It has to be said that cross-border sellers are almost omnipotent. They not only need to have the courage to run a company, but also need to understand data, logistics, and code. It can be said that they are good at both business and housework. But whether you are a novice or an experienced person, if you want to go further and more steadily on the road of cross-border e-commerce, some effective tools are still very necessary.
Some sellers never use any tools and have achieved some results along the way, but in the end they encounter many difficulties and pitfalls, and most people end up in failure. Third-party tools can indeed greatly improve our work efficiency to some extent, and to a large extent, these tools can obtain a lot of data that is not available in our market. These data are captured by the tool providers themselves and are indeed very helpful to sellers. After a lot of sellers have been defrauded, I have indeed compiled a large number of effective tools, which are worth your collection.
1. Shopify/Aliexpress Niche Analysis Tool – FindNiche
FindNiche is a niche analysis tool for AliExpress and Shopify. It helps us find out all the information about our competitors and can also inspire you to come up with products in your niche. Its power lies in big data product selection. You can lock in your potential winning products step by step through various filtering criteria.
After you find your potential niche product through various filtering criteria, you can learn more about this product by viewing the details (such as order volume, price, number of reviews, ratings...), or you can directly link to the AliExpress supplier store to view specific ratings and product descriptions, etc. By analyzing various data, we can basically determine whether the product has the potential to become the next hit product.
In the "Niche" menu that focuses on Shopify dropshipping products, in addition to linking to AliExpress stores, you can also link to Shopify stores that sell the products. At the same time, you can clearly see the product cost and price, as well as the Shopify store price, so you can easily calculate your profit margin. This is a very big advantage of FindNiche.
Additionally, this tool provides a complete Shopify store directory and store analytics. We can filter and search these stores by category and keyword. At the same time, FindNiche also uses Alexa's ranking to sort these stores. We can study these outstanding store cases, gain some experience in operating stores and shipping, and provide reference and learning for our own stores.
Ad Spy is a new feature of FindNiche, where you can view competitors’ ads, monitor ad data, and understand competitors’ off-site promotion strategies. At the same time, advertising selection can also be a good idea for product selection, obtaining high-quality potential explosive products from the number of likes and comments.
FindNiche is currently running a discount campaign. On the payment page, enter the discount code: Z907GK to enjoy a 40% discount. This discount is applicable to all packages and is a rare discount activity.
2. Amazon product selection tool - AmzChart
AmzChart is a free and powerful Amazon product selection tool with massive product data. Based on big data and artificial intelligence technology, it provides one-stop product selection, follow-up sales monitoring and other services for Amazon cross-border sellers. Help sellers find blue ocean markets through in-depth analysis of Amazon BestSellerRank (BSR) product data and category analysis.
① Amazon product selection database: powerful data crawling capabilities, fast analysis of active products in all categories of Amazon; 17 million product data, more than 7 million active products updated daily; more than 20 screening conditions, 400 product selection ideas, providing more product selection perspectives; keyword search to discover more product inspiration. Discover high-potential products and help Amazon sellers achieve rapid growth.
②Data Insights: Advanced data aggregation technology helps sellers find the most suitable Amazon market segment for themselves; insights into all Amazon saleable categories and more than 10 levels of sub-categories reveal the secrets between categories; comprehensive analysis information such as shelf time distribution, category activity analysis, category price trends, etc., helps sellers understand the market from all aspects and quickly find niche markets.
③ Monitoring tools: 7x24 real-time monitoring of product follow-up information, search for evidence, real-time alerts, escort your products, and can track competitors' product information and provide detailed data analysis.
④Keyword analysis: ASIN reverse query, ASIN keyword long-tail word analysis, help sellers find suitable and most cost-effective long-tail keywords, and improve Amazon SERP ranking.
Currently, AmzChart has already charged fees, but it has also launched a discount campaign. On the payment page, enter the discount code: WZCWQB to enjoy a 40% discount. This discount is applicable to all packages, so go ahead and try it out.
3. Cross-border e-commerce store analysis tool - SellerCenter
SellerCenter is a free and powerful seller analysis tool that updates data on millions of sellers every week. It focuses on multi-dimensional analysis of sellers on six major cross-border e-commerce platforms, including Shopify, Amazon and AliExpress, and provides in-depth analysis of friendly competitors for millions of cross-border e-commerce sellers!
