Drop shipping or Affiliate Marketing

mybarya Level 1

August 16, 2017, 11:03 am

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Drop shipping or Affiliate Marketing

To all Internet marketers on here, do you have any preference on doing business with drop shipping or affiliate marketing? Which one is more cost-effective and less risky? Would be nice to hear actual experiences from marketers who have done both.

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DarthHazard

DarthHazard

They are both not very risky, to be honest with you. With affiliate marketing, the problem is that you only get a fraction of the sale price and that can be impacted by the business decides to change the prices of their products. But the advantage is that if you setup a blog or website properly, you don't have to do much and all you have to do is ensure that enough visitors visit your website/blog. It's basically a great passive income method.

7 years ago

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vinaya

vinaya

Affiliate marketing is easy. All you have to do is set up a website and add affiliate products on your website and start promoting products. When someone buys products from your page, you earn comission. This process is automatic. You do not have to deal with receiving orders and dispatching products.
However, if you are doing drop shipping, you need to take orders and forward it to the drop shipping company and the rest of the work will be done by the dropshipping company. You don't need a website for dropshipping. You can do it on ebay.

7 years ago

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overcast

overcast

To be fair for affiliate marketing. It is one of the difficult skill. And it's not that easy as it may sound. You can see that many times such affiliate marketing takes years to even reach the 1000$ USD. I have mostly noticed that dropshipping is rather easy to setup but difficult to make money. Affiliate marketing is harder due to adblockers and also people blind to ads and links.

6 years ago

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vinaya

vinaya

Affiliate marketing has not worked for me. I am yet to try dropshipping. However, I also believe that it is very difficult to make money with both of these earning models. In order to do dropship, you have to establish reputation of your store and this is the most difficult part of dropshipping. As far as affiliate marketing is concerned, people are no longer listening to the recommendations, when they want to buy they directly go to the online shop instead of checking the affiliate links

6 years ago

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overcast

overcast

Yes indeed if this were to be easy. None of us would be spending time on forum. Instead working on those models. Both of those models cost a lot of money too. So keeping up with the methods is not that easy in that case. I personally think that affiliate marketing is easy to get into compared to drop shipping though.

6 years ago

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clara1993

clara1993

Both of them are good sources to make money without investments and I will go with drop shipping over affiliate marketing because with drop shipping you get to fix and negociate the price with a client as for affiliate marketing you can't fix the price you can only get some fixed percentages from the selles made and sometimes clients when they click on the link and see that it's an Affiliate one they drop it thinking that the price is higher just because they think you want to get some profits from them.

7 years ago

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galegatling

galegatling

The only best thing that I could imagine about affiliate marketing is that it's somehow a passive income of some sort since you won't be doing anything after you have linked all those products or services from your blog posts or websites. You will be just waiting for people to click them and buy them so you will get your own cuts as well.

7 years ago

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vinaya

vinaya

That's the beauty of affiliate marketing. On affiliate marketig, you don't have to bother with product procurement (just like in direct selling), taking orders and forwarding shipping address (like in dropshipping). It eases the work. All you have to do is find relevant products and promote on your website. You need high traffic, though.

7 years ago

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overcast

overcast

I think if you have no money at all. Then drop shipping is not the one you should go for. Instead get into affiliate marketing. And once you have some steady stream of income. Then you can get into the product sales. This requires a lot of funding and effort. It's not do it and forget it method. You may have to work on traffic and sales part. It takes a year or so for things to work.

7 years ago

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vinaya

vinaya

I have been Amazon associate since 2012. I have not sold many products, however, I find affiliate marketing easy to make passive income. Dropshipping is more of a technical work. I have a website where I am promoting products from various affiliate networks. I hope to convert the website to a dropshipping website once my sales begin to pick up.

7 years ago

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overcast

overcast

I have only success with selling books. Like I recommend books and ebooks to people on some blogs. And that works out. But the thing with dropshipping is it takes a lot of time with the shopify or the woocommerce to make money. And it may mean even a bit harder for the affiliate networks to properly setup in that case.

6 years ago

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vinaya

vinaya

Some of the affiliate products that I have been able to sell are essential oils, art works, ebooks, herbs etc. These products were sold through the articles on the same niche. For instance, I listed essential oil products on a webpage about essential oils. Based on my experience, you can actually make money through affiliate marketing of you write article based on certain products and promote related products.

