 Hello everybody! Today we have a super interesting interview with Raj, the co-founder of Sell the Trend, a product and a software that helps people to find hot selling products for their Shopify and do commerce stores using data that they have about the products. It will be super interesting and I'm super excited about it. Hey Raj, how are you today? I'm doing great, great Lira. Thanks for inviting me. Cool. So today we'll be focused on how to find winning products for dropshipping to Shopify and everything that we can find more interesting here for beginners and other dropshippers who won't find the top products. So first, can you tell us a little bit about yourself? Sure. So I am the founder of Sell the Trend and we started Sell the Trend about two years ago really with one purpose in mind really to provide an alternative way to find winning products for for dropshipping and you know the way that we kind of approach it is something that we didn't really find in the marketplace at the time which is doing it really the data way as opposed to the hand-picking way or doing it in ways that just didn't really make sense. So our focus has always been on providing something that is really database and a cut above you know some of the other tools. Okay, so your main focus is really like you check the products by the performance of the products? Yeah, yeah so we have a lot of factors that we check products on and not only are we judging products we're also judging the stores that the products live on, right? So we have a bunch of factors that we look at each product and since we've been really looking at products for the last two years we also have a history of what makes a winning product a winning product. So not only are we judging them by you know the details of the particular product but also we're judging them by the history of similar products and how they performed over the years, right? So yeah we're definitely a database when it comes to winning products. And how did it come into this idea of creating the products? It was really from really looking at what was available at the time when we started. So 2019 when we first started the options were two options either you have tools that are just providing one or two products a day or two or three products a day handpicked tool, a handpicked product or the products that were doing it through data and looking at what's happening up there online but the two top tools at the time we didn't really find it really supplied everything that it drops for me. For example the two or three products handpicked ones the problem is could be there might be showing products that maybe are not even in your niche. You know the two or three products today might be one is a docked item and one is two beauty items but you're really in the camping niche or you know the travel niche so those products are not going to be useful for you. And then the other tools really were providing a very vague product recommendation so they would recommend like a dress or something and then you're like why does this even like show me the data why this dress is really a winning product and there was no data or the data was very lacking or it was just a couple of numbers that didn't make any sense. So looking at what was happening at the time we realized that there was a need really for something that is a bit different and pretty much all the people that you know all our members really that's really what they appreciate about seller trend is being able to really pinpoint exactly how and why these products are winning products. Okay and how can I ask how many products do you have in database? We have millions we have millions you can see it on the you can see it on the on the home page there's like a number tracker it shows you how many products I think there's five or six million right now in our database and we're always adding like we're literally adding daily thousands of products daily right so. What do you scan like you scan an express or you scan other we're doing a lot of different we're scanning a lot of different sources so not only Aliexpress Shopify we're also scanning Amazon and we're always adding additional platforms to scan so we want it and that's really one of the things that we always wanted to do there's a lot of tools at the time that were just scanning Aliexpress right so I mean you can do that yourself you can just go to Aliexpress you know maybe you know look up a few things but what we wanted to do is we wanted to create something that is scanning multiple sources and then seeing what's popular across multiple sources so it's not just popular on Aliexpress or on Amazon it's also popular on Shopify it's also popular on big Shopify stores or is it popular just on you know brand new Shopify stores what's the date of the Shopify store that created and we scale that we rank all those as different things okay and you check the same product or it's already checking niche we're checking across we're checking niches and we're checking you know different products and we have like a if you go on sell the trend there's a there's a niche drop down of about 80 or so niches that you can if you're looking if you're interested in one particular niche you can just zero in on those products right so so we have a lot of filtering options because again since there's a lot of data there we wanted to give people obviously the ability to kind of slice up that data a little bit and it's not just a bunch of product random products a lot of products that ran you don't even know where to start uh so yeah so there are there are tools within within the app to uh to zero in on exactly what you're interested in oh that's super cool and interesting and also it's unique it's very different from the other tools yeah that's that's really i mean that that really is is our motto is we want to create something there's no point i mean anybody can create you know you can go go look at something copy it and create something similar right good bad or indifferent the problems you're never gonna be as good as the thing that you copy that's why we wanted to make sure we're not copying where you know we're we're we're getting the best ideas from a lot of different places and putting them into our own unique vision of exactly how to find the best winning products using data okay i may ask what are the criteria for a winning product for you so so we just literally put out a video a couple days ago it's on our blog right now and um we this this really we wanted to wanted to put out this video to kind of give people an idea of uh you know how to judge a winning product not just from a theoretical perspective like you know when you look at a product right now and this is this is really came from a um it came from a feedback from our customers so basically they