10 Best Ecommerce Product Research Tools (Detailed Analysis)

There are plenty of ecommerce tools that make it easy to find new product ideas.

So how should you choose one?

After analyzing many popular ecommerce product research tools, we found that what differentiates one tool's recommendations from another's comes down to the data (both in terms of sources and time length) it collects.

For example, a dropshipping product research tool that scrapes product sale data from three different suppliers over the past week will provide very different product data than a product research tool connected to Amazon's API and using data from the previous 12 months.

In the above scenario, the dropshipping tool will probably suggest many fad-based products, while the second will probably show more sustainable product trends, though limited to the Amazon ecosystem.

So in this post, we'll introduce you to several ecommerce product research tools and analyze how they collect data and formulate product recommendations.

Exploding Topics

Most product research tools provide product recommendations based on sales data from the past several days or weeks.

Unfortunately, a few weeks of data isn’t really enough to accurately gauge a product’s growth trajectory for the next several months or years.

In addition, the dataset that most product recommendation tools use is often limited to a handful of partner suppliers.

We wanted to take a different approach and help serious ecommerce business owners discover products that show sustainable growth trends based on reliable data.

Therefore, Exploding Topics analyzes Google Search volume from the past several years, and our Trends Database introduces you to product keywords that have shown promising compounding growth over the past several months:

There are two main advantages to using this approach:

1. Google search data is much more reliable than just looking at a handful of suppliers' sales. Chances are that if people consistently search for the product on Google, there's decent demand for it.
2. You'll see extended search trend history for each product keyword (from as far back as 15 years to as short as three months). This is a much better predictor of a product's long-term growth potential than, say, sales data from the past seven days.

With this structure, you can be confident that the product you select has the potential to grow sustainably for the years to come.

So if you’re planning to put a product into R&D for several months, there’s a good chance that demand will not only exist, but also have increased when you’re ready to launch.

Below, we'll dive into exactly how you can use Exploding Topics for the product research process and discuss how we decide which product keywords to add to our Trends Database (hint: we use both humans and AI to qualify each trend).

If you’d rather see for yourself how the Trends Database works, you can try out the freemium version right now!

How to Use Exploding Topics Pro For Product Research

Exploding Topics Pro has two key features that makes it super easy to identify up and coming trends before they take off:

• Trends Database: This is a database of over 13,000 manually vetted trends to help you discover the most promising trending topics you didn’t know about.
• Trend Search: If you’ve heard of a product, niche, or competitor company and want more information on its trend history, this feature allows you to create a report on the fly.

Let’s discuss how to use each of these features in greater detail below.

Trends Database

The Trends Database helps you discover emerging products that you didn't even know existed.

Each of the 13,000 trends in the database is a keyword (company names, products, etc.) that was originally discovered by AI and then manually approved by a human research analyst.

To use the database, you can sort by the "product" category to uncover all trending ecommerce product keywords.

If you want to get even more specific, you can filter by status (Exploding, Regular, and Peaked) as well as the time period (e.g., past 5 years, past year, past 6 months, etc.).

When you find a trend that interests you, you can click “Track Topic” and create a Project to follow it more closely.

For example, if my store is in the maternity care space, I might want to track the company Elvie and add it to a Project I created called “Ecommerce Companies.”

This way, I won’t miss up and coming competitors and I can also steal some of their product ideas. The marketing team can also dive into Elvie’s marketing strategy and research why it has experienced explosive growth.

Or, if I found a new product idea, like Rice Shampoo, I could add that to another Project like “Ecommerce Products.”

This makes it easy to quickly gather a list of trending products that you can discuss with your team and research in more detail.

So how do I know that the trends in the database are high quality?

It's a good question.

While there are plenty of AI data scrapers, we found that most tend to return irrelevant keywords (e.g., popular movies, celebrity information, and other cultural terms). So to sort out the signal from the noise, here's how each trend is qualified:

1. We use AI to scrape the web (Reddit, Google, YouTube, Amazon, etc.) and find keywords that have shown sustainable growth over an extended period of time.
2. A human analyzes each flagged keyword and ensures that it has relevant business value (e.g., is a company brand or product keyword).

This way, you can ensure that every keyword in the database is relevant.

Trends Search

After building out the Trends Database, we realized that you might have heard of a product that's not in the Trend Database, yet you still need trend data on that topic.

So we built Trends Search so that you can instantly create a report on any topic. Simply type in the keywords (brand name, product, etc.), and you’ll receive a report on the trend. For example, if you heard about a product called "jogging stroller," you could type in that keyword and instantly create a report:

As you can see, this topic has already peaked, so it’s probably not a product you would want to launch.