①Shopify Seller Analysis: You can search for Shopify stores based on country and store creation years, and provide store address, number of store products, number of categories, number of FB and INS fans, FB homepage link, hot-selling products and other information, so as to accurately locate and view Shopify's competitors. The highlight for Shopify sellers is that they can check the FB ads of competitors at any time and make product selections based on their bestselling results. It also provides the top 100 Shopify stores and the top 100 Shopify rankings in the United States.
②Amazon Seller Analysis
It provides Amazon sellers’ store addresses, product quantities, category quantities, star ratings, and sites, etc., so you can quickly view Amazon sellers and store details.
③ AliExpress Seller Analysis
Provide store address, category name, number of best-selling and new products, total number of products, number of categories, star rating, etc. Whether you are looking for a reliable supplier or a friendly business, you can quickly understand the store details.
④Wish seller analysis
You can quickly learn about store details by providing store address, category name, number of best-selling and new products, total number of products, star rating and country, etc.
⑤Shopee seller analysis
Understand the distribution of Shopee sellers in Southeast Asian countries, sellers' store addresses, number of products on sale, number of fans, store response rate, creation time and address, etc., to help you quickly lock in the top Shopee stores in different regions and the types of products sold in the stores.
⑥The most popular Shopify Apps help you quickly find effective tools, save work time, and greatly improve Shopify efficiency.
4. SEO Tools – Ahrefs
After completing the first step of building your own online store through Shopify, the second step of finding suitable products to sell through FindNiche, and doing some research on your competitors, we need to move on to the third step: SEO optimization. Shopify is a website building tool. Now that we have our own online store, we need to promote it. Driving traffic to our Shopify store is not an easy task. Among all the promotion methods, SEO is the most basic and cost-effective one. Here’s a tool I’ve been using and I find it very useful – Ahrefs. I usually use the two functions "SiteExplorer" and "KeywordExplorer".
SiteExplorer can view basic data of various types of websites, including traffic, keywords, channel analysis, etc. We can use Ahref to analyze the competitor’s situation and compare it with our own Shopify store, find out the gaps between us and the competitors, and then optimize them.
The main function of the keyword explorer function is to help me develop long-tail keywords and understand the difficulty and traffic of each keyword. It helps us to perform keyword optimization work in a targeted manner.
5. Off-site advertising spy tool - Bigspy
BigSpy is an ad spy tool for small and medium-sized businesses and individual advertisers. BigSpy has 160 million ad creative data, can monitor 40 major countries, has 6 commonly used social media and more than 20 affiliate networks. BigSpy currently supports ad monitoring on multiple channels, including Facebook, Google, Twitter, Instagram, and more.
We can track advertisements on mainstream platforms and find excellent advertising materials for our reference. BigSpy recently launched a new feature called “Ad Creatives”, which has many excellent and high-converting copywriting that can provide us with inspiration. I believe many friends who work in advertising and marketing are familiar with BigSpy, so I will not go into details here.
6. Off-site advertising interest word acquisition tool - AdTargeting
AdTargeting is an online tool for searching and targeting interest words. It does not require downloading any software and is very easy and convenient to use. Currently, AdTargeting has stored more than 80,000 Facebook interest words and 40 interest word categories, and this data is still growing. Relying on its powerful data mining and data analysis capabilities, AdTargeting can help companies or individuals find the most appropriate interest words to better target Facebook advertising audiences in the following aspects:
① Obtain more hidden interest words to improve advertising effectiveness
Simply enter keywords in the search box to get a large number of hidden interest words that your competitors don’t know about, and the audience size, gender ratio, and age structure of each interest word are all clear at a glance. For example, if you enter "music", you will get 180 related interest words recommended, which is far more than the 25 interest words officially provided by Facebook. Among these interest word recommendations, there are many interest words that are not frequently used by other advertisers but have a large number of potential audiences. These words are good choices for Facebook advertising. Because this makes it possible to spend lower advertising costs and get a higher return on investment.
② Summarize interest words by category to provide a better user experience
AdTargeting’s insights feature aggregates interest terms into categories such as shopping and fashion, entertainment, business and industry, technology, food and drink, events, and personal life. And under each category, the interest words will be sorted according to the number of audiences, and you can also see the gender distribution of the audience directly in the classification table. This feature can help advertisers quickly find the most popular interest words in their industry and have a general understanding of these words, which will help them choose more appropriate interest words later.
