As dropshipping is becoming more and more popular, an increasing amount of tools are becoming available.
Many of these tools are often expensive and taking advantage of beginner dropshippers looking for an edge in the game.
In this Saturation Inspector review, I will cover whether or not you need this chrome extension in your dropshipping toolset.
What is Saturation Inspector and How Does it Work?
Saturation Inspector is a dropshipping product research tool that functions a little bit differently from the competition.
This google chrome extension (and yes it only works on chrome) only has one core function: displaying product saturation.
It does this by looking up how many stores are selling a specific product by AliExpress. The higher the number of stores, the higher the saturation.
How Much Does Saturation Inspector Cost?
Saturation inspector costs a whopping $19 per month.
That’s a lot of money for a google chrome extension with very minimal functionality.
Especially once, with this many poor reviews.
Beware: They Limit Your Amount of Searches
This tool limits your searches to 300/day.
This should be fine, as you’re likely not doing this many daily searches BUT the tool runs in the background.
So if you don’t turn it off yourself, it will use all your searches without you realizing it, rendering the tool useless.
Imagine you’re browsing AliExpress, all these products are using up searches from your tool and you’ll quickly your daily quota.
This background-feature has been cause for complaints from Saturation Inspector users for years and they still have not done anything to improve it.
If you plan on using this app, always make sure your SaturationInspector is toggled OFF whenever you’re just browsing without the intent to check for product saturation.
Do You Need a Product Saturation Tool?
Selling saturated products is a big problem for AliExpress drop shippers.
Often new drop shippers will start selling products that were good months ago but are no longer a viable option.
This leads to many of them quitting early once they start losing lots of money on Facebook Ads.
A product saturation tool, could help prevent this.
Whenever you find a product that might be good, you turn your saturation inspector on and run a search.
The search will show you the following info:
- Competition level: untapped, competitive or saturated
- Amount of stores selling the product
- Links to the stores selling the product
So besides seeing whether or not a product is saturated, you also get to see your competitor stores.
This is great as this will give you an idea of what kind of sales copywriting and product images they are using.
You can also check out what ads they are running thanks to the Facebook Ad Library feature.
Using all this info to your benefit, you can do really good competitor research.
Saturation Inspector Customer Reviews
The reviews for Saturation Inspector on the google chrome store are really poor.
Surprisingly, many of the complaints don’t seem to be about the tool itself, but rather about the underlying software.
Many claim it to be full of bugs.
Scouring the reviews, a lot of customers are completely unable to use their purchase.
And this has been a complaint for over 2 years.
Saturation Inspector does reply to most complaints and offer refunds but as this has been going on for over 2 years, I have very little faith they will ever turn this into a bug-free app or care much about doing so.
Should You Get SaturationInspector?
I think SaturationInspector is too expensive for most people.
I’ve noticed many dropshippers accidentally use up their daily quota by not knowing it runs in the background.
On top of that, many likely aren’t using the app for the correct reasons.
Sure, knowing whether or not the product is untapped, competitive or saturated is good but it’s really the stores they display where this tool becomes handy.
The competition level only gets you so far.
Just because A LOT of stores are selling a product, doesn’t necessarily mean its saturated.
For all you know, it could be hundreds of shitty general stores that have no clue what they’re doing.
Meanwhile, an untapped product doesn’t mean it will sell.
Not every product on AliExpress is good of course.
The main reason to use this app should be to quickly perform competitor research.
And at this, the tool is flawed as well.
Think about this: SaturationInspector will take data from the EXACT AliExpress product you are looking up.
Your search will only show you results on how many stores imported that exact product from that exact seller.
What they don’t take into account is all the other AliExpress sellers that are ALSO selling this product.
So in order to really check for saturation, you would have to run the search on multiple AliExpress vendors.
Aside from that, you have to realise that many dropshippers might be using other dropshipping suppliers such as CJDropshipping, WIIO, Zendrop and more.
The saturation inspector won’t be able to locate those stores for you either.
Bottom line, If you don’t know what you’re doing and think saturation inspector will instantly let you know whether a product is worth it or not, please don’t get it.
If you understand you will have to check multiple vendors and accept that you will never have the full data on whether a product is saturated or not and primarily will be using this tool for competitor research reasons, it might be worth the money.
Saturation Inspector Alternatives
There are quite a bit of alternatives to SaturationInspector that will give you a lot more bang for your buck.
SaturationInspector, I find vastly overpriced.
Especially since the software is so buggy.
Recently, I reviewed Seller Pulse and I find it to be one of the best product researching tools out there right now.
Seller Pulse is a full product research tool that comes at $39/mo.
That’s about double what SaturationInspector is charging, I know, but you also get 10x the features.
You can find winning and popular products through a number of filtering options, check out how their sales graph, check out the competing stores, and many more features.
My Review Of Saturation Inspector
After reviewing SaturationInspector, I think it has potential.
I like that its a chrome extension I can use quickly to help me perform competitor research and save a lot of time doing so.
I don’t like that they limit daily searches, and let the app run in the background.
I also don’t like that the app is so buggy rendering it useless for a lot of paying customers.
All in all, SaturationInspector can be a good add-on when used properly but likely isn’t the tool for every dropshipper.
I think most beginners are much better off using a complete product research tool like Seller Pulse as opposed to SaturationInspector.