looked at and some we get messages from customers saying you have tons of products here how do i know where to start how do i know you know why should i pick this product compared to this product what is so different about this product from that product so we put out this this this new uh a blog and video really that's also uh a spot of our website that really takes you from a theoretical perspective of how to find a winning product but also then applies it to looking at the data and sell the trend and how the the theoretical applies to the actual data so for example uh you know what is the what is a winning product right what makes a winning product a winning product well there's there's definitely things that are common between all winning products most winning products have like you know you've probably heard this term before they have a wow factor right they have something about them that makes them stand out on on our facebook feed you know tiktok feed whatever you look at something you're like wow that's cool right so that is you know huge criteria and how do we then extrapolate that criteria to data right you can because you can't look at a picture and say a thing so you extrapolate it by data you say hey if there's a lot of excitement about this product through orders through stores ads and all that kind of stuff that shows you that there's excitement about this product in this day train in the last month two months one week or whatever it is so then we go through this entire video we go through all the different things like pricing for example you know you can have a winning product that's great but the price is uh to to sell can only be ten dollars because it's a very small thing so can you really make money on sourcing a product for a dollar selling it for ten you would think yes i can definitely make money i'm going to make nine dollars but the reality is you need to factor other costs there is shipping costs potentially there is advertising costs promotion costs so we also go through the video and break down what is a good cost factor and and profit margin that you need to really look at and some of the some of the things that you can do to kind of counteract some of these profit margin limitations right so we have like you know so we've added that recently that that goes through the entire way of not of how we judge winning products before like before you publish any product do you check it somehow on your stores or something like that or so we have so yeah it's so we have literally millions of products and thousands of products are coming in every day so we are not physically i mean that's why we we rely on the data we're not physically checking every single product putting it in our store doing ads for it and promoting and all that kind of stuff it's impossible right for the amount of products that we're showing people but again the data speaks for itself right is the is the product selling right we have sales chart is the product selling did it's did it make a sale yesterday did it make a sale a month ago two months ago how many sales did it make we also have how many how many people are excited about this how many people are adding it so we use the data to to vet the product so to speak as opposed to running an ad campaign ourselves for the particular product just for the fact that we have way too many products right it's impossible to do that yeah i agree it's very impossible to check everything but yeah and that will help maybe with the facebook ads or so yeah so we have uh in our uh nexus store so the nexus for us is really our kind of like our hub um of of our hub where we put all the the wedding products in uh the ones that have been connected through all the different uh streams like aliexpress Shopify and all that stuff it goes all sits in the nexus right and in the nexus a product research page if you click on that button for each product you'll get a lot of the data about it you know what are the top countries that are selling this product what are the sales of this product what stores are adding this product you see the stores that are adding the product how many stores are adding all that kind of stuff and we also have facebook uh targeting recommendations for these products right so we have uh you know for each product you'll have different targeting options like are we you know you can target by these facebook interests including some things like who are some popular um who are some popular names in in the space for example if it's a dog product who are some popular dog breeders uh that have big facebook pages and then you can obviously target those interests right so if i'm somebody's interested in dog products you might be interested in that breeder because they're a popular celebrity breeder then you can target those interests so we have all these interests for these products so you can literally copy and paste them into your advertising campaigns so we don't create the advertising campaigns for you we don't have a connection to your ad account but you can we have obviously some we have a we have an entire drop shipping course included with any kind of subscription so you can come in even you can even use it in the trial so you don't it's available our trials are fully fully open all the features there's no limitations at all so technically you can do a seven-day trial go in there just take the drop shipping course right and the drop shipping course takes you through the entire flow of the business from the theory in the beginning as well as setting up your Shopify store step by step as well as adding your first winning product fulfilling a product so going through the the automation of fulfilling a product goes through the whole entire thing of how to run a campaign on instagram how to run a campaign on facebook uh so you can literally use those interests in your first campaign that we show you how to set up so we don't actually have an automated method for that uh but we have the the tutorials and and the course for that as well included so you're all happy even with the education of the options sorry so what was the question so you help also with the education of the new draw absolutely absolutely not only do we have courses obviously like any business you have we have our facebook group so uh you know we have moderators there that are that are helping with questions as well as our community that also have a lot of our members and other people that that help in the group besides tutorials for every single feature we have our youtube page as well we're always adding new features and we have descriptions of all these features an education of how to use a feature in a real drop shipping situation so every single time we add a you know a sizable feature we will have this video about it and then how do you really