Product Catalog (I) - Main Page Layout

Product research is one of the most important (if not the most important) aspect of dropshipping. One of the first decisions a dropshipper has to make is to select products for the store. If you want to be a successful dropshipper, you need to select the products that are in particular showing high sales growth. If you have ever tried to research products on supplier's website such as AliExpress, you would already know how frustrating the whole experience is. The user interface is not pleasant in addition to limiting the search functionality in so many different ways.

Our supplier database overcomes all these frustrations. Let's look at some of the key features:

1. Single user interface to search multiple suppliers: (AliExpress available -- other suppliers coming soon). Imagine creating a single search expression and getting results from multiple suppliers without having to go to individual supplier websites.
2. Access hidden categories: Many supplier websites don't show all the product categories. For example, AliExpress has over 700 categories and most of them are not visible or easily accessible to web users. We make it easy to find any category just by typing a few characters.
3. Get monthly sales data: Suppliers don't allow you to track monthly sales data of the items in their store. You only see cumulative sales number. We can track sales data on a monthly basis which allows you to look at the entire sales history of the product. This is one of the most powerful features of our supplier database tool.
4. Get country data: We also show you in which countries any given item is popular in and also give you sales breakdown by country. This will help you to identify products that appeal to the region you are serving. No other tool in the market has such a feature.
5. Easy retrieval of item specifics: Our user interface nicely groups item specific data in a tabular manner so you can easily access the data such as variants (SKUs), shipping methods, item description, item images etc.
6. World-Class search engine at your fingertips: No data is useful if there is no way to search and find the exact data you are looking for. Our search engine allows you slice and dice the data the way you want using powerful filtering, searching and sorting functions that you will not find anywhere!

Let's look at the specifics.

On the left hand side of the screen you will see a collapsible sidebar that allows you to switch from one view to another. You can open or collapse the sidebar by clicking on the hamburger icon as shown below:

On the right side you will see following sections:

1. Dropdown Filters: These filters allow you to filter the products according to various parameters as explained below
   1. Supplier: This allows you to filter the results by a given supplier for example Aliexpress
   2. Category: This is a multiple level filter where you can see the results for any product category or sub-category of a given product category.
   3. Ship From: This filter allows you to see products that are shipped from a given country. Most suppliers are based in China and shipping country is China for most products as a result. However, there are still plenty of items that are shipped via local warehouses in countries around the world. If you are looking for items being shipped locally from a given country (to avoid long shipping times), this filter would come in handy.
   4. Shipping Method: This filter allows you filter products by the available shipping method. For example, many US based dropshippers prefer E-packet delivery method for its efficiency and tracking provisions. This filter would be very useful to find such products.
   5. Sort By: There are multiple product sorting options available. We have both Descending (desc) and Ascending (asc) sorting orders available for each sorting method. These are the available sorting methods:
      1. Orders: This sorts the products based on total number of orders
      2. Date-First-Seen: This will sort the products based on when it was seen first time on supplier site.
      3. Date-Last-Seen: This will sort the products based on when it was seen last time on supplier site.
      4. Orders 30 Days: This is one of the most powerful sorting methods. This allows you to sort products based on the total orders that were received in last 30 days. This facilitates finding hot selling products quite easily. This level of sorting is not available on any supplier website
      5. Duration: This sorts the product based on its longevity on supplier's site.
      6. % Growth 30 Days: Again, this is yet another powerful filter that allows you to sort products based on percent growth rather than growth of actual orders. This sorting method is particularly useful for products that are not selling in huge quantities but have seen spectacular growth, nevertheless.
2. Sliders: This area has special kind of filters that work on numbers for example price. Each of these sliders are adjustable from both the ends (left and right) so that you can define a range from minimum to a maximum value. We provide following sliders
   
   1. Price: This slider allows you to define supplier price range
   2. Duration: This slider allows you to control the products by their duration range in supplier catalog.
   3. Orders: This slider will allow you to see the products by minimum and maximum number of total orders
   4. Rating: This slider will allow you to view products by their minimum and maximum star rating
3. Product Listing: This area lists all the products that are available for your filter after you apply various filters

Please remember that you can disable a single filter at any time by clicking on the cross icon (x) or disable all filters by clicking on the Reset All button as shown below

Now let's look at an individual product listing as shown above. Each product listing has a lot of useful information which can be described as follows:

1. Date First Seen: This is the month and year when the product was first seen on supplier catalog
2. Date Last Seen: This is the month and year when the product was last seen on supplier catalog
3. Product Image: This is the main product image as provided by the supplier. Clicking on this image enlarges the image to its actual size and you can even reverse search image on Google, Bing and Tineye.
4. Title: Product title
5. Rating: Product star rating
6. Supplier Price: Average supplier price of the product
7. Orders 30 Days: Orders in last 30 days
8. Total Orders: Total number of orders
9. Percent Growth: Percent growth in last 30 days
10. Category/Sub-Category: This shows the product category and sub-category name
11. Ship From: Shows the name of the countries that the product can be shipped from
12. Ali-Express Store Name: Ali-Express is made of many different stores. This label shows the name of the store which provides the product.
13. Top Countries: Flags of top countries (max 5) where the buyers are located for that product.

The above article shows you the layout and explains the various filtering and sorting method for product supplier listing page. Reading this article will, hopefully, get you quickly accustomed to the user interface.