Affiliate Marketing Vs Dropshipping: Which is the better business method?

Disclosure Bear in mind that some of the links in this post are affiliate links and if you go through them to make a purchase I will earn a commission. Keep in mind that I link these companies and their products because of their quality and not because of the commission I receive from your purchases. The decision is yours, and whether or not you decide to buy something is completely up to you. ×

Hey guys, welcome to Fruitful Income. In this post, we’re going to be talking about which Business model is better, affiliate marketing or dropshipping with AliExpress. I know you guys have heard a lot about both businesses and, therefore, have tons of questions.

So, in this post, I’m going to be answering the following questions:

1. Which method is easiest for beginners to make money with?
2. Which method makes the most money?
3. Which method is the most passive and truly makes you money in your sleep?

Truth be told, you’re going to discover that there’s no one business model that’s better than the other. They are both quite different and they each have their own advantages and disadvantages.

So, let’s jump straight into it.

What’s the Difference between affiliate marketing and dropshipping?

I want to start off by quickly looking at each of the different business models and discuss how they make their money.

affiliate marketing

With this business model, your main goal is to refer customers or clients to someone else’s business. If a customer makes a purchase from that said business, you get a commission.

ClickBank, for example, is an affiliate program that you can sign up for. They offer lifestyle and digital products from different manufacturers and allow digital marketers to promote those products to potential customers.

If you sign up to promote an affiliate offer and refer a customer to purchase any of the products, you get a percent commission on the product’s sales price. Commission rates can vary but some products rates can reach up to 75% or even 100%.

Each affiliate’s earnings are recorded through links with a tracking code inside of them (called a Hop link). When someone clicks on your specific link and purchases the offer, you get that commission on the sale.

There is no single way to promote your affiliate offers. You can start making YouTube videos about your offer or you might start up a blog about it or you can even choose to run paid ads to it. Whichever method best suits your strengths is probably the best one to go with.

Ali Express Dropshipping

Ok, now let’s look at how you can make money with AliExpress Drop Shipping.

This method is when you set up an online store using a platform like Shopify and you list products for sale, that are being sold on aliexpress.com.

AliExpress is a website that allows you to buy items individually and directly for manufacturers that are based inChina. Therefore, the prices of these items are super cheap.

What you then do is take an item on AliExpress, list in your store, and put a huge markup on the price, usually by running paid ads to your store (Facebook ads are perhaps the best method).

When customers come to your store and purchase the items in it, you then go to AliExpress and purchase the item that the customer bought and get it shipped directly to them while keeping the difference in profit. This is the dropshipping process in a nutshell.

As you can see, both of these business models are extremely different and they each have their own strengths and weaknesses.

I recommend taking a look at which method looks the most fun and interesting to you and which one would play off your strengths more.

1.Which means it is the easiest for beginners to make money.

Affiliate Marketing

One of the challenging aspects of starting a Dropshipping store is that nobody knows who you are. When you advertise your store to someone on Facebook, you are essentially asking them to come on in and buy an item from you, despite the fact that you have built up no trust or credibility with them.

For beginners, this is one advantage of affiliate marketing. You don’t have to worry about building trust because the merchant of the offer you are promoting has most likely already done this part for you.