Other Notable Features

Exploding Topics Pro also offers a few other features that can help you uncover key trends like Meta Trends and Weekly Reports.

The idea behind Meta Trends is that whenever there is a trending company or product, there is usually a much larger industry trend around it.

So with Meta Trends, you can see other relevant companies and products related to that trend:

So if you're interested in selling scalp detoxing products, you can instantly see other related products, like scalp brushes and a scalp massager, as well as competitive companies like Wow Skin Science and Nexxus Clean.

Finally, you'll also receive Weekly Reports in your inbox. Inside each Weekly Report, you'll find five trending companies and five trending ecommerce products to quickly give you a snapshot of interesting topics.

If you want to see for yourself how Exploding Topics can help you find the best ecommerce trends and make your market research process more efficient, you can jump into the freemium Trends Database now!

Sell The Trend

Sell The Trend makes it easy for dropshippers to manage the entire ecommerce business from a single platform.

So in addition to its product research tool, Sell The Trend also offers marketing tools, store automation, a supplier database, and automated order fulfillment.

Zeroing in on its product research tool, Sell The Trend's NEXUS Product Explorer uses AI to uncover various products and then provides detailed information like:

• Number of Orders: This is the total number of orders recorded from the Aliexpress suppliers that Sell The Trends is tracking.
• Product Cost: This is the cost from their suppliers.
• Selling Price: Average shop listing price from the sites they're tracking.
• Profit margin: Calculated as profit margin = product cost - selling price
• Total Sales: Total sales generated from all the suppliers they are tracking for that particular product.
• Number of Suppliers: This is the total number of suppliers that Sell The Trend partners with that are selling the product.
• Number of Stores Selling: This is the number of dropshipping stores selling the product from the stores that Sell The Trend tracks.

It also offers a product insights feature to gauge competition and other factors:

Sell The Trend connects with ecommerce platforms like WooCommerce and Shopify, so you can add any product you see with one click to start selling it. It also offers a Chrome Extension that allows you to import products directly from AliExpress.

Another interesting feature is its Store Intelligence Tool. This tool lets you add any Shopify store URL (that the owner hasn't blocked) and identify insights like:

• Top selling products
• Average product price
• Estimated tech spend

How Sell The Trend Gathers Data

Sell The Trend's product recommendation tool scans sources like Amazon, AliExpress, CJ Dropshipping, and other marketplaces. Then, Sell The Trend's algorithm makes product recommendations based on the data it finds (e.g., orders, profit margins, etc.).

It appears that the longest it tracks data is six months, which might make it difficult to distinguish fad items from promising trends. Therefore, it's best for dropshippers rather than enterprise ecommerce brands that plan to put a product in R&D for several months.

Niche Scraper

Niche Scraper is a bot that scrapes thousands of products to provide new entrepreneurs with winning product recommendations.

With each product, you’ll also have access to a variety of different metrics, including:

• Competition Score: Calculated based on the number of different buyers on AliExpress
• AliScore: Combination of growth rate, competition, and demand
• Growth: The purchase trend over the last seven days

You can also filter by product category, growth trends, competition, and other factors.

Another feature is the Shopify scraper which analyzes Shopify stores and shows detailed competitor product insights like which products were recently added and purchase history.

The team also offers a selection of hand-picked product ideas that they believe are winning products. For each of these products, they offer detailed insights like:

• Sale price
• Purchase price
• Profit margins
• Supplier links
• Facebook ad ideas
• Product description
• Other stores selling the product

Finally, it also has a Store Analysis tool that shows the top-performing Shopify stores and their most popular products. It also shows interesting metrics like revenue, average order value, estimated monthly traffic, and more.

How Niche Scraper Gathers Data

The product scraper analyzes various AliExpress products and uses an "AliScore" to determine which ones to add to the product recommendation list.

The AliScore is a combination of various metrics such as:

• Daily sales trajectory from the past seven days
• Product competitiveness which is measured by the number of stores selling it versus the number of sales

Again, this product recommendation tool is designed to help dropshippers capitalize on fads as the data is based on just the past seven days. Therefore, it's not really designed for larger ecommerce stores that are focused on long-term growth.

The hand-picked products undergo similar analysis, though the team also finds live Facebook and TikTok ads of the product to provide real examples of other stores marketing them.

For some products (about one per day), the team also runs ads to test how audiences respond.

Ecomhunt

EcomHunt is a product discovery tool to help dropshippers find the right products at the right time. It offers three main features:

• Product Database: This is a database of thousands of products that shows detailed information like profitability, engagement, and links to dropshippers selling those products.
• Ecomhunt Get Lucky: This pulls individual products from the product database that fit the following filters:
  • Trending (the topic is trending upwards via Google Trends)
  • It's high margin
  • Top score (Ecomhunt score calculated based on Google Trends, Aliexpress interest, low visits, and margins)
  • Low visits (products with few visits on the Ecomhunt platform in the last 30 days).
• Ecomhunt LIVE: This is a list of 2,300 products that are trending upward and provides 30 day engagement history on each product and the countries it's trending in.
• Ecomhunt Tracker: The product tracking tool allows you to track performance metrics and monitor sale performance for each product.

