In addition to Amazon stores, what other cross-border e-commerce projects can make money?

We have talked a lot about Amazon store operations and independent self-built websites, but it seems that a large number of readers are still confused and can't find the direction. To be honest, it is not easy to open a store on Amazon or operate an independent website, especially for sellers who work alone. Even if they successfully pass the threshold of opening a store, they will later find that there are so many tricks and tricks hidden behind the threshold. trap. In the cross-border e-commerce industry, it is customary to compare new sellers and novice sellers to leeks. Because they lack professional knowledge or independent thinking ability, they will be cut off by cross-border platforms and various service providers if they are not careful.

As we all know, competition on Amazon is becoming increasingly fierce. The Amazon market has entered the Red Ocean. It is not easy to stand out in the Red Ocean. Even the deceived Amazon training industry has lost its early prosperity and gradually declined, replaced by independent self-built websites. Well, I don’t object to sellers setting up independent self-built websites. As I said in previous blogs, independent self-built websites are the icing on the cake, not a timely help. A novice who has no experience in cross-border e-commerce, doesn’t understand SEO optimization, and doesn’t know how to attract traffic outside the site, just goes to build an independent website. Obviously, this will be very difficult.

A large number of readers have a one-sided understanding of cross-border e-commerce. They always think about getting rich overnight. Starting a business is risky. Please treat cross-border e-commerce entrepreneurship rationally. There are many people who leave the market with losses. As someone who has been there, I also hope that I can share some of my own experiences so that more newcomers can avoid detours, be less deceived, and minimize entrepreneurial risks. If you have carefully read the previous articles of Chenfei Blog, you should have some basic understanding of the thresholds and risks of this industry. Nowadays, opening and operating a store on the Amazon platform has gradually become a high-risk job. Malicious competition is rampant, FBA stocking costs remain high, listing and store closure risks caused by fraudulent order evaluations, overseas tax compliance costs have risen sharply, etc. The risk is high, but the profits obtained are getting lower and lower, or even losses. Opening and operating an Amazon store is a challenge. Do you get braver as you go, or do you give up when things get better? Give it a try.

The question is, is there any way to do cross-border e-commerce and run Amazon with low risk and no threshold, and the key is not to deal with after-sales service? Don’t worry, let’s analyze them one by one:

Low risk:

We can understand that there is no cost investment, no need to purchase goods or prepare goods, so there will be no dead inventory; You don’t need to pack and ship goods yourself, and you don’t have to pay logistics fees, so you don’t have to worry about product damage or logistics loss; you don’t need to pay monthly rent or sales commissions every month, and you don’t have to worry about the store being shut down due to violations.

Low threshold:

No need to register a company by yourself, no need to ask an accountant to file annual tax returns, no need to register a US trademark, no VAT tax number or EIN employer identification number, no UPC code, and I have never done any Amazon brand registration, so I am alone. This threshold is low enough.

After thinking about it, it seems that only Dropshipping meets the above requirements of low risk and low threshold. No, this lonely man doesn’t even want to take care of after-sales service. Dropshipping seems not to be possible yet. How can such a good thing be possible? Wait, there seems to be a way to meet the above requirements. Isn't this Affiliate? Yes, don’t forget, Amazon also has its own website alliance-Amazon Affiliate Program!

What is the Amazon Affiliate Program?

In short, it is an affiliate program in which users promote and sell Amazon products through their own websites, blogs, YouTube channels and other social media to obtain sales rebates.

In China, we are accustomed to refer to such projects as website alliances or advertising alliances, such as Baidu Alliance, Taobao Alliance, JD Alliance, etc., while abroad, such alliances are usually collectively referred to as Affiliate, such as Amazon Affiliate, CJ Affiliate, Shopify affiliates, etc. Of course, there are also some other names, such as the most famous Google Adsense and Shareasale. Still don’t understand? To put it more simply, it is a form of online earning.

