 1,000 X what that is. And with that being said, thanks for watching guys. I hope you enjoyed the video. If you did, please do me the favor a small favor of hitting that like button. If you wanna see more of my videos make sure you subscribe and one final quick note then before you go if you are looking for a program to take you from day one as a complete beginner from scratch all the way up to having a fully fledged and operational business on Shopify make sure you check out my eCom Academy there'll be a link in the description down below. Thanks again for watching I hope you really enjoyed it and I'll see you in the next one.