Here's a snapshot of the information available in the product database:

Ecomhunt also has a chrome extension that allows you to inspect competitor stores and their products.

How Ecomhunt Gathers Data

Ecomhunt uses social media engagement data to find popular products, and then a team of product researchers looks at which ones are receiving the most sales on various top ecommerce stores they're tracking. From there, the most promising products are added to the product recommendation database.

It's also worth noting that Ecomhunt specifically looks for new products. So it's not designed to help ecommerce brands analyze long-term trends.

Dropship Spy

Dropship Spy is another product finder that offers three main features to help you find winning products:

• Social Proof Products: This is a database that takes the 2500 top-selling products from the suppliers that Dropship Spy works with (across eBay, Amazon, and AliExpress) and ranks them by engagement (a score calculated based on likes, views, and shares) across Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.
• AliExpress Hot Products: This is a database of the current highest-selling products. It includes a sales trend graph that tracks sales from particular suppliers for the past four months.
• AliExpress Winners Research: You can search and analyze any product on the Aliexpress platform and view sales, profit margins, and other details.

Dropship Spy also has a selection of other tools that make it easy to streamline your entire ecommerce marketing strategy, including:

• Video ads
• Ad copy
• Audiences
• Relevant influencers

You can also connect directly with vendors to sell your products.

How Dropship Spy Gathers Data

Dropship Spy gathers its data (sales, profit margins, etc.) by tracking its suppliers' product data from the past four months of data. It also examines social media advertisement engagement across Facebook, Instagram, and TokTok to calculate each product's engagement score.

Thieve.co

Thieve is a product finder for AliExpress that takes a unique approach to product recommendations.

Rather than just selecting the highest-selling products across a set of suppliers, it curates a collection of products recommended by creators, like bloggers, photographers, and designers.

For each product, you'll be able to see the price, total sales, product rating, and likes. By default, the dashboard will order the products by "Trending."

Thieve also has the following tabs for more detailed product research:

• Niche: If you sell a particular niche, this tab will show you keyword trends and niche analysis, like influencers in the space, average profitability, competition, and CPC data.
• Keywords: This tab shows you the trending search volume pulled from Google Trends for various keywords (both product names and niche keywords) and predictive search volume for the next three months.
• Store Search: This allows you to search ecommerce stores and shows you the estimated monthly sales of the store (pulled from third-party sources like Oberlo and DSer) as well as engagement data like social media likes. It includes a link to the "best sellers" product as well.

How Thieve Gathers Data

Thieve is designed specifically for AliExpress sellers, and its key differentiator is that it starts by analyzing products suggested by creators (like bloggers, designers, and photographers). Then, its algorithm scans those products for various metrics like recency, popularity amongst the Thieve audience, and other conversion metrics.

Therefore, the data is sourced primarily from the Thieve ecosystem.

JungleScout

JungleScout is a platform for both beginner and established Amazon sellers, and it has plenty of different tools for product research, including:

• Product Tracker: After finding a product you're interested in, the Product Tracker lets you track key metrics like units sold, rank, inventory, and price. You can also group products by category and view a single spreadsheet-like dashboard with real-time data on the above metrics.
• Opportunity Finder: This analyzes Amazon keyword search data to help you identify opportunities for new products and niches. In addition to providing you with search volume, 30 day, and 90 day trends for each keyword, you'll also see a competition score, average monthly units sold, and seasonality scores.
• Product Database: This allows you to search Amazon's 475 million products with filters like product reviews, price, rank, sales, revenue, and ratings.
• Category Trends: This feature can track the top 100 products of any category or subcategory on Amazon. You'll be able to see historical trend data from sales to reviews.
• Rank Tracker: This tool allows you to monitor keyword rankings over time. You can use it to reverse-search a group of ASINs and see historical keyword performance data to discover which keywords are influencing you and your competitors' listings.

Jungle Scout offers a selection of other tools to help you with marketing automation, inventory management, and more.

How JungleScout Gathers Data

JungleScout’s product database data comes directly from the Amazon API, and it takes a unique approach to product recommendations.

Rather than aggregating various metrics and telling you which products are “the best,” the database contains a variety of metrics and then allows you to sort by various metrics like:

• High demand and low competition
• High demand and bad marketing
• Good demand and poor product quality
• Good return on investment
• Max/min price
• Max/min rank
• Max/min reviews
• Max/min ratings

You can also track product performance over an extended period of time in the Product Tracker.

