New Post
2 July 2025
How to Validate a Winning Product Before Investing
Created: 12 December 2024
How well you succeed in dropshipping depends on your ability to find and validate winning products. But finding a winning product is never a walk in the park. The best dropshipping products are never found by a hunch or by guesswork, but by a well-thought-out product validation process.
Product validation gives you a chance to set up a successful dropshipping business by first figuring out if there is a market fit for your product before diving in. That way, you get to conserve your limited resources and avoid wasting your time pushing out products no one is interested in buying.
In this post, we will explore what product validation is all about, why it’s important for every dropshipping store, and how to go about it. So be sure to read to the end so as not to miss anything.
Key Takeaways
- What is a winning product
- What is product validation
- Understanding the product validation process
- Tools and methods for validating a winning product idea
- Best practices for validating a winning product idea
What is a Winning Product?
Before we dive into exploring what product validation is about, it makes sense to take a detour and look at what makes for a winning product.
Put simply, winning dropshipping products are products that are in demand and give shoppers good value for their money. The characteristics of a winning product are as follows:
- Solves a Problem or Pain Point: People are more likely to buy products that address real needs or frustrations.
- Unique or Has a Competitive Edge: A product that stands out from competitors or offers something better has a higher chance of success.
- Impulse-Buy Friendly: Products that trigger emotional buying decisions work well in dropshipping, especially with ads.
- High Perceived Value: You want products that allow for good profit margins.
- Trending or Evergreen: A trending product can ride a wave of demand, while evergreen products provide consistent long-term sales.
Building a profitable dropshipping business depends largely on your ability to find products that meet these criteria. This is where product validation comes into play.
Pro tip: Find winning product ideas in a cinch with Sell The Trend’s AI-powered product research tool.
What is Product Validation?
As we hinted earlier, finding profitable dropshipping products hardly ever happens by luck, but by some serious market research and testing – or simply product validation.
Product validation is the process of testing and verifying whether a product idea has market demand and can generate sales before fully investing in it. It’s about gathering evidence to figure out if people are willing to buy the product you want to sell – and for the price you have in mind.
Why would you want to invest time and effort into validating a product before pushing it out into the market? For starters, it helps you avoid early failure in business. Research has shown that 35% of businesses fail in their early stages due to a lack of market demand. In other words, these businesses failed because they failed to properly validate their product idea.
Other reasons why product validation is crucial for finding best-selling dropshipping products are discussed below.
7 Reasons Why Product Validation Is So Important
1. Saves You Time and Money
Without validation, you’re essentially gambling with your resources, and it’s just a matter of time before your dropshipping business crumbles.
- Time: You’ll waste hours setting up product pages, running ads, and handling logistics for a product that doesn’t sell.
- Money: Ad budgets, supplier costs, and even software subscriptions can add up quickly if the product fails.
Instead of investing blindly, validation helps you test demand with low-cost methods like small ad campaigns or pre-orders.
2. Reduces Business Risks
Although getting into dropshipping is easy, it comes with some risks, and the top on the list is launching untested products. Testing dropshipping products to sell gives you a chance to spot the following early on:
- Market Saturation: Just because a product is trending doesn’t mean there’s room for more sellers.
- Low Demand: A product that “seems cool” may not solve a problem or appeal to enough customers.
- Supplier Availability: Even if a product has good demand and moderate competition, you also need to find out if there is sufficient supplier availability. Doing so increases the odds of success for your dropshipping store.
3. Helps You Identify Winning Dropshipping Products Faster
Another reason to employ validation is that it allows you to identify profitable dropshipping products much faster, making it easy to boost sales in a shorter timeframe.
It does this by enabling you to spot products with strong demand and high profitability and also eliminate underperforming products swiftly.
4. Allows Data-Driven Decisions
Keeping a tab on market trends allows you to stay agile and flexible, which are the two important traits you need to succeed as a dropshipper. Plus, it lets you spot profitable dropshipping niches early on before they get saturated. Needless to say, you can only follow market trends when you have access to reliable data.
This is also where product validation comes in helpful. Take the global car accessories market for instance. Although it’s a huge market, data from Google Trends shows it’s been on a steady decline in the last two years or so.
