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Affiliate or Drop Ship

I have learned a great deal about the differences of affiliate businesses versus drop ship businesses this week.  For an affiliate business you set up an internet site and advertisers share links or banners on your site to sell merchandise.  So this blog (if I has subscribers) would be the perfect place to start an affiliate business.  While affiliate businesses are easy to set up, take few resources to maintain and produce residual income, it might not be the best bet for an online business.  Affiliates have to wait for customers to click the link and buy the goods and services before they will see any money.  However, a drop ship company might be a better choice if you want more involvement in your business.  You select the items you want to sell on your website.  You can select many different items and never have to carry an inventory.  Once your customer buys the item from you, you contact your drop shipper and they send the item to the customer directly.  The down side to this business is that if the customer receives a bad item, or needs to return the item, it is up to you to figure out how to get the item back to the drop shipper for a return.  Many drop shippers don't have a return policy, so you could be in trouble when it comes to people requesting their money back.
There is no fail safe options when it comes to setting up a business, so you have to weight all the pros and cons of each method and decide for yourself which is right for you.   

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