Unicorn Smasher

Unicorn Smasher helps automate Amazon product research by providing detailed product information.

Simply type in the category or keyword for the product you want to sell, and the Unicorn Smasher's extension will show you the following metrics for each search result:

• Number of sellers
• Variations
• Estimated sales
• Estimated revenue
• Reviews
• Ratings

For example, if you are interested in selling air fryers, you can see a selection of air fryers and the abovementioned metrics for each one.

While the Chrome extension is a free tool, Unicorn Smasher also offers a paid platform that gives you more detailed information, such as:

• One-click Amazon product information
• Complete data board
• Sales forecast

How Unicorn Smasher Gathers Data

While they don’t specify how they gather data, it’s probably gathered from Amazon’s API. Unicorn Smasher is unique from the other tools on this list as it isn’t designed to give explicit product recommendations. Instead, it’s designed to let you find more metrics for a product you’ve already discovered.

Helium 10

Helium 10 is a full-service platform for Amazon sellers and offers tools for everything from product research and listing optimization to analytics and marketing tools.

Focusing on its product research capabilities, Helium 10 offers the following tools:

• Black Box: This feature makes it easy to quickly find different products to sell and filter by geographic location, competition levels, price range, and monthly revenue.
• Trendster: This price tracking feature measures seasonality and other factors to evaluate products.
• XRay: This is their product analysis feature that provides product-specific metrics like search volume, average price, average BSR, and average reviews. Premium users can also unlock total and average revenue estimates. It is compatible with Amazon and Walmart products.

It also offers a Chrome Extension to access these tools directly from your browser while researching products.

In addition to product research, it also offers the following keyword research tools:

• Cerebro: This is a reverse ASIN/Product ID lookup tool
• Magnet: This keyword planner helps you find keyword data from Amazon and Walmart searches.
• Misspellinator: This tool finds commonly misspelled words so that you can capitalize on these low-competition keywords.

In addition to these product research tools, Helium 10 also offers plenty of other tools for marketing, listing optimization, analytics, and more.

How Helium 10 Gathers Data

Most of Helium 10's data comes from Amazon's API.

Helium 10 is also structured similarly to JungleScout as its main product database (Black Box) allows you to filter all Amazon products by various metrics like review count, review rating, best seller ranking, and more. So instead of telling you which products you should purchase based on an internal algorithm, you can just search based on various filters.

Regarding other data like performance, sales, and keyword search volume estimations, they have a data team that uses AI and machine learning to calculate these numbers. However, there isn't specific information about where that data is gathered from.

Algopix

Algopix is a product research tool for Amazon, eBay, and Walmart. Unlike many of the other tools on this list, it is specifically designed for product research and offers both product discovery and analysis tools to help you find the most profitable products.

On the discovery side, you'll be able to find products with either the:

• Product category analyzer
• Keyword discovery tool

With the product category analyzer, you can search by various categories in specific countries and even the brand name. Or, if you already have a specific product in mind, you can type it into the keyword discovery tool directly.

Here's an example of a broad keyword search:

Once you've found a few products of interest, you can analyze them with the Single Product Analyzer feature.

This provides information like:

• The marketplace with the highest profit opportunity (e.g., eBay, Amazon, etc.)
• Product demand level (calculated by product searches and product sales across several markets)
• Average expenses (shipping costs, marketplace fees, taxes, purchase costs, etc.)
• Average profit (average sale price minus average expenses)

All these metrics are calculated based on the averages of various products across eBay, Amazon, and Walmart. Of course, this means the accuracy of each calculation depends on how much data is available inside the platform. 

Algopix also offers a store analyzer that makes it easy to search by Seller ID and see inventory analysis.

It offers a free plan with many of the same features as the paid plans, though with limited monthly searches.

How Algopix Gathers Data

Algopix gathers data from various APIs, and you can read more about it in each of these guides:

• Amazon API
• Walmart API
• eBay API

From there, it aggregates all of the data for each metric shown.

This makes the data fairly accurate, though it isn’t always accessible for every product.

Start Researching The Best Ecommerce Products Now

As you can see, there are plenty of different product research tools, but they tend to be ideal for different use cases.

If you’re starting a dropshipping business and want a simple tool that automates the entire process for you, something like Sell The Trend or Jungle Scout might be a great solution to help you quickly get started.

However, if you’re building your own ecommerce products or you have more of a long term vision for your online business, you might want to use a tool like Exploding Topics that leverages a broader data set (Google Search volume) and analyzes longer-term trends.

To see for yourself if Exploding Topics is a good fit for your business, you can try out the freemium version now!