what's the purpose of this feature and how to use it in a real drop shipping situation for example you know let's say we add a new something to modify variations so not only do we describe what the feature does but also you know when you're adding a variation what kind of price should we use for this variation for this product how to make sure that you're making profits for this variation when you're adding a product or variation so so yeah we always have a lot of education as well for for everybody so it's insane because you can really help people to succeed using the tool and knowledge absolutely like like our literally our motto is you know your success is our success right our member success is our success like any business and I'm sure you know this yourself if you don't have successful customers and successful members you will never have a successful business because nobody is going to want to stay so that's why we do everything that we can we have not only do we have you know live chat and email support and group and we're always open to answer questions whether they're you know support questions general administration questions or if they have technical questions I don't know how to use this how do I do this how come my Shopify store is not doing something then we have over solutions or existing blog articles or FAQs to help them nice okay so you said that you have a millions of products and you almost said that you also help with the Facebook audiences don't have the audiences for all of the products or like it's something that you do manually and you just know so so we have yeah sure we have audiences for the majority of the products so if you know for the majority of the products the millions of products we have audiences but if somebody wants something specific that we don't have an audience for we have an audience builder tool that's included so in this tool you can go in there you can write in some keywords about this whatever it is let's say you know funny dog collar whatever the keyword is or diamond collar right and then with this tool we can suggest some audiences for you that you can test that and if there's something specific that you really need you can always send us a message and we've added specific audiences for some top audiences that we were missing you know let's say back in the day maybe we were missing fishing audiences or something like that and then somebody suggested it hey you know I'm I'm big in the fishing nation you guys don't have any audiences for any of these fishing tools that's something that we can definitely add so we're always adding to our audience list the same way we're adding to our niche list what about different suppliers like you said that you support product research from some different suppliers and do you also offer do you also show the exact product from the supplier from any express or amazon absolutely absolutely yes yeah so not only do we show the product so you can obviously you know but also you can add your own suppliers let's say you go on aliexpress and you find it something that you know different a better price than what we show in our system you did more research you can find a better price you can definitely add that supplier into our system and it'll be available for you to to use available for you to fulfill orders with so yeah absolutely or you can you can add your own suppliers and we're also adding additional suppliers besides aliexpress soon to really open up available suppliers available to to our members would you consider your tool as a tool for Shopify only or can it work for eBay users for example also so so right now the only two integrations that we supply with that we support in terms of product export to an income tool would be Shopify and WooCommerce right so you can use it for Shopify you can use it for WooCommerce there's no any kind of eBay or Amazon integrations right now so we're focusing on Shopify and WooCommerce and we still have you know there's still a lot of a lot of room there to go into providing new features and new support for those two platforms we're always adding new platforms like if somebody comes up to us says oh we know a lot of people start asking us about like you know big commerce or something like that another tool you know that's the kind of like the Shopify and WooCommerce thing that's something that you know we can think about adding but again it all depends on the amount of effort that you want to put in to support you know the members right so we don't want to kind of spread us off to to fan and start adding some additional platforms when we can still you know add a lot more features to the existing platforms that we have but we're always looking and if there's enough demand from people say hey there's you know a lot of demand for big commerce or something like that from a lot of our members because they have extra extra platforms because we have members that actually have Shopify and WooCommerce stores they have both both types of stores right so if there's a lot of demand we're absolutely thinking of adding it for sure okay and what is the average product price that you would recommend to beginners to start with and with which product with which profit margins sure so uh the cost could be anything really I mean all the office depends on your budget right so so we're going to a lot of suppliers you can find really good products for for for a cheap cost right so you can find a product for $3 that you can then sell for $20 right so the cost is not the key as like you mentioned the real the real the real factor that you want to think about is the profit margin right so you want to think that you have enough profit margin there to turn a profit so our recommendation would be make sure that you have at least of a $15 profit margin uh for for products right so you know you can buy it for five but then you have to sell it for 20 or you can sell it for a bit cheaper you can buy it for five sell it for 15 so that's only a $10 profit margin but then we recommend either adding shipping on top of that so another $5 of shipping so you can bring it into that kind of safer zone of profit margins or you can do things like doing cross sells and upsells to increase your average auto value right so let's say you're selling a dog a dog bone let's say like or like a dog collar for example then make sure that your upsells you have an associated dog bed that you're also selling or a dog toy make sure that you have other related products or if you're selling for example a dog collar make sure that you're picking products that you can sell in multiples so you know you're not only one dog collar make sure that you have the option to sell two dog collars for a bit less more money or three dog collars for you know so that way and and we've seen it obviously