6 years ago

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Corzhens

Corzhens

On the contrary, it looks like you are talking about affiliate marketing where you need your own website to promote your products. In drop shipping, you can simply connect to a supplier and promote his goods. The buyers are yours and they transact with you which means you are a direct middleman who earns on commission basis. I have many friends in Facebook who are into drop shipping and they are using Facebook for the business.

6 years ago

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overcast

overcast

The case with dropshipping is you need website too. Where you have to list products from the supplier and bring traffic. So the case is same like affiliate marketing where you are asking for users to check out the website and then work with the content for converting. In such context dropshipping is harder because you have to watch out the refunds and the returns of products.

6 years ago

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vinaya

vinaya

You can do affiliate marketing and dropshipping even if you do not have a website. You can do affiliate marketing and dropshipping via social media. However, there is a limitation on using social media to do dropshipping and affiliate marketing. The best way to do affiliate marketing and dropshipping is through your own website. First of all, you control your content, secondly you can establish your credibility. Thirdly, you can build your own brand.

6 years ago

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Corzhens

Corzhens

I am not familiar with affiliate marketing so I can only speak for dropshipping which I think is a good business. In fact, I have plans of engaging in dropshipping of clothing and accessories because I had that business before although it was not in the internet. What's good in dropshipping is that your only job is to get orders for the products that you sell. And marketing is done in social media so practically there is no capital needed. Once you get an order, the supplier will handle everything and you will just wait for your commission. From what I see in my Facebook friends, it's a pretty good online business.

7 years ago

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overcast

overcast

I have found that dropshipping requires some initial capital. But that does not seem to be the case with the affiliate marketing. And that's the real difference between the two. You can see that affiliate marketing can make more passively. But it's more or less a gamble. And ranking pages is not easy. So I think drop shipping is more reliable model in that case.

7 years ago

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vinaya

vinaya

If you develop contents on certain topics and share related affiliate products with the content, you are likely to sell affiliate products. Affiliate marketing works better for reviews, you can review products and refer related products.
IN dropshipping, you launch your own store. Since people do not trust new store, you will first have to build your credibility, which is very difficult when you are starting small.

6 years ago

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augusta

augusta

two good sources of making money without investing a dime but I prefer affiliate marketing especially if you're affiliating for the big names.You only need to advertise and you might not need to push much because people already know the brand and what they're capable of .

You could go for affiliate marketing stores with good commission rate.

7 years ago

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overcast

overcast

Dropshipping requires a lot of investing. So I don't think it's a dime. In fact the most investment required is through dropshipping. For example, you need a site. And you have to also consider spending money on initial subscription to the drop shipping site. That surely ends up helping you. I think for each person the cost would vary with dropshipping.

7 years ago

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anwebservices

anwebservices

Both of these are good. No risk involved, specially as affiliating because you not providing services or products, in some words you just recommending it to your audience. Dropshipping is nice and could be more profitable because you can set your own selling price, while you again not providing services or products but letting original supplier to do that part os business. Nice to do any of these to if you have good ability to promote such products, services or links...

7 years ago

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kgord

kgord

I think you have to weigh the advantages and disadvantages of each before you commit to a method. It would seem to me that affiliate marketing may be the way to start initially because you would be taking less risk. It is up to each individual though to decide what will work for them in internet marketing.

7 years ago

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Authord

Authord

I think two of the easiest opportunities to get started with, are dropshipping and affiliate marketing.
Both opportunities are in fact relatively similar. The business models
rely on selling someone else's products, that you don't have to buy or
stock before you can sell them, and once you have a customer, the
product owner ships the item direct to them.
On the face of it then, as long as you can find buying customers, they
both seem like easy enough ways to start your own business. But there
are some key differences that could make dropshipping the preferred
option.

7 years ago

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centurion

centurion

I think affiliate marketing . There is no risk on affiliate marketing shipment. If shipment goes for miss- than there have a guarantee is that affiliate marketing company will do again shipment.

Thanks
Centurion

7 years ago

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overcast

overcast

I think there is a lot of risk. If the google penalizes the site on the web. Then getting back the ranking. And even getting some traffic form the google at all is going to be hard. Same can be said about the dropshipping. You need people who buy. And that seems to be the way for both affiliate marketing and dropshipping works. Not a lot of people manage to make money from both.

7 years ago

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seolads

seolads

As affiliate you earn only commission from the sale while as dropshipper you can set your own price and calculate your earnings to earn more money then affiliate only (in most cases), while you spend same time in promoting one or another link.

7 years ago

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