Selling products online without inventory can be done in a number of ways:
- Drop shipping – sell another company’s products and ship them directly to the customer
- Affiliate marketing – sell other people’s products and services through a unique tracking link online
- Shopify store – can be set up with a simple plugin to directly link to existing drop shipping/affiliate products
- POD – Print On Demand – printing T-shits and clothing on demand with specific logos and designs.
- Fulfilment by Amazon (FBA) – Products are handled and shipped by Amazon fulfilment centres.
- Sell Digital Products – With a digital product, you can automate the sale online. No need to handle or ship products yourself. You can also find other people’s digital products which you can sell (affiliate marketing).
- MLM – Multi-level marketing is a business model in which people recruit other sellers and earn a percentage of their profit.
Selling Products Online Without Inventory
While there are certain business models which can help you sell online without products of your own, many of these services will charge a premium for their assistance. Some will only charge a percentage of what you earn and some can be done without a charge, (other than your marketing efforts). Of all these different business models my favourite is affiliate marketing for a number of reasons:
- You don’t need your own products with affiliate marketing
- Choose from a number of products available online
- There’s multiple affiliate programs you can join and thousands of products you can choose from
Like all other methods of selling online, there’s always a catch! Affiliate marketing like drop shipping, or Print On Demand or a Shopify store will all require you to market your website/product. Marketing is therefore the key skill you will need to learn in order to be profitable with most of these methods.
While many business models will work and become profitable with the right amount of customers, it’s still your job to find those customers and websites don’t serve themselves. You must learn how to send the right customers to your products to generate sales. Even if you’re not having to fulfil those product deliveries yourself.
Selling Products Online Without Inventory: Traffic To A Website
Setting up a website to sell something is the easy part, whether you use a Shopify Store, the drop shipping or affiliate marketing business models. Once your store is set up, it has the potential to sell products to its visitors. However, that is only the potential store and you’ll need to find a strategy for sending targeted website traffic to your store if you want to make any sales.
To do this there are a few different strategies:
- Paid traffic – is the fastest method to get people to your online store. Pay per click according to your marketing budget.
- Organic traffic – is another way you can attain an audience for your online store. This requires you to create content and work on your SEO – search engine optimisation so you can attain free traffic from the search engines.
- Social media is another option for finding potential customers to send to your website and there are paid and unpaid social media marketing methods.
Whatever methods you choose for your marketing strategy has a huge impact on your success. With paid marketing you can get traffic quickly. But with organic marketing it can take much longer and is much less scalable.
Why Choose Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular methods of building an income online through selling someone else’s products/services. Amazon, for example has an affiliate program which anyone can join. Once joined you can choose any products from Amazon to promote from a website. Or, use your affiliate link to promote products anywhere online.
Amazon though is not the best payer in terms of affiliate products. There are far more lucrative products to choose from. High ticket affiliate products and subscription products for example are the best payers. A high ticket affiliate product will typically pay $500 and above per sale. Subscription products are good for affiliates because they pay out recurring commissions. So a single sale can bring in monthly commissions for potentially years to come; especially if you choose valuable products which are necessary for business, for example.
An example of a good digital product to sell is Aweber. Aweber is an email autoresponder and it’s useful for online business owners.