How many products would you recommand

Well, there are a couple issues with having a huge shop, in my opinion.

First, most buyers are looking for specific items online. It could be anything from lawn mowers to workout benches to cell phone cases. So, most niches/shops aren't going to have 500+ products. They're going to have the products that their customers are looking for and tailor their products to those customers.

Second, you don't want to give your customers information overload. There have been plenty of studies that show when customers have too many options, they often times simply choose not to purchase anything. You have to funnel your traffic to do what you want them to do on your site. It's not that easy to do with 500+ products.

Unless you're a huge business, like Amazon, it's nearly impossible to target virtually everyone with unlimited products. That is a classic rookie mistake, thinking more products equals more money. What you need to do, especially when drop shipping, is differentiate yourself from the competition. Unfortunately, when you drop ship from most places, you're directly competing with almost an unlimited number of other sites selling the exact same products. So, how do sites differentiate themselves? Normally, it's a fight to the bottom with drop shipping with a lot of people undercutting each other on pricing. And, if you're drop shipping form a company that also sells their own products to the public, there is almost no way to compete with them on price.

Also, when you have 500+ products, that means you need to take time or pay someone to write 500 unique product descriptions and everything else that comes along with building an ecommerce shop. If you copy and paste the description that the drop shipper provides, you probably won't even be indexed in Google.

backwards...

find out what people want FIRST then provide it..

this is crucial

-Ike Paz

It seems much profitable to have a store in one or two related niches than having 100s, 1000s of products loaded in various niches. If you have the right idea about your niche, you can target your audience well.

Also, unless you have good source of paid traffic, having just a store with affiliate products may not give you high conversion rates.

It's more profitable to have a site/blog with product reviews, comparisons and high quality/useful content. That way you will be able to get organic traffic too.

Hope this helps.

I think your problem is marketing your huge shop, rather than the number of products you have there...

If you can successfully push tons of traffic to your generic online store selling thousands of products, then why not? There's no limit on how many products you can sell.

The point is, it's much more easier to promote shops focusing on one industry, rather than those that sell everything for everyone.