③ Provide audience analysis reports of interest words to help advertisers better understand their audiences
To solve the problem of advertising audience targeting, we must first have a deep understanding of the audience. AdTargeting is based on Facebook's big data analysis function and provides advertisers with audience analysis reports for interest words, including analysis of the audience's geographical distribution, age, gender, personal relationship status, education level, industry, and devices used. The report also provides a list of the 10 most relevant interests that the interest audience is also interested in, as well as the Facebook pages that are most relevant to the interest audience.
Obtaining analytical reports can help you gain a deeper understanding of your audience so that you can better target your audience and deliver your ads, and you can also create advertising content based on the needs of your target users. Advertisers can also target competitors’ fans based on the Facebook pages most relevant to the audience of interest terms provided by AdTargeting, thereby improving advertising competitiveness.
④ Interest word comparison to help advertisers choose more appropriate interest words
When advertisers are hesitant among several interest words and don’t know which one to choose to better target the audience, they can use AdTargeting’s interest word comparison function to conduct a comparative analysis of interest words. Intuitive and clear comparison results can help advertisers choose more appropriate interest words.
In addition, in addition to helping business owners obtain more and better Facebook interest words to more accurately target audiences, AdTargeting also has Google keyword targeting capabilities. This function can help advertisers search for more applicable keywords and provide analytical reports on keyword search volume, search trends, CPC and payment difficulty. AdTargeting is applicable to any country or region where Facebook or Google advertising is needed.
With the global economic situation not optimistic and Facebook advertising competition becoming increasingly fierce, it is more important than ever for companies to adjust their media strategies, identify the most valuable marketing activities, and accurately target their audiences. Since its launch, AdTargeting has helped many users solve the problem of Facebook advertising audience targeting through interest-based keyword targeting, attract more potential users, and achieve the purpose of advertising, and has been widely praised by users. In the future, AdTargeting will continue to develop more channels and continuously improve product functions and services, striving to help users better locate potential audiences.
7. Off-site advertising cost benchmark tool - ADCostly
ADCostly is an advertising cost analysis tool that covers all interests on Facebook and can display detailed audience numbers and the average CPC and CPM prices for each interest word. This operation actually directly solves the current situation where we spend money but don’t get any orders. Firstly, we can find more interest words, and secondly, the benchmark cost of each interest word is displayed here, so we can directly calculate the budget. In this way, the cost should be more in line with our advertising results.
ADCostly is divided into three functional sections. The Audience section is the keyword expansion section. Here we enter baking and can see that there are 34 search results. There are also suggested words here. The suggested words also give us 42 results. The suggested words are all related to our search terms and mainly help us expand our thinking. In fact, we can also re-enter the search results into the search box, so that new expansion words will appear, and we can get hundreds of words of interest by repeating this process. Moreover, the audience size, CPC and CPM prices of each interest word are marked, so advertising costs can be more secure.
In addition, ADCostly has two sections, namely CPC and CPA. These two sections mainly show the average CPC, CPM, CTR, and CPA of different industries, different platforms and different times. We have seen many websites produce annual average CPC, CPM and other data reports, but they cannot be queried in real time. ADCostly actually implements the real-time query function. You can select your industry, the time period you want, or even the CTA you want, and its cost changes can be queried. In addition, there is also a detailed analysis of age and gender.
When placing an ad, after you check these data, will your ad be able to choose from more audiences? Your user portrait will become more accurate, and advertising costs will no longer be a random guess. The situation of advertising expenses not being billed has also been directly improved.
8. Marketing Tools – SendinBlue
We often use email marketing, or EDM, in Shopify stores. Today I would like to introduce to you an EDM mass messaging tool that I often use - SendinBlue. I have been using SendinBlue for some time, and its function design is relatively complete. Not only can I perform A/B testing within the same email campaign, but other common features such as custom fields, scheduled sends, and free email templates are also relatively complete.
After you send the email, the system will automatically calculate the data you sent. But its shortcomings are also obvious. SendinBlue is very strict with its data requirements. Unless you can ensure that your marketing emails have an open rate of more than 10%, you will face the situation where your account can no longer be used. However, this is also to ensure the brand effect of sendinblue and avoid bringing too much spam to users, which is understandable. Sendinblue is still at a relatively high level in EDM marketing.
