Ecommerce/Shopify Vs. Affiliate Marketing?

To sell a product you need good marketing, good products, good sales pages, good customer support, good supplier relations, good website, good SEO and so forth.

Most newbies will struggle with every part of this. And probably give up in a few weeks not knowing what the real problems are nor how to minimise them.

So affiliate marketing allows you to focus on just one aspect - marketing - getting good at that, and then expand into your own store when ready.

So do that Taco!

You need to invest some money upfront if you go for a Shopify store and if you want to automate the business then you can pay for plugins like Oberlo. Creating a Shopify store, filling it up with products and setting everything up can now be done within few hours. It doesn't take much time but just a little investment. Then comes the next part - Advertising your store. You'll again have to spend some bucks but the best part is you will see sales and income soon.

Affiliate marketing on the other hand can be done with very little to no investment. The only investment is the domain name and auto-responder service like Aweber. You need to set up a opt-in page to collect email of prospects in return for a free gift and do your marketing in follow up emails that you set up in your auto-responder. If you want you can spend some money advertising your opt-in page or go the free route for promoting it. However, don't expect to make sales right away. It can take a while for sales to trickle in.

There you have it, the choice is now your's. You can start a Shopify store, do affiliate marketing or you can start both if you have time and some money to invest.

Make sure to do some research before you decide your niche market.

Take your first step and keep going.

Good luck...

It depends. If you have a product that you confidently think will sell, start a Shopify store. On the other hand, if you don't, you can start affiliate marketing too little to no cost at all. I'd suggest having a blog though.

I choose affiliate marketing, because i joined a system about affiliate marketing couple of months ago and its worth it,

and i can just give 2-3 hours to my affiliate marketing business and it will be good, just sending emails etc...

Dropshipping using Shopify Is the easiest and fastest way to make money online right now.

You can start with less than $50 and start making sales within one week.

Affiliate marketing on the other hand...You have to understand this: There are two types of people doing affiliate marketing.

1) You build an audience, build trust with them, offer them value, then you promote an offer to your audience, they buy, then you make money. It takes a lot of time to reach that point, but this is how affiliate marketing the right way is done, and you can make a lot of money doing it.

2) Short term affiliate marketing. These people promote CPA offers and stuff like that, the relationship with the potential buyer is less important, but you need to spend more money upfront (versus in #1 where you built that relationship through a lot of content).

Both of these affiliate marketing strategies work, but I would say #1 would be the ultimate goal someone should want to aim at, because you build a solid audience that TRUST YOU, and even more important..FOLLOW YOU no matter what platform you use. This is a real, solid, business.

That being said, I believe dropshipping using Shopify is the easiest method to make money online right now and this is the method I would want to start with If I was a newbie again.

I prefer affiliate marketing as its not so complicated and i have as many products as i want to promote

I have been doing affiliate / CPA marketing for over 16 years and I'm always looking for additional revenue streams, but the Shopify model isn't for me. I know someone that's been running Shopify stores for quite a while and they are doing very well. However, it is definitely more work that affiliate marketing.

I heavily promoting PPL (pay per lead...lead generation) offers. This is because there is no credit card / purchase required to complete an offer. All a user has to do is fill out a form, so conversion rates are typically much higher compared to offers that require a sale to be made.

I favor offers that have a make, get or save money benefit to them, as they have overall worked the best. They also tend to have the greatest mass appeal (will be of interest to a large general audience), so the potential exists to produce high volume and they are fairly easy to cross promote on the back-end.

Some of the verticals I have done extremely well with are: education, insurance, loans, debt, credit, mortgage, assistance, discount offers, homeowner offers, etc...

The bulk of the offers that I promote pay around $20-$40 per lead, but there are others that pay more and less. However, you don't want to get caught up solely on what an offer pays because how well it converts is just as important. For example, if you have an offer that pays $9, but if it converts at 2X or more of a $20 offer, then it will perform about the same and possibly better. At the same time, if you have an offer that pays $90 and it converts poorly, it may not even be worth promoting.

Everything I promote is about mass appeal and the path of least resistance to generating conversions / $$$. It is far easier to get someone fill out a short form than to get them to pull out their credit card and make a purchase. So why struggle with trying to sell this or that, when you can provide free information that users want/need and get paid well doing it.

