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How to Find Products to Sell on Shopify

Published on September 25, 2023by Botster

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Did you know that over 2.6m American owned online stores are hosted on Shopify? In fact, it is home to popular brands like Kylie Cosmetics and Fashion Nova. However, one question every Shopify seller has answered at one point is “What are the best products to sell on Shopify?”

You see, creating a Shopify store is easy, compared to figuring out what to sell on it. It’s a different ball game if you run a brand with proprietary products, but if you’re into retail and dropshipping, finding products you can sell on Shopify for quick success is a must.

The typical market research for finding winning products to sell online will have you checking forums, attending trade shows, and all those boring, time-consuming activities that may in the end not lead to anything worthwhile. If you’re looking to expand your offering on your Shopify store, you have absolutely no reason to wait till the next trade show before you do that. And that is why today’s guide is dedicated to finding products to sell on Shopify.

Here’s what you should expect from the next few minutes you'll be spending with me:

How to find winning products to sell on Shopify
How to extract product information from any Shopify store in bulk
Automation software that can help you decide which products to sell on your Shopify store

Whether you’re new to selling online or you already own a Shopify store, the methods and processes I will show you in this guide can help you identify what product to sell on Shopify and also scale your business faster.

To make this guide easier to follow, I’ll act as an imaginary e-commerce retailer that has a streetwear fashion store. I’d like to expand my offerings, but I don’t know hot products to sell on Shopify that can bring fast sales.

I’ll now use automation software to find best-selling products through a process I carefully developed. You can replicate the steps for your niche, and I believe they would work regardless.

But quickly before we get to the fun part, what is Shopify?

Shopify is an e-commerce platform that provides businesses with the tools and services they need to create and manage their online stores. It supplies everything, including domain, hosting, shopping cart, payment processing, inventory management, and more.

The very first thing in finding the best product to sell on Shopify is that you must know your competitor’s website address (URL) and their website must be hosted on Shopify.

How do you know if a website is hosted on Shopify? Follow these simple steps:

Go to https://builtwith.com.
On the homepage, input the name of the website and click on “Lookup”:

On the result, stay in the “Technology Profile” tab and scroll down till you find the “eCommerce” subheading:

Right there, you’ll find whatever eCommerce platform that website is hosted on:

Now that we’ve sorted that, let’s find popular items to sell on Shopify!

Finding the best Shopify products to sell

How to check best selling products on Shopify: Qualitative analysis

First, I would like to introduce to you the Shopify Product Scraper, an automation tool that can scrape products that sell well on Shopify and their descriptions from any e-commerce store that is built on Shopify. It will also extract the list into a spreadsheet for offline analysis in Excel.

This is the first line of action in this process, and you’ll typically need to input your competitors’ URLs to fetch their data.

To gain access to the Shopify Product Scraper and start extracting the best-selling Shopify products, you must first create a free account on Botster:

Registration is totally free, and your credit card details are not even required.

Upon completing your registration, you’ll gain access to a plethora of other automation tools as well.

Once you’ve confirmed your email address, proceed with the steps below to extract trending products to sell on Shopify:

Open the Shopify Product Scraper homepage by clicking on "Start Bot":

Give your job a unique name and specify a project folder if you wish.

I named my job “Top selling product on Shopify 1”:

Set the maximum number of products you want the software to extract for you:

Now, enter the URL of the Shopify store you want to extract data from.

Typically, this should be a competing store in the same niche as you:

Set your notification options and how you’d like to receive the file:

Finally, click on “ Start this bot” and voila! You’re done. Easy peasy.

The “My Jobs” page will launch automatically and you can see the bot working to fetch the data you requested.

Video guide

If you’d rather follow a video of me using this automation tool to fetch the top products to sell on Shopify, here’s a video I made earlier solely for that purpose:

Results

In less than a minute, the software will compile your results and you’ll see something like this:

From here, you can choose to view the data immediately or run again after some weeks to get updated results. You can also click on CSV, XLS, or JSON to download the file in that particular format.

If you choose to view the file in Excel, it’ll look like this:

Tips

I strongly suggest extracting your competitor’s products because it provides you with insights into market demand, customer preferences, pricing strategies, and potential gaps in the market.
In the fresh data we got just now, there’s a column titled “Product URL”. Use those URLs to track their prices as described below.
Remove duplicate URLs by selecting the “Product URL” column, navigate to “Data” on the navbar, and click on “Remove Duplicates”
If you also sell on Amazon, my guide on how to scrape Amazon products is an excellent resource you should read through.

How to see top selling products on Shopify: Quantitative analysis

Next up we have the Shopify Product Quantity Monitor, an automation software that can monitor the quantity changes of individual items.

Unlike the previous one, however, the Shopify Product Quantity Monitor can help you monitor how much of a particular product is left in stock day in day out. This way, you can tell how fast that product is being purchased, which tells you that it is a top selling product on Shopify.

Here’s how to setup the Shopify Product Quantity Monitor:

Launch the software’s start page and name your job like I described earlier.
Next, paste the product URLs you want to monitor from the last result, making sure there are no duplicates.

Each product URL must go on a new line:

Next, set up your time and scheduling preferences.

