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Are you wanting to find out how to sell products online without inventory? Well, I know of three ways you can do this but all three ways will need a website.
You cannot sell without a website (long term anyway) but you can sell products online without inventory for sure because there are so many choices these days online.
Out of the three, I’m using one of them and I like the one I use because it brings me free organic traffic that’s highly targeted.
The other two options, you may need to do paid advertising to get traffic unless you use the method I use to get free organic traffic which I’ll explain everything in this post.
The three options I will talk about today to sell products online without inventory are:
Then I’ll tell you “What I Use and Why I Chose This Way” vs the other two.
PRINT-ON-DEMAND SERVICES
If you haven’t heard of this option, there are many services that offer this now online. What you do is set up an online store and you connect your store to one of these print-on-demand services.
You will design your own t-shirts, cups, mugs, tote bags, hats and many other offerings these services provide.
The design can be made by you or you can outsource that. Once you have the designs you want to sell, you will put the designs on the products you want to sell.
Usually, the print-on-demand service will provide mock images of the products and you will put the designs on those mock images to use as your product listings.
When you sell something from your shop, you will collect money from your customer and the order goes directly to the print-on-demand service.
The print-on-demand service will print the products ordered and will charge you for them plus shipping, and they will ship the products out directly to your customers.
The shipping label on the box will have the company name and logo you provide to the print-on-demand service to use.
You make money by charging your customers however much you want to make!
For example, a t-shirt may cost you $15 from the print-on-demand service plus $5 shipping. You may then want to charge your customer $25 plus $6 shipping to make a profit.
This option is great for anyone who want to sell t-shirts, mugs, totes, and hats. Some even have keychains and some other products as well.
An easy way to get this option started is getting your website started at Shopify and use one of their third party apps called Printful, which is a print-on-demand service. Customer service is usually handled by yourself but returns are handled by Printful.
Shopify specializes in e-commerce and a leader in helping millions of people open up their online stores, and with Printful integrating easily with their interface, this would be the easiest way to get this set up quickly.
Shopify provides you with the hosting of your online store and has a very user friendly back end interface to easily set up your online shop.
DROP SHIPPING SERVICES
Using a drop shipping service is very much like print-on-demand but it’s more for other physical products.
Some drop shippers have websites that they already host for you and you just pay them a fixed monthly fee for the website, or you can create your own e-commerce site.
You can set your own prices based on what the drop shipper charges you for the cost of the products plus shipping them to your customers.
There are drop shipper directories like World Wide Brands but Shopify also has drop shipping options and guides if you sign up with them since their pricing for their online stores are probably cheaper than most drop shippers.
Drop shipping makes it easy for anyone to start their own online shop without holding any inventory or using a lot of money to start such a business, unlike a brick and mortar store.
For this option you will deal with all customer service yourself as well and you’ll have to deal with returns and exchanges with the drop shopper.
If you can find a manufacturer that sells to their products to you very cheap, this route can be a pretty profitable.
AFFILIATE MARKETING
This method of selling products without having any inventory is becoming one of the fastest growing industry in the last few years.
With affiliate marketing, you can make money by just promoting other people’s products to others and if the people you are promoting to buys the product, you make a commission.
Many well known companies already have affiliate programs you can join to promote their products like Amazon, Target, Best Buy, Walmart, Nike, Apple and many more big companies.
More and more companies are offering affiliate programs because they see the huge potential of having hundreds or thousands of people promoting their products for them and have seen big increases in sales because of it.
You can promote other people’s products through your website, email list, social media, or even offline. However, you need to see what the rules are before you join the affiliate programs because some will say you are not allowed to use off-line methods or even emails.
Most common way is to use a blog to promote other people’s products and usually you do so by choosing a niche/a certain topic.
The commission rates are controlled by the companies offering the affiliate program and you can make from pennies to hundreds per sale… some programs, you can even make thousands per sale, but that’s just to show how wide range this can be.
The most successful affiliate marketers out there are making 6 figures a month! But, it’s also very possible to earn a full time income with this method and work from home.
Wealthy Affiliate specializes in training people on how to start this business, teaching them all about affiliate marketing and how to set up your website to do this.
Wealthy Affiliate even offers a Free Starter membership to give you 2 free websites, click here for more information and check out a video tour of their training platform:
WHAT I USE AND WHY I CHOSE THIS WAY
I’ve been making money online since 2013 and I’ve tried a few different things. Even before that, I’ve been building websites since the early years when I had to learn coding.
These days, it’s so easy to build websites and you don’t need to learn coding anymore so anyone can get into this game if they want to.
