Affiliate Marketing / Drop shipping

[LeroysBoots]

"My wife is obsessed with the above as her way to earning a living, I told her to carry on being a teacher ! Anyone dabbled in this ?, not teaching ! Cheers"

[mashed in maryland]

"Know of a couple people who've done Amazon FBA. Basically source cheap shit wholesale on Alibaba.com, tgey send it to an Amazon warehouse, you use Amazon to sell it, and they do all the postage and packing etc for you. Its doable but it takes time and requires start-up costs that no one selling courses on how to do it are upfront about (importing shit from China isn't cheap or straightforward) plus involves a lot of knowledge on search engine optimisation etc. It becomes a full time job and income is never guaranteed but expenditures are. Tell your missus that most people who make big money on this sort of thing make their money by selling online courses on how they did it, rather than actually doing it. But if she's a teacher she might have natural flair and this time next year you'll be millionaires. So fuck knows."

[Westham67]

On The Ball 3:18 Thu May 9 You must be an ITK OG to know such a term

[stubbo]

"None of this stuff is 'easy money'. For both you need a platform that reaches people to sell your chosen product(s). And you won't be the only people selling those products...so how do you convince people to buy them from you as opposed to someone else? Secondly, the margins. If you assume you make no more than 5% of a sale price, to match up to even a part time teacher's salary of ~18k, you'd need to sell £360,000 of product (and that's assuming 100% profit, not having to pay for advertising etc to gain your reach). The people that make the real money in this space are the people selling the dream. The mechanics of doing it are very straightforward...the ability to do it successfully...much less so. As for 'why would you do this over have a box of stuff in your garage'...all about avoiding the cost of buying stock up front. All you really do is find sales and pass them on to the seller for a small cut of the profit. There's no risk in shelling out a load of money for a product that doesn't sell....just the risk of spending time and effort trying to find customers. If your wife really wants to go this road of high volume, low margin sales, I'd suggest she looks into something she can source quickly and cheaply locally on demand and sell it in a format that isn't readily available. E.g. Look at what Screwfix of Toolstation sell as a multi-pack item, break it into singles and sell the singles on Ebay. Lots of people don't do the research to shop around...will assume Ebay is the cheapest way to buy something, or will not want 10 of something, so will pay a bit more per item for one of something, than pay less per item but end up with 9 of something they don't want...basically arbitrage using small volume multi-packs. It's not real Dropshipping, as you have to go and buy the item, but you can collect the money/sale up front, you can see from existing listings what is selling and can barge into the market of, and it's readily available. But again....if you're only making a 50p-£1.50 per item....that's a lot of sales and trips to the post office to make any meaningful money."

[On The Ball]

"Shouldn't she be trying this as a ""side hustle"" (to coin a phrase I heard recently)?"

[madeeasy]

"Don't know anything about it so excuse the ignorance in my questions. My understanding is you have a website or app to brand, market and sell a product, the ""drop shipping company"" store and deliver the product. But you have to have the product to sell in the first place? If that is right and you are selling, for arguments sake mobile phone covers. Why not just have them in a few boxes in the garage and package and post them yourself to save that middle man cost? Sorry If I have got it wrong. I have had my BIL talk about it and can't quite get my head around it. Please explain where I am right or wrong!"