The Highly Guarded “Weapon” That The Top 1% Of Dropshippers Use To Obliterate Their Competitors

It’s no secret that what separates the 1% dropshippers from the rest of the 99% is the number of products they test each week. To put simply, it’s a numbers game. The more products you’re able to test, the higher the chance of finding multiple winning products that you’re able to scale your e-commerce business.

This is how the top 1% are consistently hitting 6-7 figure months – by finding and scaling multiple winning products consistently week in week out. This is also the reason why the top 1% of dropshippers focus on building massive Product Research Teams to constantly churn out products to test.

In some cases, in contrast to most dropshippers who are only testing 5-10 products a week, they test up to 20-30 products a day! This is because when you have more product researchers, you test more products a day. When you test more products a day, you scale more winning products faster.

Now, while the idea of scaling your Product Research Team may sound simple, but after working with and talking to many high 6-7 figure/month dropshippers, I noticed that they usually face two HUGE Challenges when they scale up their product research team. 

If you want to hit those sexy 6-7 figure/month revenue, make sure to watch out for these 2 deadly challenges as you scale up your team, because when you combine these two problems together — you have a recipe for disaster.

These are two of the main reasons why most dropshippers either fail to scale to 7 figure months or scale to 7 figure months while SACRIFICING their profit margins. 

Also, later in this post, I will also share with you an optimized product research system — a secret weapon that many of the top 1% of dropshippers are using for rapid scaling.

2 Huge Challenges 6-7 Figure/Month Dropshippers Experience

Product Duplication and Drop In Product Research Quality

Challenge #1: Product Duplication

As you add more product researchers to your team, one challenge you will start to experience is Product Duplication. Meaning, the product research team would constantly find products that another team member has already found.

The reason why this happens is that as your product research team grows, the chances of them finding the same products over and over again gets a lot higher (especially if your product research process revolves around AdSpy).

So even though your team may have 30 new products to test each day, and even if it looks pretty good on excel sheets, the truth is that out of the 30 products, only 20 of them are UNIQUE products and the other 10 of them are actually the same or duplications of each other.

While this may sound like a small issue, the implication can be HUGE because the opportunity cost for these duplications can be very high. Like how it was mentioned earlier, it’s all about the numbers game.

Any time not spent researching new unique products is time and opportunity lost. 10 duplicated products a day means 50 duplicated products a week. Having 50 duplicated products a week means you’re missing out on the chance to test 50 additional unique products — which could have greatly increased your chance of finding multiple winners every week.

Product duplication is one thing you want to avoid at all costs as you scale up your research team. If you’re not tracking it yet, it would be useful to see how many product duplications your team has on a weekly basis. 

Try This Instead: Separate your product research team by niches and sub-niches.

Here’s one of the simple but effective solutions that we implement for our clients to reduce the overlapping and waste of effort while maximizing the chance of finding winning products.

For example, one of them could be doing Beauty products, another doing Gadgets, another doing Pets, another Outdoors, and so on. As you continue to scale up your team, you can also break it into more sub-niches, with each researcher going more in-depth into each sub-niche.

This way the team members will be clearer and more in-depth on what they should look out for. With lesser people looking for the same category (especially when they use the spy tool AdSpy to find products), there’s a lesser chance of overlapping products. 

Furthermore, if the product researchers are specialized in a specific niche, they are more likely to recognize what are the common traits of the winning products for that niche and increase the chance of finding winning products in that niche in the future.

As simple as this sounds, this is one of the effective strategies we use to help our clients to scale up both the number and quality of product tests a day.

Challenge #2: Drop in Product Research Quality

Whenever our agency onboards new clients, one of the first systems we always implement is to have a fixed set of Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs, for the team.

The KPIs can be as simple as testing 30 new products a day. From there we can break it down further (e.g. research 30 products a day, create 3-5 video creatives per products a day), then we set KPI for each team member on a daily/weekly/monthly basis.

