Affiliate marketing vs personal online shop

Both, affiliate marketing and online shop have own advantages and disadvantages but what business method is the best? In my opinion, you can't answer into this question straightforward, but I would like to mention main information about these business methods.

Affiliate marketing

Advantages: Of course, the main affiliate system advantage is the opportunity to sell goods without ordering it up-front. Also, you don't have to worry about warehousing and goods turnover problems as your affiliate provides you a full support. In the most cases, you will also get all advertising material – banners, promotional texts, videos and so on, all you wil have to do is to use it for goods promotion.

Disadvantages: Many people think that they don't have to invest (or invest very low amount of money) in order to start a work in the affiliate marketing, however they are wrong. Yes, you can try to promote the goods in forums or in your own articles but the real truth is that you need quite a lot of money for advertising: let's take an example of ''Google adsense'': if you pay 0.2$ for one visitor to your website, you will need at least 10 $ per day budget to have a good selling results because the average visitors-orders ratio for goods with price of ~80 $ is about 100:1, this means that you will have to spend ~20$ for one order so, if you have low affiliate commissions, you can even loose your money.

Personal online shop:

Advantages: You will have all goods yourself, so you will be able to adapt to the market: sell goods at the higher price when demand is rising and make the discounts when you have overstock. Also, online shops are more unique than affiliate websites because it have personal web designs, different goods, so customers remember shops more easily than affiliate marketing websites. Finally, you will be able to provide better support as you can make as many products photos as you want and provide a full support, this won't be possible in the affiliate marketing, unless you will buy goods yourself and then analyze them in order to provide good support for your customers.

Disadvantages: Sadly, if you own the online shop, you will have to pay not only for advertisements but also for your goods, warehousing costs (if you will be selling a lot of items) and higher hosting costs (as online shop need a reliable hosting with SSL certificate).

To sum up, an affiliate marketing and online shop have both advantages and disadvantages, so you have to decide what business method suits you best by yourself, however don't trust all information which you can find on the internet, as, for example, myth that affiliate marketing is a business method for which you don't need any investment - sometimes, affiliate website advertising may cost you more than personal online shop with all goods.

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