From this data, it’s safe to say that car accessories shouldn’t be on your list of dropshipping products to sell in 2025.
5. Improves Ad Campaign Performance
Running ads for unvalidated products can burn your budget quickly. In the same vein, running ads with low profit margins is the fastest way to incur heavy losses, and this can potentially grind your business to a halt.
- When a product has proven demand, your ads are more likely to convert.
- High engagement (clicks, comments, shares) from test ads is a strong indicator that your product resonates with your audience.
Product validation ensures your ad spend is targeted and effective, leading to better returns on investment (ROI).
6. Builds Confidence and Reduces Stress
Starting a dropshipping business can feel overwhelming, especially when every product choice feels like a gamble. Product validation provides clarity and confidence. Why so?
- You’ll know you’re launching something people want.
- You’ll avoid second-guessing every decision.
7. Makes it Easy to Find High-Profit Dropshipping Products
Another reason why validating products is important is that it lets you know if a product is a potential profit spinner or a dud.
Understanding The Product Validation Process
Having a deep understanding of the product validation process makes it very easy to find high-profit dropshipping products. That being said, here’s what the stages of a typical validation process look like:
Stage 1: Product Ideation
More often than not, the product validation process starts with ideation. At this stage, you brainstorm on potentially profitable dropshipping products ideas. Inspiration can come from different sources, including:
- Hobby and passion: Many great product ideas in history came from the hobbies and passions of people. So there’s absolutely nothing wrong with having a hunch for a product idea – only ensure you validate it before diving in.
- Trending Products: Check trending items on social media, Amazon, or AliExpress.
- Niche Opportunities: Focus on products with a targeted audience but low competition.
- Asking around: As weird as it may sound, asking around for product suggestions can open the door to a profitable niche you can explore.
Stage 2: Identifying Consumer Demand
In 1957, the Ford Motor Company released a car it believed would revolutionize the US car market and reestablish itself as a market leader.
Called the Ford Edsel (after the son of the company’s founder), this car was purely a product of a “hunch” idea. Without any sort of validation, the company blindly poured over $250 million into developing the product. Needless to say, the car failed badly. In fact, the failure was so grand that the company had to take the product off the market 2 short years later.
To date, the failure of the Ford Edsel serves as a major lesson of how not to allow “hunch” take the place of proper market research.
If you don’t want to tell a similar story, be sure to properly research a dropshipping niche – regardless of how attractive it looks – before jumping in to find out if there is a sizable consumer demand for it.
Stage 3: Study Your Target Audience
Dropshipping products sell well when you can understand who your ideal customers are. For example, if you are looking to explore the baby products market, your target customers would be new parents, particularly mothers. If it’s the pet supplies niche that you are after, millennial and Gen-Z pet owners are the perfect set of people to target with your ads.
While it’s easy to figure out the target audience for certain dropshipping niches, others require intense research.
Some tried-and-true strategies for studying your target audience include checking an established competitor’s customer base and doing surveys.
Stage 4: Analyze Profitability
Even if a product has demand and a solid customer base, it must be profitable. Here’s how to ensure strong margins:
- Calculate Your Costs
- Product Cost: Supplier price on platforms like AliExpress.
- Shipping Costs: Affordable options like ePacket or free shipping.
- Advertising Costs: Estimate your ad budget to acquire customers.
- Determine Selling Price
– Benchmark prices from competitors or similar products
– Profit margins of 20% to 30% are ideal options.
Stage 5: Verifying Product Quality and
Although optional, you might also want to very product quality before finally launching your dropshipping store. This is particularly true if you intend to sell to tech-savvy consumers.
Bonus Stage: Find a Reliable Dropshipping Supplier
Whether you are looking to dropship health supplements, educational toys, gadgets, etc., it’s important to find a reliable dropshipping supplier that not only sells affordable products but also high-quality stuff.
Stage 6: Put it All Together
The final step of product validation is to put together all you’ve found, refine your initial product idea if necessary, and launch.
Tools and Methods for Validating Winning Products
Now that you have a fair idea of what product validation is all about and the stages that make it up, it’s about time we showed you tools and methods to use for this purpose. Let’s dive straight right in!
