Dropshipping Vs. Affiliate Marketing: Which Business Model is More Profitable?
If you want to sell products online and make money by selling online, you have multiple options,
Manufacture products and sell through your store
Procure products and sell through your store
Dropshipping
Affiliate marketing
Out of these 4 methods to sell products and make money online, the cheapest way is dropshipping and affiliate marketing as you don’t have to manufacture or procure products to sell
Dropshipping Vs. Affiliate Marketing
Dropshipping means you sell from your store, affiliate marketing means you send buyers to someone's store. Let me exemplify, you have a site called abc. When you are dropshipping, people will buy products from your abc store. However, when you are doing affiliate marketing, you will be sending buyers to amazon, clickbank, etc. The only similarity between these two selling methods is you don' have to own products to sell products.
Affiliate marketing is similar to dropshipping in the sense that just like dropshipping, you don’t have to spend money on products that you want to sell. If you have high-traffic websites, affiliate marketing can do wonders.
In order to do affiliate marketing, you need to build a website, developed content around the affiliated products and published it on your website, and then promote your content and website. If you get traffic on your site, you will be able to sell your affiliate products.
If you want to create a dropshipping store, you have a lot of options such as shopify, big commerce, etc. but if do not want to spend a lot of money, you should try WordPress with woo-commerce and Ezusy plugin. The free version gives you such flexibility that you may not have to buy a premium version.
Creating a dropship website with platform like shopify might be easy, but you need to remember, you will have to spend a lot of money. Well, you get a 1-month free trial and you will have to pay $29 per month. But that is not the only cost associated with shopify store, you will also have to buy add ons that will allow you to import products from aliexpress. You will also have to spend money on templates and add ons that will be necessary to run the shopify store. Last but not the least, you will have to spend a lot of money on advertising your store.
Is it Easy to Make Money With Dropshipping and Affiliate Marketing?
A lot of people use aliexpress for their dropshipping business. However, most of people do not realize that it is not easy to make money through dropshipping, you need to establish your brand and it is not an easy job. How can you compete with the existing stores? You will have to spend a lot of money marketing your store and you might end up burning your marketing budget. Furthermore, building a dropship store costs a lot of money, you need to pay a lot of money as a subscription fee and also buy themes, and addons for your store.
Well, shopify is not the only platform to dropship. You also do not actually need your own store to dropship. You can use other platforms as well. Facebook marketplace is also a good platform to dropship. You can list the product for the sale and the product could be fulfilled by your supplier.
One of the major drawbacks of dropshipping is you need to build a brand before you can start selling. No one will buy from a random website, they will check the reputation before buying. Therefore, it is not easy to start selling through dropshipping. Therefore, selling on an online marketplace can be better
The key to becoming successful whether with dropshipping or affiliate marketing is choosing the right product. For instance, you can choose male grooming products and cosmetics as they are in high demand. You can not only sell from your inventory but also dropship or affiliate market these products. However, I believe this is highly a competitive niche, a lot of people are in the business line and you have to work hard to make profits.
First published on Trendri, in author's name
Image source Pixabay
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