Ecommerce Tips: What It Takes To Find Winning Ecommerce Products

The Tan Brothers share with Philipp Schoeffmann what it takes to find winning ecommerce products, and more at Affiliate World Europe 2018 in Barcelona.

Interview with The Tan Brothers | Founder, Ecommerce Elites Mastermind

By Philipp Schoeffmann

Interview Transcript

Phil:: This is double trouble, seriously. The two mighty twins – no, they’re not twins, but true, true ecommerce masters. Tan Brothers, thank you very much for joining me here – onstage and joining me for this interview. We’re at Affiliate World Europe obviously. And those two just shared a lot of gems about how they run their ecommerce empire. So Steven, Evan, welcome here. And maybe you can share a little bit about what you focus on these days. And we can dive right into what you talked about onstage.
Steven:: Sure, Phil. So thanks for having us again this year in 2018 Affiliate World Barcelona. We are really excited to be here as well, really nice place and great event. So we have been in the ecommerce space for over ten years. So we have our focus which is still drop shipping and selling physical ecommerce products to international markets like the US, Europe. Our base is still shipping products from China. Whereby this year we’ll probably be exploring more offshore international warehouses so we can get our products to consumers in a way faster time. So that’s going to be one of our focuses and probably exploring different kinds of platforms that help generate more sales for our company.
Phil:: Fantastic, that’s an awesome next step. Kind of a biggie right?
Steven:: Yeah, for sure yeah. Excited to get everything up and running.
Phil:: Oh yeah, that’s a major thing I guess. Well, let’s dive into more of the tactics.

Steven:: Sure. So one of them is definitely people need to identify the key characteristics of the winning product. There’s a lot of different ways that you can actually identify a winning product right from the get go. At least having a good idea of what’s a winning product instead of just going through a lot of different ecommerce products and not knowing what kind of characteristics to look out for. So that’s one of the first things that we shared in the presentation.
Evan:: So a lot of people who do product research, they do it themselves. And they have to spend so much time doing it themselves. But what we emphasize is, we build a system and we let the employees do everything for you. So day in, day out, these employees will find you potential winning products. And everything is integrated in such a way that you don’t have to look at it to make sure you’re launching something. Every day, even if you’re not doing anything, your staff is launching products for you through to the product research methods that we teach, which is very, very important that this system constantly churns new winning products for you.
Phil:: Right, well that’s very important and I know you’re big on building systems and making things scaleable.
Steven:: Yeah, for sure.

Phil:: Absolutely, I’m very impressed by that. Can you share a little bit more about systems in general? If somebody is just starting out with dropshipping and they’ve had some first success. They’re making money. They can invest into their company. What are the most important systems to build? What processes do they need to start with?
Steven:: I think definitely, entrepreneurs need to have the mindset that they need to delegate more instead of doing everything themselves. So this is one of the things that I always advise, entrepreneurs need to have the “delegate” mindset. If you don’t have the “delegate” mindset, there is no systems or processes that will come out of this whole entrepreneurship. So we usually suggest that what you do is note down and video record whatever they are doing. How they found their first winning ecommerce product, the whole process, document it. Nowadays there are so many, like Camtasia, or you can self-record yourself and do all this and record it. And put it into a process so that you can scale this when hiring more employees in the future. So probably the first thing they need to start hiring is the project manager or product research. People who can help them execute all these kinds of stuff day in and day out.

Steven: So the first step, you definitely have to start testing. We have our product manager go through the whole list. He has to filter the product whether it’s good or not based on all the factors the staff have put in. How many views, how many shares. How many ecommerce products have been sold on AliExpress. There’s a lot of key factors that they have to go through the list because the normal staff will only go through and put in as much as possible all the different kind of ecommerce products inside the list. So your product manager has to first step, filter the list into smaller lists of products that you can start testing. Essentially the key is still testing a product because no one – there’s no 100% way of knowing which product is going to be the winner until you test it. So instead of wasting money on products that have no potential, product manager is key in identifying all the products that all the lower level people have submitted all the products. He’ll filter it and find those and prioritise whichever is suitable for testing.

Phil:: So where do you see the biggest opportunities right now? If you look at the entire ecommerce space.
Steven:: Definitely, I would say building brands is part of the long-term strategy. So, I mean, there are a lot of people just starting out in this whole dropshipping space to get more cashflow. It’s really hard to build a really good brand in the long-term if you’re just starting out with no cashflow, with very little in the bank. Ideally I would always suggest to people to build a long-tem, sustainable brand once you have achieved good cash flow.
Phil:: Do you run a lot of different brands? Or do you focus on like, one brand and have a lot of different…
Steven:: I’m a huge diversification guy. So I usually don’t rely on just one site or one website or one brand. So we do have a lot of different websites for dropshipping, for brands and so on.
Phil:: Alright, perfect. Well thank you so much. Amazing. Definitely two guys that we can learn a lot from. Awesome to have you.
Steven:: Thanks Phil.
Evan:: Thank you. Thanks Phil.