Alex Fedotoff is a Ukrainian immigrant turned ecom millionaire. Forbes calls him the “King of Facebook ads.” Bahahaha. Forbes will call you anything you want for about four grand. Can you trust this guy to help you win with ecom? He says he’s got a bulletproof method for picking products that’ll make you big bucks. It’s not what the gurus are teaching. Criteria number one is plump margins. You gotta give yourself some room to run ads and make mistakes and still turn a profit.
“Personally, I’m looking for at least $30 gross profit margin,” Alex says. “And then another thing is the product needs to be easy and light to ship. If it’s heavy, if it’s fragile, and it’s coming all the way from China in a package, there’s a very high chance that it will break. But when you choose small, light, durable products, you don’t run into these issues. And even if there’s an increase in shipping rates, it still won’t significantly affect your profit margins.” Makes sense, so how do you find ’em?
Alex uses a variety of free and paid tools. Facebook’s Ad Library is a great place to start. Costs nothing. And basically, you can spy on ecom sellers and dropshippers and whatnot, and see which ads they’re running, and for how long (which kinda tells you whether or not they’re making that person money), and then you can click through and check out their landing pages and reverse engineer how they’re making it all work. And it’s cool ’cause it’s current. You can see which products are selling well today.
In terms of paid tools, Minea is at the top of Alex’s list. After you sign up, right when you log in, there’s a section that says “Top 10 winning products of the day.” Then it’s broken down by platform, whether it’s a Facebook ad, TikTok ad, or Pinterest ad. So you can see who’s spending the most money, how many comments their ad’s getting, how many likes, how many shares, and so on. What Alex likes to do is find something with a moderate number of likes, so that it’s not super competitive, and then improve upon it.
Pro tip: when you’re doing product research, go through these funnels, and add the products to your cart. Get as close to actually buying them as you can get, without submitting payment. Why? Because then these platforms will identify you as an ideal candidate for similar products and you’ll start getting hit with all sorts of similar ads. Boom. Now winning product ideas are coming to you—you just have to keep your eyes open. Start a swipe file. Collect notes and screenshots and URLs and whatever else you come across.
Then what? Apply some common sense. Put any potential products through a series of questions to help you narrow it down. Does it solve a problem? Is it a problem people are highly motivated to solve as soon as possible? Does it have a high perceived value? Is there a wow factor? Can you play on people’s emotions to sell it? (Sounds bad but it’s true.) Is it available in stores? (Ideally, it’s not.) What’s it cost per unit? How much can you sell it for? Does that leave you at least $30 worth of wiggle room? And so on and so forth.
Pro pro tip: when you think you’ve decided on a product, order it from the top competitor. Note the order number. Wait a coupla days. Order it again. Note that order number. Say it’s 200 higher than the last—that tells ya they’ve sold 200 units in the last two days. Right? This gives you amazing insight on the potential. For more tips and tricks and mentoring from Alex, check out Ecommerce Scaling Secrets and Brand Builders Academy. He’s got a bunch of courses you can choose from. Cost is anywhere from a few hundred bucks to $10,000 and up.
