E-commerce vs Affiliate Marketing

What are the disadvantages and advantages of e-commerce and the idea of selling actual products over other Online Business Options?

Many marketers start an online business career as Affiliate Marketers (selling software and e-books that are downloadable via the Internet), as Internet Marketers (teaching other how to run an online business), as Speculators (buying low and selling high through eBay, Craigslist, Forex, etc), doing Online Surveys or other Services that can be rendered via the Internet (copyrighting, website or graphic design, driving traffic to websites using various methods, etc), and much more. Many of these online businesses actually require a lot of skills, long hours, dedication, and huge financial input whilst producing varying results. E-commerce or drop shipping (selling actual goods that are delivered via courier or postal services) has its own little obstacles, unless being properly planned, implemented and with the right partners to automate most processes.

The potential downsides to e-commerce that are resolved by Niche Blueprint:

• You will be figuring out what to sell so you’re risking just a little bit of your time and energy on something that’s likely to succeed and only starting on something that has a decent chance for success,
• Finding drop-ship suppliers (no one wants to deal with inventory and shipping issues),
• Finding the right e-commerce store software so you can try these out quickly and cheaply,
• Setting up the shopping cart, and
• Getting traffic to the store through Search Engine Optimization (Pay per Click advertising an option later on).

There is so much that’s great about it:

• You control the price,
• You don’t have to write a ‘sales page’,
• It’s relatively easy to drive traffic with SEO (if you do the research correctly),
• There is no Google quality score to ever worry about (if you choose to do PPC for traffic),
• There’s no arguing with Google about whether you’re an affiliate and trying to do a bridge page,
• You can make use of templates for the web site so you don’t have to design one from scratch,
• You can easily outsource the operation of the store (assuming drop-shipping),
• You can sell the site, it’s a ‘real business’ that has a bit more ‘security’ than traditional affiliate marketing arbitrage opportunities,
• If you have the right software and training, you can set up a site in an hour and you can be testing a store with only a $10 investment (the domain name),
• The list just goes on and on.