Speaking of online earning, this is another huge industry. The emergence of online earning is even much earlier than the current cross-border e-commerce industry. Earning money online sounds tacky and gives people the first impression that this industry seems to be fooling people. The online earning industry is very similar to the cross-border e-commerce industry. They have also experienced the era of cheating. The same routines experienced by the cross-border industry have also appeared in the online earning industry. For example, in the early years, those fake original works defrauded Google traffic. Group fraud traffic, collection fraud traffic, these routines are the same as today's Amazon fraud evaluation. Black technology? collection? Online earning is the ancestor of cross-border e-commerce.

Don’t look down on tacky online earning. To this day, online earning is still the main traffic channel for many advertisers and stores. Of course, what we are talking about here is overseas online earning and has nothing to do with domestic website alliances. Any website owner who has some experience will never bother with these domestic website alliances. Those who make small profits are not easy to fool.

Speaking of making money online, I think of overseas collection. Do you still remember the cross-border e-commerce payment channel Payoneer? We found some early introductions to Payoneer from Baidu Encyclopedia:

You read that right. In the early years, Payoneer was dedicated to online earning (website alliance) collection services. At that time, there was really no Amazon business. It was also a coincidence that around 2013-2014, Shenzhen sellers started selling products on Amazon and accidentally discovered that they could use a U.S. bank account issued by Payoneer to collect funds from Amazon. Gradually, the amount collected became higher and higher, even exceeding the amount on the website. Alliance collection volume. It was not until 2015 that Payoneer began to vigorously promote Amazon's collection business in China. Slowly, other collection companies also began to appear, and today's cross-border e-commerce industry is booming.

Google Adsense, CJ Affiliate, Shareasale and Amazon Affiliate are currently the largest website advertising alliance projects. Among them, the one that Chinese website owners are most familiar with is naturally Google Adsense. I think there must be many cross-border e-commerce sellers like me, who have switched careers from website owners to the cross-border e-commerce industry. As a person who has experienced the transformation of the industry, I have truly witnessed the carnival and decline of Google Adsense in China. In the early years, at the end of each month, long queues would form at the Postal Savings Bank of China branches across the country. Countless website owners would collect Western Union remittances here at this time, and receive advertising revenue from Google, ranging from as little as 200-300 US dollars. , up to tens of thousands of dollars.

The Google Adsense income of some overseas website owners is staggeringly high. If you often google search questions to find answers, then you must have heard of Wikihow.com. The owner of the website is Jack Herrick. He has built a website to help users solve problems in their daily lives. It is currently the website with the highest Google Adsense income in the world. How high is it? $7 million/month. In addition, what is particularly worth mentioning here is Hongkiat.com, a blogger from Hong Kong, Hongkiat Lim, who ranks seventh in the world in terms of Google Adsense income, with US$440,000 per month. The key point is that he still accomplished everything in a personal way. (List of the top 10 Google Adsense income websites in the world in 2019)

In the website alliance industry, Google Adsense is the well-deserved king, including the income of YouTube channel bloggers. Many people will wonder why these YouTube channel bloggers do not work all day long, traveling around, eating and drinking. Many YouTube channels produce very well-made videos, and the value of the content they share is even higher than many paid trainings on the market. That's right, because they get very high advertising revenue and affiliate product recommendation revenue from Google Adsense. Some of them don't like the paid training industry at all. In order to get more fans' attention and increase the number of video views, the only way is to do nothing. Reserved to share their professional knowledge and practical experience with users. This is why more and more professional cross-border e-commerce sellers use Google and YouTube as their main learning channels, and do not care about domestic paid training at all.

This is a digression to tell you some background knowledge about website alliances. Let’s get back to the topic. In addition to Google Adsense, Amazon Alliance, as the king of the e-commerce website affiliate category, is also a project worth trying. Especially for cross-border e-commerce sellers, the ingenious combination of the Amazon alliance and independent self-built websites is another combo that can, to a certain extent, boost the sales of their own Amazon store products and improve search result rankings. Today, we will focus on the Amazon Affiliate Program.

How to register for Amazon Affiliat?

Amazon Alliance: /

I won’t go into details here about how to register for the Amazon Alliance. In fact, there is nothing to talk about. Just follow the official instructions and complete it step by step. Of course, if If you can't even register, it's actually not recommended to bother with the Amazon Alliance. You've already surrendered before the battle has even begun, let alone how to run a self-built website, blog, and YouTube channel to promote and sell Amazon products to get rebates. .

