Identifying trending products before they peak is tricky.
If a product is too easy to find, it's likely already popular, and you won't have the first-mover advantage when entering the market.
However, you can consistently identify emerging products before they peak by taking a more strategic approach to product research.
In this post, we'll walk you through a simple yet effective strategy to consistently identify under-the-radar trending products.
1. Use a Trending Product Discovery Tool
The fastest way to find a list of new product ideas is by using a product discovery tool focused on trends.
Most are databases you can filter by category to instantly see a list of trending products:
The only problem is that most trending product databases use sales data to show you a list of currently popular products.
Or, they only show products that have significantly grown in popularity over the past few weeks – which is often a sign that the product is seasonal or simply a short-term fad.
Which means you typically won't find many under-the-radar products with long-term growth potential with most tools.
We built the Trending Products database in Exploding Topics to solve this problem.
To weed out fads and peaking products, we only include products with a history of compounding Google search volume growth.
If a product keyword experienced compounding growth over the past several months or years, it will likely continue growing steadily in the coming months/years.
You can sort the Trending Products database by growth rate (Exploding, Regular, and Peaked) and time period (ranging from 3 months to 15 years). Then, you'll see a list of the products with the strongest growth rate over that time period.
You can also sort the database by various other filters, including:
- Product Category (13 different categories ranging from beauty and wellness to tech and travel)
- Revenue
- Reviews
- Price
- BSR
- Monthly Sales
It's also unlikely that Exploding Topics will miss any fast-emerging products.
This is because we use AI and machine learning to search billions of signals (Google Search, Spotify, YouTube, forums like Reddit, social media platforms, etc.) to identify topics gaining traction.
This process is a key differentiator that makes Exploding Topics effective at identifying under-the-radar products before they peak.
And, you'll find more unique product ideas in the Exploding Topics database than a product research tool that relies exclusively on Amazon data.
When you find a product that interests you, click on it to see more details, including a forecast for that product's growth trend:
If you want to track the product, just click "Track Topic" and add it to a Project. Projects are files that live inside the Trend Tracking dashboard, and Exploding Topics updates the product's trend data in real-time.
This means you never have to update a spreadsheet with current product trend data.
Scroll down more, and you'll see a list of the top sellers and brands and specific metrics for each product, like monthly sales, price, and average reviews.
You'll also find a list of other related products and topics, and a breakdown of the social media channels the product is trending on.
While you can use any product discovery tool to find new product ideas, the key differentiators that set Exploding Topics apart are:
- More Unique Product Ideas/Unlikely To Miss New Emerging Products: We don't just use Amazon data to source product ideas. We use AI and machine learning to monitor millions of data points across YouTube, Google Search, Spotify, Reddit, social media, and Amazon to identify trending products.
- Identify Trending Items With Long-Term Growth: Instead of just showing you the current best-selling products (which are peaking or may be short-term fads), we show you products with long-term growth potential. We use Google Search volume to judge a product's growth potential as it is a large, unsampled data set.
- Advanced Filters And Metrics: In addition to giving you product ideas, Exploding Topics also gives you detailed metrics that can help you gauge product demand, profitability, and future growth. You'll also have data on the top brands and sellers, and you can click a link to each product listing to gather more qualitative data, like specific customer reviews.
You can try Exploding Topics Pro for $1 today to start browsing trending products.
2. Search Best Sellers Categories
An easy way to find a goldmine of high demand products is to make a list of all your competitors' websites and track their best sellers' categories.
Amazon also has a Best Sellers category that lists the best-selling products based on sales volume. To find products relevant to your niche, just sort by department:
The Amazon Movers and Shakers category is also a useful resource for discovering new dropshipping product ideas.
It shows a list of products that saw the biggest boost in sales rankings on Amazon over the last 24 hours:
While the best sellers and movers and shakers categories are great for sellers that want to add high-demand products to their online store quickly, it's not the best for retailers and other ecommerce businesses that develop their own products for two reasons:
- These products are often fads, and demand might die quickly.
- The market for these products tends to become oversaturated quickly.
Nevertheless, it's a great resource for business owners who want to quickly find trending products.
3. Ask Your Customers What Products They Want
The best products to add to your ecommerce store are the related products your current customers are already buying from other brands.
So survey your existing customers and ask about additional related products they purchase from other brands to get new product ideas.
You can use a survey tool like Typeform or SurveyMonkey to send your survey.
If you don’t have an audience yet, you can use SurveyMonkey’s Market Research Panel to survey your potential target audience.
It allows you to specify the demographics, employment status, and interests of your target audience, and then their service will send your survey to that specific audience.
You can also add screening questions to target an even more specific audience.
For example, you could survey moms in their thirties who go to the gym three times per week and have children under the age of two.
Pro Tip: As you’re creating your survey, avoid asking broad questions like "what new trending products would you buy?"
Most people draw a blank when you ask broad questions, so instead ask specific questions like:
- What cool athleisure products did you recently see on social media? What did you like about it?
- What are other athleisure products you bought in the past six months?
- What other athleisure brands do you shop at?
- What products do you typically buy from those athleisure brands and why?
These questions will help you generate more specific responses and give you higher-quality feedback.
3. Related Product Suggestions And Bundles
If you find one trending product, you can often find ven more trending products by looking at:
- Related product suggestions
- Bundled product offers
Inside our Trending Products database, you'll see a list of related products at the bottom of each product page. You can click on any of these products to explore them in more detail:
You can also find related trending products on each Amazon product page. Just scroll down to the middle of the page (or Control F "related products"), and you'll find a list of related products:
Adding products that complement your core product is an excellent growth strategy, as it will increase your average order value. This means you earn more profit per customer while customer acquisition costs remain constant.
