8 Best Ways To Spy On Dropshipping Stores in 2024 (Competitor Research)
Looking for the best ways to spy on dropshipping stores?
You may be interested in discovering what your competition is up to, drawing inspiration from them, or finding out about their top-selling products.
Regardless of your reasons, there are numerous methods to spy on stores!
The best ways to spy on dropshipping stores: An overview
Here is an overview of all the different ways to spy on dropshipping stores:
Why do you need to spy on dropshipping stores?
Spying on your competitor’s dropshipping stores can help you identify the things that are working for them.
For example, you could identify their best-selling products, social media pages, and active ads!
8 Ways to spy on dropshipping stores in 2024
Next, let’s move into the best ways to spy on dropshipping stores!
A few of these methods require you to use money, but most of them are entirely free methods.
1. Spy tools
If you don’t know what spy tools are, they’re essentially paid tools that give you useful information about other dropshippers, such as their best-selling products, store traffic, and overall revenue.
The most common types of spy tools are Shopify spy tools and Facebook spy tools.
Here are examples of some of the spying tools we recommend:
- Sell The Trend. The available ‘Store Intelligence’ feature lets you analyze other dropshippers and their stores. (Check out our review here)
- Meta Ad Library. While it’s not specifically built to spy on dropshipping stores, it can be used for that purpose.
- Anstrex. This tool primarily focuses on product research and can help you find some of the best-selling products in Shopify stores.
- Ali Hunter. Ali Hunter helps you find the best-selling products of other dropshippers and gives you insights into how many sales they’re making.
- BigSpy. BigSpy is focused on ad spying, and it collects and stores 500,000 new ads every day from different platforms.
Depending on your own needs, you can select one of the above tools or multiple of them.
2. Use Google text search
You may not be familiar with it from before, but you can actually use Google to spy on other dropshipping stores.
The best part is there are no costs involved.
This technique works best when you’re in the market research phase. At this stage, you’re not sure what product you want to sell yet.
Let’s look at an example. Let’s say you’re looking for product ideas in the pet niche. This is what you need to do.
1. Find a common keyword or product that many stores in your niche will likely have on their website. For our example, we will use ‘pet beds’. You want to use a single-word keyword or a maximum of two words to get as broad results as possible.
2. Create a query for Google.
- Shopify is the most popular ecommerce platform for dropshippers, so we will use it as an example and only show results from it. By default, every Shopify website is assigned a subdomain on myshopify.com. For instance, theoodie.myshopify.com is the Shopify domain for theoodie.com.
So, site:myshopify.com is the correct Google query to restrict the search.
- Then, we only want results from different websites. To achieve this, we instruct Google only to return results for websites containing ‘/products/’ (without quotation marks). This phrase appears on all Shopify store product pages.
The Google query, in this case, is inurl:/products/ so we add it to the search.
- Then, we request that Google returns only product pages containing the words ‘pet beds’ anywhere on the page.
The query that achieves this is intext: “pet beds” (wrap your keyword in double quotation marks if it has more than one word).
Note: If you use multiple keywords, create a similar query for each one. If you include all your words in the same query, Google will assume your text is one keyword.
3. If you did everything as we explained in the previous steps, you should end up with something like this: ‘site:myshopify.com inurl:/products/ intext: “pet beds“.
4. After this, you can press enter and let Google do its thing.
Suddenly, you have access to hundreds of your dropshipping competitors for free!
You can also repeat the above steps for other keywords in your niche to find even more websites.
3. Order two times from another dropshipper a month apart
This is a unique strategy, but it can give you good insights into how well your competitors are doing.
To try this method, find a competitor’s website and identify its cheapest-selling product. The best way to find one is to use the Google text search method we explained in section two.
After this, order the item and note the date and time. Then wait.
After one month, order the same item and wait for it to arrive.
In most cases, the orders come with a receipt that contains an order number. Ideally, each order’s receipt number is incremented, and you’ll usually receive an email with that number as well.
For example, this is how the order number in the email looks for Shopify orders:
If you subtract the receipt number of your last order from your first, you should get the total number of orders the Shopify store has had in the last month.
Based on your business knowledge, estimate the store’s average order value. Multiply the average order value by the number of orders, and you’ll have an estimate of the store’s monthly revenue.
The downside of this method is that it can get expensive if the products in your niche are expensive or if you intend to use this method in multiple stores.
Note: You cannot guarantee that the store you spy on will calculate receipt numbers incrementally. For example, Shopify allows you to change the order ID format to characters or symbols, which makes estimating monthly orders more difficult.
4. Store subscription
If you’re looking for unique dropshipping spying strategies, this is one of them.
Different news aggregator apps like Feedly enable you to track the product launches of your competitors.
You have two options with Feedly.
You can subscribe to the entire niche by selecting ‘Product Launches’ as the trigger and adding an entire industry.