from from from research and from data and from obviously drop shippers is that a lot of people want presented with that option a lot of buyers when they're presented with that option especially if the product cost is low you're not selling something for $50 if you're selling something for $10 you'll have no problem you know buying two for $15 for example so so there are things that you can do to mitigate you know lower profit margin product and some of those things are obviously mentioned in the video that we just put out on our blog so yeah so that's our our recommendations around the $15 range is a pretty safe range for profit margin on products yeah and another thing that I would recommend is also to do something like bundling that you can take absolutely absolutely that's something we're definitely looking into it because that's something we can do on our side right the bundling can be not on on the on the platform side as well so so you plan to add a feature that helps people to create bundles absolutely absolutely that's something definitely in our roadmap we don't have it right now but that's something definitely in our roadmap because it makes sense right for certain products it makes sense to bundle them and make them more viable for sure nice okay so thank you for the valuable information about the technical things I would like to ask you some more other questions sure about general about dropshipping what do you think that will be the future of the dropshipping in terms of Shopify dropshipping so dropshipping has been around for years right dropshipping has been around for years and it is an exciting business model for a lot of people it's exciting business model for a lot of people that do not have the budget to you know buy inventory and stock inventory and dropshipping really is at the core of the entrepreneurial spirit right it's it's the ability to own your own business to be really a trader really you're buying and you're selling right and that's really a core a very core business model that's been around for years so I think the key for dropshipping's health moving forward is providing a lot more options in terms of suppliers and shipping options and different warehousing and you know that to me is going to be and I think that will is is happening every day more suppliers coming to the marketplace more businesses start offering better shipping options and the reason it is is because the e-commerce industry as a whole forget dropshipping just e-commerce is is only expanding at an exponential rate because of not only what happened this year with the pandemic and some of these other things but also people's desire for convenience so the people have are always looking for more convenient ways to to do things right so that to me is is really you're talking about a business model that's been around for years that is only being supported by people's natural desires which is convenience finding things that they like and I think the people that are going to do the best are the people that are looking at dropshipping as a real business and not as a quick money making operation right so like any business you give it time and effort it will be good for you and the only our jobs I guess the same thing with out of the yes our jobs is to provide people the tools that simplify this for them in every single way whether it's picking products whether it's managing automation education all those things so I mean I believe the future is bright for dropshipping but again it's a business and anybody that goes in there and goes hey you know I need to make a quick buck today dropshipping is not for you it's like any business it's just not for you right so yeah I totally agree that there are people who sell dreams to people about blockchain but maybe it's the easiest business in the world in terms of the budget that you need to spend in the beginning yeah and the time it takes to learn to understand to understand the business but I agree that it's basically it's a real business and people need to understand it and work like they work in a real business absolutely absolutely but again it's it's it's such a base it's such a base business model of you know buying and selling really it's it's at the heart of e-commerce so to speak right so yeah so it's like any other business model you know it's always gonna have its own life provided you treat it as a real business okay and one last question that I like to ask in the as the last question of the interviews is what would be the one thing that you would recommend to a beginner dropshipper for a successful way the dropshipping niche so so I'll give you a couple one is you gotta have you gotta have a faith and persistence in any business venture you have to have faith and persistence you have to have faith that uh you know it can work because it has worked because it does work for other people right and then you have to take that faith that you can make it happen and then you can you have to marry it with persistence you have to be persistent you have to realize that you know the world is not against you the world wants you to succeed it's just you have to realize this with the faith part and then find everything that you need to succeed so whether it means education whether it means uh you know uh find tools for example uh whatever it is you have to realize that you know you need those two things in order to succeed in any business and now for dropshippers the the recommendation is is what we talked about earlier if you look at this as a real business then I'll give you an example then the question of what you are spending on certain things becomes irrelevant I'll give you an example so you know if you look at any business where you plan to make you know a hundred thousand dollars a year let's say what are you willing to spend to make that business happen are you willing to spend a dollar a day to make that business happen thirty dollars a month are you willing to spend fifty dollars a month a hundred dollars a month a thousand dollars a month so a lot you have to make sure that you are investing not only your time but you have to also invest money and that's I think the biggest problem that a lot of people when they look at dropshippers like we were talking about they're thinking well I can have fifty dollars in my pocket and I can make it successful right and it would be extremely difficult you have to have a little bit of budget to work with and you have to learn and you have to have faith and you have to have persistence well thank you for the great interview rush it was super interesting and I'm sure that it will give people a lot of value and they hope that people will really check products using data and thanks for being here today so thank you Lior for having me and a big hello to all of your viewers