Merging e-Commerce and Affiliate Marketing

Last few days I was a bit absent here within the community of Wealthy Affiliate and I was really missing you all. But I am back here with new experiences which I am going to share today.

Frankly speaking, I was busy to build up one of my websites with a newer appearance. Previously, I was creating contents and promoting products through affiliate links on my website. I was promoting mainly Amazon products, but to be honest, there was not much traffic there. As a result that particular website was experiencing very poor sell (I am speaking here only about that particular website, not others).

I started to think about improving the performance of that website, and suddenly I came across one of Jay's training where incorporation of e-commerce in a website was described. I felt really interested like many other people and jumped into the new mission: Merging e-commerce and affiliate marketing on my website.

Here, in this short blog, I am sharing my experience with you. First of all, I would say, things are not easy, it needs hard work and time, but if you can cross all the barriers it is a golden opportunity for sure.

Others' vision in building an e-commerce

People are much fascinated about e-commerce because everyone is watching the profit of Amazon, eBay, Walmart, and other e-commerce platforms. Maybe you are one of them and interested to build up an e-commerce website. But I must remind, building an eCommerce needs much more effort and time than affiliate marketing. On the other hand, the profit margin is much higher in e-commerce if you compare with affiliate marketing. If an Amazon product gets sold from your link, you'll receive maximum 10% revenue, but selling a product from your e-commerce website you can earn much more than that, maybe up to 50-100% profit. So, naturally, e-commerce will attract you much. But, let me discuss the differences (I wouldn't say "difficulties", because nothing is easy in this world).

Big differences between e-commerce and Affiliate marketing

• In Affiliate marketing, you don't have to think much about product collection, shipping, delivery, inventory, etc. Amazon or eBay is doing that, you just need the promote their product with perfect blogging. In e-commerce, you have to check everything starting from product collection, shipping, delivery, inventory, customer care (most important).
• In affiliate marketing, if you choose the right keywords and create helpful articles, you can compete with other bloggers with your niche, because in blogging SEO is much important than advertisements. But in e-commerce the story is different: your products need to compete with millions of other similar products. Ads are much important there than SEO because to win the SEO race you have to work extremely hard. This doesn't mean you can avoid SEO factors. In fact still, you have to create contents for SEO.
• In Affiliate marketing, you need to just create contents and product reviews, that's all. More helpful your contents are, more will be the visitors. In e-commerce you have to focus on two factors: creating unique product descriptions for your real customers, and creating useful contents to attract customers and search engine optimization (SEO). Managing time for these two jobs is never easy. All big companies hire specific content writers to keep their website alive.
• In Affiliate marketing, you can create at least 3-5 blogs every week, which is good enough for SEO and traffic. But in e-commerce, you have to add at least 4-5 products per day including there unique descriptions (If your website cannot provide a huge product library of variable choice, customers will simply reject your website) and also need to create contents as much as possible (3-5) mainly for SEO and more traffic.
• If affiliate marketing you don't need many plugins to maintain your website. But in e-commerce a big list of plugins are required for customers' easy operations, may of those are expensive.
• Your commissions are relatively low in Affiliate marketing. You can sell products in a much higher profit margin in your e-commerce website.

Conclusive remarks

Without any confusion, merging e-commerce with affiliate marketing is a great idea, but you need to have enough potential, as I mentioned in the above section. You can promote Amazon or eBay products as an affiliate and also promote your own products in your blog contents, and at the same time, you can sell your physical products through your website.

So, it is a matter of double revenue.

Nowadays dropshipping is a popular e-commerce method and many companies offer you to create a dropshipping store. It, of course, reduces some of your activities in building the website and selling products, such as you'll get a wide variety of product selection options, no need to think about shipping and inventory, etc. But still, you have to maintain all other jobs.

That's all for today. I'll be back soon with more information on these topics.