Looking for the best ways to spy on dropshipping stores?
You may want to find out what your competition is doing and take inspiration from them or just see what their best-selling products are.
No matter the reason, there are many different ways you can 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:
| Method | Main focus | Pricing | Read Review |
| Spy tools | Ad and product spying | Depends on the tool | Spy tools review |
| Google text search | Product spying | Free | Google text search review |
| Two orders | Revenue estimation | Cost of the orders | Two orders review |
| Store subscription | Product spying | Depends on the tool | Store subscription review |
| Bestseller products | Product spying | Free | Bestseller products review |
| Social pages | General spying | Free | Social pages review |
| Revenue formula | Revenue estimation | Free | Revenue formula review |
| Google Lens | Product spying | Free | Google Lens review |
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.
- TrendingProducts. TrendingProducts is a tool that consists of an online dashboard as well as a Chrome extension that helps you find suppliers, ads, and trending ecommerce products.
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.
Or, you can use the available company AI models to subscribe to a specific competitor and their product launches.
Cool, right?
While most of these news aggregator apps are paid, they can be worth it since they can save you from a lot of manual work.
5. Sort by best-selling products
You may not be familiar with it, but you can spy on the best-selling products of most dropshipping stores by adding a simple piece of text to the store's URL.
You may think: 'Why would anyone want to show their best-selling products?'
In all honesty, the main priority of all the big dropshipping brands is their customers, not the competitors. While there are ways to try to disable the 'best-selling' page, most dropshipping stores don't do that.
Some even show it publicly to make it easy for customers to find the most appealing products.
Tip: To find the best-selling products page, put this piece of text at the end of the store's URL: /collections/all?sort_by=best-selling
Some stores have this turned off, but you can read here how to beat them!
For example, when you add the piece of text, this is how the URL would look like:
This will show you all the best-selling products!
Cool, right?
Keep in mind that this works best for Shopify sites. If the website is built on another ecommerce website, you can still look up if they have public best-selling categories.
You can also look at their home page carousels to see what products they showcase the most.
Especially for more regular collections, they can be some of their best-selling items.
Most likely, if your competitors' dropshipping store makes a good amount of sales, they are using social media.
The thing is, you can use it to your advantage!
Most Shopify stores list their social media pages on their footer section.
From your competitor's social media pages, you can:
- Learn about their business strategy. Ask yourself: what are the brand's content creation techniques, how often do they publish, and how much focus do they put on the content?
- Learn about their marketing strategy. While it's hard to understand a brand's entire marketing strategy from social media, you can get clues by looking into what social media platforms they publish on.
- See the level of their customer support. How good is their customer support? You can even send them a message on social media to see this. If customer support is non-existent, you can use this to your advantage.
- Estimate how well they're doing financially. This will be reflected in the small things on their social media page. How much effort are they putting into the designs and the social media post descriptions?
While this doesn't directly tell how they're doing financially, it can be a good indicator of whether they have the money to invest in social media. - Find valuable information. Additionally, you can find other valuable information on their social media page, such as the influencers they collaborate with.
If your competitors don't have their social media pages listed on their websites, there are alternative ways to find them.
- Go to the social media page you'd like to investigate. For example, Facebook.
- Search for the business name on Meta Ads Library. It's usually the same as the brand name. If they have one, it should come up.
The Meta Ads Library is free, and it also shows ads that run on Instagram.
If you want to search from other social media platforms, you can use spying tools like BigSpy. It helps you find competitors from TikTok, Google, YouTube, etc.
7. Estimate the monthly revenue using the revenue formula
If you want to estimate the monthly revenue of another dropshipper's store, you can use the revenue formula.
To use this method, you need the following things:
- Store traffic. To get the store traffic, you will need a tool. Many tools can do that, but one of the most popular and free ones is Similarweb.
- Your niche's conversion rate. Each niche has its own conversion rate, which depends on many things. The conversion rate is mainly guided by the average price of products in the niche. For example, low-ticket items have a higher conversion rate.
- The average order price of a store. If you already have experience in your niche, it may be easier to calculate this, but otherwise, it is a bit hard. On your competitor's website, calculate the sum of all product prices and divide it by the total number of products.
Alternatively, you can calculate the average order price of the best-selling products, which can give you a better estimate if they have dozens of products.
After you have these three estimations, you can calculate the store's revenue by the following:
Dropshipping store's revenue = Estimated monthly traffic X Conversation rate X Average product price
For example, if the traffic is 20,000 per month, the average conversion rate is 3%, and the average product price is $40. The store's estimated revenue will be:
Dropshipping store revenue = 20,000 X (3/100) X 40
This would mean the monthly revenue of the store is $24,000
This is one of the ways to estimate the sales volume of a dropshipping store. If you want to learn more about the other ways, look at our other article explaining it.
8. Use Google Lens
Google Lens is a simple tool by Google that enables you to search by an image.
Before using this method, it would be helpful to know what products you want to sell. It even works better if you use images from AliExpress.
To use this method, here's what you need to do:
1. Go to Google, and click the small camera icon on the right saying 'Search by image'.
2. Drag and drop your product photo in the box that appears.
Google will automatically search for all the sources that match the product photo. In our example, this is what happened:
3. Scroll the list Google provides you and explore the stores that show up. You will realize that many of the websites are other dropshippers and their stores.
If you want more refined results, combine this method with the Google text search method we went through in section two.
Summary
There you have it: eight tips for spying dropshipping stores in 2024.
Before we get to the conclusion, here is a summary of everything we have discussed so far about the best ways to spy on dropshipping stores:
- While many spy tools are paid, they are the fastest way to spy on dropshipping stores in 2024.
- Google text search method is great for finding many competitors within a specific niche.
- A more advanced dropshipping spying strategy is ordering two times from a competitor and looking into how many orders they have gained over time.
- Checking competitors' social media pages can give you good insights into how well they're doing.
- The revenue formula enables you to estimate your dropshipping competitor's monthly revenue.
Conclusion
Whether you want to find the best-selling products of a dropship store or learn more about their overall strategy, these spying methods will help you do that.
If you're trying to find winning products from your competitors, you may also benefit by looking into our article, which explains the best ways to search for winning products.
If you think we missed something, let us know in the comments.
Good luck!
Want to learn more about dropshipping?
Ready to move your dropshipping store to the next level? Check out the articles below:
- Product Research for Shopify: 8 Tips to Find the Best Ones
- The 17 Best Winning Dropshipping Product Research Tools
- 13 Best Shopify Spy Tools to Do Competitor Research (2024)
Plus, don’t forget to check out our in-depth guide on how to start dropshipping here!
