Dropshipping Vs. Affiliate marketing

I don't, Erik.

Neither of these business models normally returns very much pure profit (except in a relatively few cases). Affiliate marketing can be hard due to the levels of competition, and the product owner dictates entirely. The dropshipping business model is heavily weighted in favour of the wholesaler and not the dropshipper and most often returns poor margins.

Instead I own an ecommerce business with my own brands. Net margins averaging 54% on 6 figure a month sales.

In that way I control every single aspect of my offering. With affiliate marketing and dropshipping you are at the complete mercy of other people who can, and do, dictate to your detriment.

Good luck with your venture.

Money is money. You should start in whichever business model best suits your needs/budget and expand from there.

As far as dropshipping, in my experience if you work with product manufacturers and legitimate distributors, profit margins can range between 20%-60%. It really depends on your niche or what products you choose to market. I'm currently receiving 60% profit margins in a particular niche, but having to offer free shipping to remain competitive cuts slightly into the profit, unfortunately.

For me drop shipping is a much better choice. For the amount of work put into affiliate, I'd rather put that towards my products and reap the higher profits

I agree with violet0176.

Start with what suits you best.

Truth be told, with the right product or offer, anything can make you thousands a month.

Of course, if you don't have your own products and don't want to deal with shipping and returns, etc. affiliate marketing can be very lucrative.

However, I have some friends who found a clever niche and started a online store and are doing very well. (And no, they won't tell anyone what the niche is.)

:-)

I'm with violet0176. Two of the big advantages with dropshipping are to do with the fact you do not hold any stock.

Firstly, you do not have to pay storage. So though you may not make as much from each sale you are not having to pay to store your stock.

Secondly, you are not stuck with stock that has not sold. Unsold stock is money tied up. You will end up having to sell it off cheap just to get rid of it.

Also with the right deal you can still end up making a good profit.

I would suggest you take your time and do your research. You need to find a good dropshipper. Someone you can trust. That mean emailing and talking to them. If they reply quickly then you know they are on the ball.

A simple trick is to Google the companies name with the word scam. See what comes up.

Look to see what others say about them. I was looking at one dropshipper which had what I thought was some good products. But checking them out it turned out the products were crap and their customer service was appalling. Once they got the customers money they did not give a damn. And if you're dropshipping their product it is you who has to deal with them and will get it in the neck from your customers. And did I mention they were charging £125 per year for you to dropship their goods.

I found a much better dropshipper giving me a decent margin.

Has affiliate marketing had its day? I have noticed that Rosalind Gardner, one time queen of affiliates, seems to have cooled quite a bit on it.

Anyway. I hope that helps. Do your research but with the right dropshipper you can make a good business from it.

yeah but the biggest problem in dropshiping is........finding the dropshippers who are not competing with you! :'((((
Anyone who can give some tips into finding dropshippers like violet0176 did?

Problem of affiliate marketing is that you are not alone who promote the particular product. Even if you are able to get cheap search clicks for your niche, you can still encounter a problems of very small purchases of your products because probably your audience has already seen that product many times over the internet.

If you do dropshipping of some unique product (but still desired product on the marked) then you have big advantages.

You may want to look into selling some of your inventory on Amazon using their FBA business model.


This way all the shipping and customer satisfaction is taken care of by them, plus you have the very valuable effect of the large amount of buyer traffic that is always on their site looking to spend money.

Not anyone have touched one this.

Branding, it's the most important thing. How you're going to market, advertise & promote your products. Be it able to get customer or affliate, but branding your products for conversions is one of the most important factor when doing drop shipping. Because the products are not yours so you've to make it seems much better than any other person who is providing it.

Examples:
Use special or personally printed mailing bags, and insert a thank you card with future discount if they exceed an amount during checkout!

This little things add up to you generating some sick income with drop shipping.

In 09 i started in affiliate marketing and had some pretty good success, but what i found out was i didn't control returning customers (email list) in affiliate marketing as i did with my own drop shipping website. I had more control in profit, payouts, upset/down sell, emailing list etc. The main thing is you have more control with the drop ship business model than affiliate marketing

I think some people just love drop shipping business model and some other people love affiliate business model. Or they think one model is more suitable for them than any other model.

Love the responses here. If you don't have the means to start with stock dropshipping is a good model to get into ecommerce. Its completely possible to have good margins and lots of research will help you find a better supplier. Try to keep a really good relationship with your supplier(s), add them on skype/facebook, get their phone number and treat them like a business friend!

Do you agree that you have to devote more time about customer problems on DropShipping than in affiliate?