The online lead generation is a multi-billion dollar industry. Done right it can be far more profitable than many imagine. Everyone that I know that is in the business and knows what they are doing, for the most part, does 6-7 figures. While that's a huge range, much comes to one's ability to scale and effectively build / manage the infrastructure needed to scale.

Something to think about.

I choose affiliate marketing. Becuase you can start with a very low budget if you can do article writing and SEO. You just need to invest in buying domain and hosting!

Best of luck!

Another option you did not ask about that you may want to consider is setting up an FBA business on Amazon. Amazon has huge amounts of buyer traffic and they will take care of all fulfiment and customer satisfaction issues. It only makes sense to have your inventory on the site where most people go directly to when they plan on buying.


It is mentioned above "To sell a product you need good marketing, good products, good sales pages, good customer support, good supplier relations, good website, good SEO,


With an FBA business you just need to obtain a good (desirable) product at the right price and Amazon takes care of the rest >>> good marketing, good sales pages, good customer support, good supplier relations, good website with massive traffic and good SEO.

For a beginner, I would recommend you start with affiliate marketing first. It's easier to set up. It's also easier to learn. Once you understand how AM works and you have a successful system in place, it'll be easier to dive into ecommerce.

If you are just starting out, Shopify might be a good idea. You can get started fairly quick.

I would suggest buying a custom domain to integrate with your shopify store. Remember you can easily setup the store and also import products from Aliexpress. Make use of plugins and apps such as Oberlo, and Kit to assist you in your campaigns. The good thing is you can test run and even setup the whole store without spending a dime to see how it goes.

You can do both. Just search for the right software in SaaS. I would pick the one with omnichannel + affiliate program + google shopping feed generation + drop shipping capabilities. Right tools set will help you to manage orders and product returns in effective way.

You can start an online store and dropship products but you've to take care of three things

1. You've to be master of Facebook ads
2. Deliver products than other, mostly less than 3/4 days
3. And you've to maintain quality

To run an ecommerce store without headache you can go with Shopify. Shopify is only a platform for Ecommerce but now a days many marketers are creating the meanings of Shopify to anything else, they are showing this is like a money machine which is not true. I would suggest you to learn Facebook advertising and marketing seriously.

If you've need more help feel free to reply

Well its been a week now, ive got my shopify store up and running and i have spent a little over $50 at the moment with no return, although im getting traffic increase so far and my facebook page is starting to grow a little bit too. Will definitely report back once ive mad my first sale.

Both types of sites can give you good income. I think it all boils down on how challenging it is to set-up an e-commerce site VS a WordPress affiliate site. I was able to set-up both kinds of sites and I find it easier to build an affiliate site than an e-commerce store.

If you want to make money without spending much money, the quickest way is to sell a service and/or info product. Personally, I like to combine the two with Facebook ad campaigns.

--> Find a problem
--> Offer a service or product that solves it
--> Target people with that problem on Facebook
--> Landing page with free gift (short and sweet and answers a burning question or solves a big problem)
--> Immediate offer $7-97
--> If no, downsell
--> if yes, upsell
--> Second offer or consultation for a high ticket sale
--> Follow up with affiliate products and your high ticket offer via email.

If you can come close to breaking even on your first $7-97 offer you'll have a great funnel. Everything else is profit. Granted, it's easier said than done.

I would go for online store- sooner or later you will cross that bridge.

You'll have to invest some money in the beginning whether you decide to start with affiliate marketing or a shopify store.

I recommend that you start with affiliate marketing first in order to identify the vertical/product that you want to pursue. You will want to use native advertising as it is the best and most efficient way to drive traffic to your landing pages. There are many native advertising networks each with their own strengths, though I recommend finding a platform which allows you to aggregate your media buy under one account. These aggregator platforms also offer CPA optimization tools and also offer much better personal support.

Shopify offers a 14-day trial so you can test drive without investing any money

Affiliate marketing is a great way to start building your potential offering on your Shopify store. There are thousands of affiliate products that you can test on several avenues and be able to profit while testing out the waters on which products there's demand for. You can also identify which demographic you'd want to focus your store towards based on the profitability of your affiliate efforts.

Once you've ran numerous affiliate campaigns, you should definitely have an idea of which products to feature on your Shopify store. If you set up the right analytic tools, you should be able to identify your target demographic which will help you with your Facebook and Google campaigns to promote your store.