I’d recommend that you set this to “daily”, but if you’d rather not get daily notifications, twice a week is great:

Next, specify if you’d like the project to keep running or terminate at a set date:

Finally, set up notifications, click on “Start this bot”, and that’s it! You’re done.

Now you can bask in the evening sun instead of monitoring your competitors’ inventory changes by yourself ☀️

Results

The Shopify Product Quantity Monitor is an automation tool that runs based on schedules, so its project board would look like this:

You can click on “Stop” to end the project or “Run Now” to put it into action immediately and have the results sent to your email address:

That’s the second step to finding top selling items on Shopify.

Tips

Use this automation tool to scrape your competitors’ products and determine their best products selling on Shopify.
Typically, the quantity of sold products reflects how popular that product is and how well it sells. The higher the “sold” value - the more advisable it is to offer that product in your Shopify store.
Also, the quantity of stocked products hints at how eager your competitor is to have it on offer. It could be that it sells really, and the seller doesn’t want to run out of stock pretty fast. The higher the “stocked” quantity - the more advisable it is to sell that product in your Shopify store.

How to find good products to sell on Shopify: Inventory analysis

Have you ever wondered which products your competitors sell the most? I mean, what is that one product that goes out of stock, is re-added after a few days, then goes out of stock and is added again, on and on like that.

Most stores have a Shopify best selling products collection that only they are aware of.

With the help of the Shopify Product Inventory Tracker, you can identify such highest selling products on Shopify and offer them on your store as well.

Here’s how to automate the tracking:

Launch the Shopify Product Inventory Tracker’s start page and name your job.

I’d name this one “BeeInspired most selling products on Shopify”, after another streetwear store.

Next, enter the website address of the competitor you want to spy on (we’re secret service now 😎).

Now set up your time and scheduling options to track and identify the most selling product on Shopify like we did for the Shopify Product Quantity Monitor.
Click on “Start this bot”, and yes! You’re done already.

Now you’re privy to your competitor’s inventory. If you notice that a particular product sells fast, it’s probably one of the best items to sell on Shopify.

Depending on your scheduling, the software will run automatically and send a Shopify top selling products report for that store to your email.

Tips

As with the last automation tool, I recommend you use this tool to track your competitors’ inventory to see what sells the most in their stores.
One can assume that “newly added products” are the ones that your competitors expect will sell well, so you might want to keep your eyes on them by monitoring their quantity changes as described using the last tool.
Usually, items under “products removed from the store” probably didn’t sell well, and you might want to ignore those.
Use the Shopify API to get even more insights into a store's product inventory. I'm demonstrating how to use the API in this short video:

What are the best selling items on Shopify: Pricing analysis

Whether you’re trying to find best selling products on a Shopify store or not, it’s always a good idea to track your competitor prices. There are many benefits to this. You can set competitive prices on products and you’ll also be aware when an item’s price goes up and down.

To conduct a pricing analysis of the most selling items on Shopify, set up the automation tool called the Shopify Product Price Monitor. Its name speaks for itself.

Note that you must have the URL for the item you want to set up tracking for.

Launch the Shopify Product Price Monitor’s start page and name your job.
Next, input the URL for that product:

Next, set up the condition for notification:

Set up the time and scheduling for this project:

Finally, set your notification preferences and launch the bot into action.

Like the last 3 top selling Shopify products checkers we’ve used in this guide, this tool will run based on your schedule and send you an email if there has been a price change in the product you wish to monitor.

Video guide

If you’re keen on watching me use this bot to monitor Shopify best selling products URL, here’s a video I made for it:

Tips

You can track your competitors’ prices as it helps you select the best products to sell by identifying profitable niches, setting competitive prices, and optimizing your cost structure to maximize profits.
If there are products on a particular store that you want to buy in bulk at the lowest price possible and then resell them in your Shopify store at a higher price, this tool does an excellent job of monitoring it on your behalf.
If you’re interested in tracking the prices of Amazon merchants as well, my guide on Amazon product price tracking did justice to that.

And that concludes this guide on how to find the right product to sell on Shopify.

One of the oldest recommendations in business is that you sell a product that already has an established market, and that’s the point of using the strategies I described above to find what products to sell on Shopify and set up yourself for success.

How much does it cost to find the best Shopify items to sell?

Seeing as the strategy I just taught you above involves four automation tools, you’re probably wondering how much they will cost.

First, I should mention that you can find a best selling product on Shopify manually if you put your heart and time into it.

The downside is that you won’t be able to scale your business faster. These tools, however, cost too little to worry about.

Check this out:

As of 2023, extracting product information using the Shopify Product Scraper costs between $0.15 (for 10 products) and $12.90 (for up to 65k products) per run.
Using the Shopify Product Quantity Monitor to see the quantity changes of items costs $0.25 (for 10 products) per run. That’s a meager $2.50 for 100 products.
Leveraging the Shopify Product Inventory Tracker to spy on your competitors costs a flat fee of $0.45 per run.
Tracking product prices using the Shopify Product Price Monitor costs approximately $0.02 per run.

As you can see, it is well possible to invest as little as $1 on using these bots and you’ll in turn earn $1,000s from your store by selling the best-selling Shopify products you find with their help.

To up your game even further on Shopify automation, check my guide on the best Shopify automation apps. You’ll gain access to each of these apps if you sign up for a free Botster account today!