Amazon is also a great resource for discovering product bundle ideas. You can go to any product page and scroll down to see products frequently bought together:
If you already have a store with products, make a spreadsheet with each product you currently sell. Then, type them into Amazon one by one to see the products frequently purchased together with the main product you already sell.
For example, if you already sell throw pillows, your top priority should be adding bedsheets and pillow cases as those are the products frequently purchased together.
4. Identify Trending Brands And Topics
You might notice that some trending products are generic products dressed up with unique messaging and positioning.
For example, Liquid Death is essentially water repackaged with unique messaging targeting a younger demographic.
These trends are worth monitoring because you could increase your own product's profit margins by repositioning it.
There are plenty of ways to manually search for trending brands, like:
- Reading industry publications and looking at advertisem*nts of various brands.
- Following industry experts on social media and monitoring brands they mention.
- Joining groups (Facebook, Slack, Reddit, etc.) and asking members about trending products.
- Listening to podcasts and browsing podcast notes to learn about recommended products.
The problem with these methods is that they're very time-consuming, and you'll likely overlook some emerging brands.
To help you quickly identify trending brands, we built the Trends Database. It contains thousands of trending topics, including brand names, product keywords, and topics.
You can quickly filter for relevant keywords by selecting one of the dozens of categories. Then select the "Brands" filter and set the Status filter to "Exploding." You can also filter by time period (ranging from 3 months to 15 years) and sort by growth, search volume, trend line, or discovered date.
If you find a product that interests you, click on it to view a forecast of its growth trend for the coming year and the social media platforms it’s trending on.
You can also scroll down to see other related trending topics.
To track the brand, click "Track Topic" and add it to a Project.
For example, below is a Project I created that's tracking several hair care brands, and Exploding Topics will continue to update the trend growth in real time:
Exploding Topics also offers a database of trending startups. Similar to the Trending Products database, you can sort the Trending Startups database by category and then view metrics like total funding, number of employees, last funding round, location, and more.
You'll also see a graph of the brand's Google Search volume trend to gauge that brand's growth.
If you're interested in a startup, click on it for more details, like its growth forecast and other detailed metrics.
If you scroll down further, you’ll also see a list of other related trending startups and trends.
You can try Exploding Topics Pro for $1 today to see for yourself how the Trending Topics and Trending Startups features can help you find new trends and product ideas.
5.Track Competitors’ Ads
If your competitors have been running ads for a particular product for an extended period of time, it's probably profitable.
You can use the free Facebook Ads Library to track your competitors' Facebook and Instagram ads. It shows all your competitors' ads, each ad version, and how long the ad has run.
For example, if you have an athleisure brand, you could look at Gymshark's ads and see which products they promote heavily.
Another option is to look at the paid keywords your competitors are targeting with Google Ads.
You can use a tool like Ahrefs or Semrush to do this. Just enter the competitor's URL and click "paid keywords."
For example, if you're selling supplements, look at the keywords that iHerb targets.
This list of keywords can give you a few product ideas such as:
- Digestive enzymes
- HemCalm tablets
- Living Silica
To confirm that the product is trending, you can type it into the Trends Search feature in Exploding Topics:
The Trends Feature gives you the historical Google Search volume trend for any keyword, and you can click “Track Topic” to save it to a Project.
You’ll also see other related trending topics that you can further explore for more product ideas:
For example, you might want to also explore the product “living silica collagen booster.”
6. Social Media Influencers
Social media influencers are incentivized to discuss cool trending products because novel product recommendation posts tend to generate high engagement.
To discover the best influencers to follow, use a tool like BuzzSumo. It makes it easy to find influencers quickly and then you can either follow them or use BuzzSumo’s alerts to be notified when they publish content.
Another option to find trending products is to follow your competitors' partner influencers.
This will help you stay up-to-date with your competitors' best products, and you'll probably also discover new popular products from other parallel brands those influencers are promoting.
You can find relevant influencers by scrolling through your competitors' social media pages (most influencers tag the brand in their posts).
Or, type your competitors’ brand name into TikTok or YouTube with the search term “unboxing” or “review.”
This is another really easy way to quickly find relevant influencers:
Then, browse through each of those influencers’ profiles to find other related products they’re promoting.
8. Reddit Forums And Social Media Groups
Most ecommerce industries have a handful of subreddits or social media groups dedicated to your target audience (and sometimes even your exact product).
For example, this subreddit covers everything about Padel sports and has an excellent guide on choosing a padel racket. So if you're considering adding padel rackets to your store, it's a great resource to learn what customers look for in a padel racket so that you can design the best product possible.
While reading these forums regularly to find trending product ideas might seem time-consuming, it's a good way to stay up-to-date with consumer needs and improve your marketing messaging.
Or, if you don’t have time to read through all of the comments, you can paste them into ChatGPT and ask it to extract key questions and pain points from the comments.
There are also plenty of social media groups that make it easy to connect with your ideal audience and learn what they want in a product.
For example, here are multiple Facebook groups dedicated to toddler activities:
You can also use social media to follow trending hashtags for more products.
Find The Right Products For Your Store Now
One of the biggest challenges for newer entrepreneurs is just getting started. It's easy to get overwhelmed by the prospect of choosing just one product to sell online, but you'll learn from experience and mistakes.
So use the tips in this post to create a list of trending products today and set a deadline to select and launch your product.
If you want an easy method to quickly find trending products, consider using the Trending Products database in Exploding Topics. You can start a $1 trial to start browsing product ideas today.