1. Validate Your Ideas on Sell The Trend
Sell The Trend is a dropshipping platform and a product research tool that not only helps you find winning products quickly but also enables you to validate dropshipping product ideas. It does this by providing you with key sales data about a product or niche, including average order volume, selling price, potential profit margin, and product rating. With data at your fingertips, you can easily tell if a product is worth dropshipping in the first place.
Let’s say you want to get into the pet supplies market. Your preliminary research says the global pet care market was worth over $300 billion and is poised to hit $500 billion by 2030. Unfortunately, these data don’t say if pet care is one of the profitable dropshipping niches to explore in 2025, nor does it point out how much you can make in profits.
To remedy this situation, simply launch Sell The Trend’s product explorer tool and plug in the search term “pet”.
Doing so will bring up a list of pet supply products together with their sales data, which should give a good idea of the viability of what product you have in mind. Plus, you can also find high-quality products you probably never thought of on the platform.
2. Use Google Trends to Analyze Demand
Google Trends is a powerful tool to analyze product demand over time. It helps you determine whether interest in a product is rising, stable, or declining.
How to Use It:
- Go to Google Trends.
- Enter product keywords (e.g., “portable blender”).
- Look for upward or stable trends over the past 6-12 months.
- Focus on products with growing or consistent demand.
By way of illustration, let’s say you want to dropship baby products but are not sure if there is a solid market demand for them. Pull up Google Trends, put in “baby products” (you can be more specific if you want), and set the time frame to 12 months. You should see something like this:
As you can see, the demand for baby products has been fairly stable in the past 12 months. You can also use this tactic to check other dropshipping niches like office supplies, pet products, etc.
When put to good use, Google Trends can help you find winning dropshipping products.
3. Run Low-Budget Test Ads
Running test ads is one of the most effective ways to validate products. By running test ads on platforms like Facebook, TikTok and even Google, you can get a good idea of how consumers will respond when you eventually launch fully.
To set up a test ad, simply:
- Create a simple product video or image ad.
- Set a small budget ($20–$50).
- Target your ideal audience based on age, interests, and behaviors.
- Measure results like clicks, engagement (likes, comments, shares), and purchases.
What metrics should you keep an eye out for when running these ads?
- High engagement (positive comments, shares).
- Strong click-through rates (CTR).
- Early purchases—this confirms real demand.
If you need help setting up these test ads, consider using Sell The Trend’s ad video creator tool.
Even better, you can use the video ads explorer tool to find inspiration.
Pro tip: Create winning ad videos with Sell The Trends video creator
4. Monitor Social Media Trends
Another way to find the best dropshipping niches and validate product ideas is to constantly monitor social media trends. Platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Pinterest allow you to gauge product interest quickly.
Here are creative ways to leverage social media to find products that are in high demand and explore thriving markets.
- Search for hashtags or keywords related to your product (e.g., #portableblender).
- Look for viral videos, posts, or pins featuring the product.
- Check engagement: high likes, comments, and shares mean strong interest.
Bonus Tip: Post the product on your own accounts or partner with micro-influencers to get feedback.
5. Check Out Market Competition
Spying on competing online stores is another way to identify winning products and also get a good idea of consumer preferences. Naturally, you will want to check their top-selling products, the strategies they use to attract customers, and possibly the dropshipping supplier they work with.
While studying your competitors, here are important things to look out for:
- Products with high order volume.
- Positive reviews and ratings.
- Competitors consistently run ads for the product (indicating success).
6. Customer Feedback and Reviews
Looking at customer feedback and reviews can also help you discover winning products while validating the ones you have in mind.
The way this works is simple. First, head to any popular e-commerce platform with a high sales volume. Amazon, Aliexpress, CJ Dropshipping, and even any popular Shopify store are all good choices. Search for the product you are thinking of selling and check the review section to see what customers are saying about it.
If there are sufficient reviews and overall positive reviews about the product, it’s a good sign it will likely perform well when put to the market.
7. Pre-Sell the Product
Pre-selling is a low-risk strategy to test demand before you invest in inventory or ads. For example, if you tinkering with the thoughts of selling office products, phone accessories, or even pet accessories, try preselling them to see how customers would respond.