As you know, what gets measured gets managed. From there we can optimize and improve further. Oftentimes, just by implementing the right KPIs and Scorecard Metrics for our clients, they would see at least a 2 to 3x increase in efficiency and output (e.g. from 3 products a day to 9 products a day. One of our clients is even producing 27 high-quality video creatives each day using the system we created).

Now, the idea of having KPIs for your business and team is quite straightforward and simple. Most dropshippers tend to already have some kind of KPIs that they are tracking. It’s nothing new.

Here’s a shocking truth: just having KPIs by itself without a proper system can actually lead to lower performance and revenue!

Here’s why: Many dropshippers like to wear the number of products they test each week like a badge of honor, which can be a good thing because more product tests tend to lead to more winning products. However, in order to hit those numbers, what actually tends to happen is they intentionally reduce their criteria when researching for products.

Here’s what I mean: Top dropshippers know that in order for them to have a higher chance of finding a winning product, they’ll have to follow strict product research criteria. Oftentimes, in order for a product to be added into their “list of products to launch”, the product has to first fulfill over five criteria. This ensures that every single product on the list is of the highest quality and has the highest chance of becoming winning products. 

Still, as they try to scale up the number of product tests each day to hit certain KPI, many of them start to find that they are unable to consistently hit those KPIs at high quality — whether it’s because of duplication, or inefficiency, or ineffectiveness of the system.

So what they end up doing is this: A lot of them start to lower the number of criteria on the checklist just so that their team can hit those KPIs.

For example, instead of 5 criteria, they might lower it to 4, or just 3. Even though this makes finding products and hitting the daily quota much easier, it will drastically affect the quality of the products added to the list. So on “paper”, even though they have like 20-30 product tests a day, most of them are low quality.

This does not only significantly lowers their chances of finding a winning product, but also often results in burning cash to test these low-quality products and reduce the overall profits.

So, how do we create a system to test more products a day while still maintaining high quality? 

Try This Instead: Use a Scorecard Metric to measure both the Quantity and Quality of their product research. Get your product research team to upload all of the products that they’ve found onto just ONE centralized sheet to keep things clearer.

When our client first came to us, he had his team upload their products in multiple google sheets and platforms. This meant that the product researchers had to constantly refer back to several different google sheets to see if the product has been added previously. Because of the extra steps, his team wasn’t able to test more than 3 products a day.

Here’s what we did to 4x the number of products they test: We created a customized system for his team by streamlining his entire product research process.

One of the effective things we did was to integrate a google form TOGETHER with the google sheet. We then got his product research team to upload the products into the google form which then automatically adds the product into the google sheet. A product research team leader will then vet through the google sheet and remove any products that are duplicated.

This will prevent the product researcher to constantly refer back to the google sheets, and focus on finding as many products as they can.

We also created a Scorecard Metric that shows the product researchers how many unique products they have found each day (after removing the duplicates). So that they know how many more products they need to search for at any time. 

At the end of the week or month, this Scorecard Metric will also show how many of their products they found turn out to be a winner. This way, we can track both the quantity and quality of each product researcher.

If they are not hitting their numbers, then we improve on the process and system to make it more efficient. If the quality is not good enough, then either we review their process, their skills, or find a replacement if they are not suitable. That way, everything is tracked, measured, and continuously optimized.

Using this customized system we built, our client was able to scale his product research team and went from testing 3 products a day to up to 12 products a day EVEN when they had to follow his extremely strict 5 step product research criteria. 

This allowed him to find winning products consistently and he is now on his way to crushing 7 figure months.

Hope you find these two strategies useful! 

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Did you find this post useful? 

In Atomatic Agency, we’ve developed a lot of strategies and systems to help dropshippers to remove bottlenecks while improving the efficiency and output of their team.

These allow them to scale much faster while spending less time working in the business. 

As we like to say, “Marketing Allows Your Business to Scale, But Operations Is What Enables It.”

We work with 6 figure/month clients and scale their business up to 7-8 figures/month. Our clients are able to achieve consistent revenue and turn their business into a consistent cash cow with less effort and in a short-time period.

If you’re a 6 figure/month dropshipper that is serious about automating your business and scaling consistently, click on the button below to schedule a call with us.