If you’re new to the world of making money online but have been watching videos and doing a little research, you may have heard of affiliate marketing and dropshipping. What is the difference between affiliate marketing and dropshipping you may ask. I’ll explain in this article.
I’ve been doing affiliate marketing for around 16 months now and I recently tried my hand at dropshipping. I was already making some money with niche websites but I kept seeing these young people on Youtube just killing it with dropshipping, like tens of thousands of dollars a month in a short amount of time. There was no Google Sandbox or long waiting time for your site to gain authority and rank. It’s very enticing to people who have that “make money online fast” mentality.
I was totally realistic going in, I knew what it was and that it’s not as ethical as other methods of making money online. I’ll explain why I feel this way below.
What is the difference between affiliate marketing and dropshipping?
Dropshipping is when you sell physical products but do not have any inventory. You promote the products like affiliate marketing, but customers actually make a purchase on your website and you are then responsible for fulfilling the order through a supplier of your choosing. Your source will then ship the product from their warehouse directly to the customer. You never have to touch the product unless it’s for testing and product images.
Affiliate marketing is when you are promoting someone else’s product on your own website. You use special links from your affiliate network for each product recommendation. When someone makes a purchase after clicking on one of those links, you get a piece of the pie. Over time you can get hundreds or even thousands of these sales commissions every month.
Here are some of the main differences between the two.
Dropshipping
Pros
- Can start making money much faster
- Can scale very quickly
- Work from home
Cons
- Advertising and promotion is a must, SEO isn’t a viable way to get traffic
- Mush less passive, dropshipping requires more active work to run the store
- Most stores don’t have a long life and you have to ride trends with product
- Takes more of an up front investment to get started
- Higher overhead
- Some aspects are unethical
- More difficult to succeed
Affiliate marketing
Pros
- Much more passive income, runs on autopilot
- You can scale it over time to a significant income
- Work from home
- Feels more honest
- Less liability
- Safer option with better chance of success
Cons
- A lot of work on the front end
- Takes a long time to see success
- Some people never get the hang of it