How to Pre-Sell:
- Add the product to your online store as a pre-order option.
- Set a clear shipping date (e.g., “Ships in 3-4 weeks”).
- Promote the product through email marketing, organic social media, or small ads.
8. Collaborate With Influencers
Collaborating with influencers with large a following on social media, or even the upcoming ones that are showing signs of significant growth can also work. Doing so is useful for validating product ideas and properly gauging changing consumer preferences.
For this technique to work:
- Find micro-influencers (10K–50K followers) in your niche.
- Send them the product for free and ask for a review or shout-out.
- Track audience engagement (likes, comments, and DMs).
Best Practices for Validating a Winning Product
Here are important tips to keep in mind when validating winning products to ensure you get the most out of your efforts.
1. Stick With Data, Not Emotions
Emotions are a fleeting thing and are never to be relied upon when picking dropshipping products to invest in – data should always take precedence.
In other words, no matter how excited or passionate you are about a product, do your due diligence to check for key data, such as consumer trends, emerging trends, availability of repeat customers, etc. before jumping right into it.
2. Test Demand Before Scaling
Never go all-in on a product before confirming demand. Sometimes, what looks like high-demand products are actually a passing fad. Only by testing will you know if it’s worth your time or not.
Some creative ways to test market demand before scaling include:
- Run Small Ads: Launch Facebook, TikTok, or Instagram ads with a small budget ($20–$50) to see how the audience responds.
- Pre-Orders: List the product on your store with a pre-order option to gauge purchase interest.
- Influencer Testing: Collaborate with micro-influencers and track their audience’s response.
3. Always Keep an Eye Out for Changing Trends
A product can trend today only to fade away the very next moment. Take for example diet sodas: in the early 2000s, they were a huge thing but it’s become a story of steady decline, and there are no signs of respite yet.
Whether you are looking to dropship essential oils, home improvement products, fitness equipment, etc., always monitor market trends to know when to adapt.
4. Verify Profit Margins and Supplier Availability Early
A product might have strong demand, but if your profit margins are too thin, it won’t sustain your business. In the same vein, if you are unable to find reliable suppliers for a product, you will struggle to grow your dropshipping business.
Thankfully, dropshipping tools like Sell The Trend make finding reliable suppliers a breeze.
5. Collect Customer Feedback Early
Getting feedback before fully launching your product helps identify issues and opportunities for improvement.
To do so:
- Offer the product to a small group of customers at a discounted price.
- Send samples to micro-influencers and ask for honest feedback.
- Run surveys or polls to understand customer preferences.
Conclusion
We can’t overemphasize the importance of validating a product idea before going all out to invest your time and effort into pushing it to the market.
Unfortunately, we’ve seen lots of dropshippers get swayed by excitement or what we like to call “gut instinct” when picking niche products to sell. The result is always the same: huge disappointment and wasted resources.
Validating product ideas not only saves you the troubles of wasted time and effort but also gives you a competitive edge. On top of that, it helps you spot profitable products that consumers won’t mind spending their last dime to buy. Either way, it’s a win-win for you.
FAQ
1. How would you validate the successful implementation of a product?
To validate any product idea, first check for key metrics such as consumer trends, market demand, profit potential, average order value, etc. These metrics give you insights into the product’s market viability.
After that, run test ads and ask for feedback on social media to further validate the product.
2. What is the first arguably the best way to validate the marketability of your product?
The smartest way to validate a product idea is to test it in the real market with minimal investment.
- Run Small Ads – Use Facebook or TikTok ads to measure interest and engagement.
- Collect Feedback – Share the idea with your target audience through surveys or social media.
- Pre-Sell the Product – Offer pre-orders to confirm real demand before full launch.
- Analyze Competitors – Study successful products and market trends for insights.
3. How do you verify a product?
The surest way to verify a product is to see what consumers are saying about it online. Checking for online reviews, running surveys, and asking around can all help.
4. How to validate a product or service’s marketability?
To validate a product’s marketability:
- Test Demand – Run small ads or pre-sell to gauge interest.
- Gather Feedback – Survey your target audience for insights.
- Analyze Competitors – Study similar products and their success.
- Track Engagement – Look for clicks, inquiries, and pre-orders.
