Drop shipping or affiliate marketing

Many people can not differentiate between drop shipping business and internet affiliate marketing. so I would like here to create a short overview of both affiliate and drop shipping business.

1-affiliate marketing would be the process when you sell other people product (digital or physical) and acquire commission for any sale you made.

2-drop shipping business is accomplished by selling physical products online without necessity to have products currently stored with you. third part companies called drop-shipping companies or drop-shippers will store and ship these products for you.

In order to do an excellent drop shipping business you need to:

1-first select the niche that you want to work on.
2-find suppliers to your items. you can benefit highly from directories like salehoo and worldwide brands.
3-you can benefit from terapeak to find what sells best?
4-list the items in your website or shop.
5-if someone buys from you - go to drop shipper and reorder the same item again.
6-the drop shipper will ship your item directly to the customer.

Yeah... And don't forget dropshipping can be very risky business. Even if your partner company is the most reliable, there can occur problems. As a dropshipper you'll have to explain somehow to your customers. Also you'll have to deal with returns which can be tricky if you dropship internationally.

All businesses are filled with risk. The great thing about dropshipping, you own the customer versus in affiliate marketing, every customer is someone else's.

You can still incorporate a lead capture into your affiliate funnel and retain customers. Affiliate marketing can be used just like dropshipping models and the customer will be oblivious to it (in most cases). You can mix your dropshipping site with affiliate products whenever a lapse is evident in genre offerings. There are many sites using multi-modal (model) instances in their platform.

I prefer dropshipping. In my opinion, its much easier.

I really think that drop shipping is a big hassle and a waist of time. It takes a lot to be able to actually make some decent profit out of it because there are alot of steps, other than actually selling it. People are always picky and if something goes wrong its not that easy to deal with the buyer and their complaints and all that B.S... i think AF is your best bet pal.