It’s still a lot of work, don’t get me wrong. It’s a lot to learn if you haven’t done any of it, but we all start from zero knowledge when learning something new but if you have the right training, you’ll start off on the right foot.
AFFILIATE MARKETING VS ONLINE SHOPS
Having had my experiences, I have found that affiliate marketing is the best bet! I feel this because I have learned that having an online shop doesn’t get you any organic traffic.
I have had three online shops, I have used Printful for one and others were handmade goods, I find that online shops go nowhere.
I mean, people can’t really find your shop on the internet, you don’t get a lot of organic search traffic and it’s always about promotions, free and paid.
With affiliate marketing, basically blogging (best way to do affiliate marketing), you learn how to use keywords that people use to search on the internet and your blog will show up on those search results if you have done your keyword research correctly.
With an online shop, your shop is pretty much static once you set up your product listings, after that there’s not a lot of other activity going on with your shop, so your shop won’t rank well on search engines because of this.
On the other hand, a blog will rank well because it’s always churning out great information for people to find (that’s if you put in the work to create such great content) so it’s dynamic and search engines love that.
Especially, if you are writing on things that help solve the problems people are searching to find or fix!
This is the key to affiliate marketing, it’s not so much about selling as it’s about helping others. If you know how to fix a flat tire on a bike, then that’s great, someone is searching this problem out somewhere because they don’t know how.
So if you have a blog post about how to fix a flat tire on a bike, your website comes up in their search, they read your blog post, and they find it’s super useful, they will click the links to go buy the things you’ve recommended to fix their flat tire with.
Because they bought the supplies through your website, you will make a commission!
When I say they buy through your website, I meant, linked through your website. There will be affiliate links on your website to tell them where to go to buy the supplies.
When they click on the affiliate link, it will take them to the online store like Target to buy the supplies at, the link tracks that reader going from your website to the company’s website and that’s how they know to pay you the commission.
The way search engines work these days, I’d rather have a blog than an online shop because you will get a lot more free targeted organic traffic than any online shop will ever get on its own.
You will always have to promote your shop online, offline, everywhere. It won’t be found unless it’s searched out for its specific name or domain.
With a blog, yes you can do other promotions, but there are 3.4 billion people nowadays on the internet searching for things, all kinds of things, and if you have a blog, you will have a chance to rank on page 1 of these searches being made and make commissions easier than making a sale on an online shop.
If you had both and you do NO promotions on either site, a blog will always make more money in the end especially when as it ages; the more it ages, the better it ranks on the search engines, the more money you’ll make.
That’s how I see it from my experience. Not only that, it’s passive income, you can make money from that how to fix a flat tire post over and over again for a long time to come.
HOW I GOT STARTED IN AFFILIATE MARKETING
With anything new, it’s best to get training because when I tried to do it early on without training, I completely failed because I didn’t know how to set up my website properly, or know how to use keywords, or how to write content that converted.
When I started this blog back in September, 2016, I knew I wanted to do it right from the beginning and I was so happy to have found Wealthy Affiliate.
You will literally have everything you need on that training platform:
- Easy to use website builder;
- Best high speed and secured web hosting;
- Step-by-step training that is in-depth and with beginners in mind;
- Friendly community for amazing support and learning;
- Live chat to get instant help;
- Free keyword research tool;
- Weekly Live Webinars for continual learning for your online business;
- 2 Free Websites to start;
- Free Starter membership – try before you buy!
There’s so much to say about them, there’s an entire review post about Wealthy Affiliate that includes a video tour of the platform here:
Go check it out and I know you won’t regret it.
I’ve been a Premium member since I found it and I will be there for YOU through your journey too.
If you like affiliate marketing and think that’s what you want to use to build your online business, Wealthy Affiliate will help you reach your goals as they make it their business to care about your success!
You can sign up to Wealthy Affiliate here instead if you are eager to start for FREE:
Whatever you choose, choose one that fits you the most. I wish you best to luck in the path you take and hope you will be on your way to making money online!
If you have any questions or thoughts about how to sell products without inventory or Wealthy Affiliate, please do not hesitate to leave me a comment below. I always reply to all my awesome readers! 🙂
Let’s make money online!
So you’ve heard there are ways to sell products online without inventory and you want to know how it’s done. The idea of building an online business with little to no money, no overhead and low risk is appealing.
Yes that’s right Hunter, building an affiliate marketing business is the way to go for a low risk business because you just have to pay for training (unless you’re already an expert at website building and know how to write self traffic generating content), your domain, and hosting. But, at Wealthy Affiliate, you can get the training and high quality hosting together for a low price than many hosting plans I’ve seen, so this training platform is totally worth it.
I hope you will choose to affiliate marketing as your solution to selling products online without inventory. 🙂
Grace