How much commission rebate can I get through Amazon Affiliate?

Amazon affiliate commission sharing table: /help/operating/schedule

The maximum is 10%, and most mainstream products are concentrated between 5% and 8%. As an Amazon seller, if the profit from selling products in your store is actually less than 8%, you may consider switching from an e-commerce seller to becoming an affiliate website owner. It's the same way to make money. The risks you take when operating an affiliate are much smaller than the risks you take as a seller. There is no need to worry about FBA stocking or being maliciously attacked. You can focus enough on sales promotion and freely choose the products you want to promote from countless Amazon products. Of course, this is also a product selection strategy. It also directly affects product promotion volume and sales rebate ratio.

How does Amazon Associates collect payment?

The three current payment options remain the same – bank transfer, gift card or check.

The official recommendation is bank transfer. Similar to the payment method of Amazon e-commerce business, you can use the U.S. bank account number issued by Payoneer to collect funds from the Amazon alliance, which is convenient and fast.

However, according to user feedback, the Amazon Alliance now requires that only those registered with a U.S. payee address, a U.S. tax ID or Social Security Number SSN information can use direct bank transfer to collect money (that is, use Payoneer to collect money) payment), otherwise only gift cards or checks can be accepted.

Chenfei’s blog talks a lot about cross-border collection, but there are problems with collection here. If you choose to use a check, there is a long waiting time, coupled with the clean collection, it usually takes about 45 days to get it. The key point is that the check may be lost in the mail. Of course, although it takes a long time, the funds will eventually be received. If you want to use a U.S. bank account issued by Payoneer to collect payments more quickly, a U.S. tax ID number is a prerequisite. How to solve it? "Registering a US company, you read that right, you don't have to worry about those troubles when using a US company for cross-border e-commerce" and "Do it yourself to apply for a US federal tax number (EIN) - US employer identification number for your US company LLC" These two articles can help you solve some practical problems.

How to operate an Amazon affiliate promotion website?

There are many channels for Amazon Alliance product promotion, including independent self-built websites, blogs, YouTube channels and other social media channels.

You can set up an English blog, write some product evaluation and comparison articles, and embed links to Amazon affiliate products in the articles. After readers read the article, they will enter the Amazon store through the affiliate link and make purchases within 24 hours, that is, Receive product sales rebates. For example / An independent blog dedicated to sharing razor product reviews.

Independent blogs are currently the most mainstream Amazon affiliate marketing method. Independent blogs can be well optimized for Google and can continuously produce original content. If it is for a certain Concentrated promotion of products in specific fields can make it easier to obtain higher rankings in Google search results, obtain natural traffic, and ultimately obtain sales rebates. When a blog gains a certain popularity or weight, many Amazon sellers will proactively contact the blogger, willing to pay higher advertising fees, and request the blogger to link to the seller's listing link based on specific keywords, thereby ultimately pushing up the seller's listing. Rank on the Amazon website keyword search results page and get more orders.

1. Write content on your blog about how to choose or buy products on Amazon. Many people are used to searching Google for related content about this product before placing an order. Mommy bloggers, write about parenting tips, such as how to buy baby products, and include Amazon affiliate links to what you think are the best options. A food blog can link to cooking tools, pots and pans. Photography websites can link to cameras and other photography equipment. Pet bloggers can share some supplies for their own cats and dogs and link to the Amazon affiliate link.

2. Write new product reviews: Likewise, people want to know about projects before investing money, especially if they are new and there isn't a lot of information available.

3. Promote special offers on blogs: Many people are used to searching for some optimization codes from the Internet, so that they can reduce some fees when placing orders.

Building a blog is not complicated. I shared how to quickly build a personal blog in "Start your knowledge sharing with WordPress like Chenfei Blog and teach you how to quickly build a personal blog with WordPress".

Once the blog is set up, you still need a set of business templates. "Why can a website template priced at $60 on ThemeForest sell 500,000 sets?" "Looking at cross-border e-commerce independent self-built websites from the perspective of commercial templates", this article can tell you how to spend less money and buy the right template.

In this way, a professional personal blog is set up, and then some Amazon affiliate WordPress plug-ins are installed.

You can also use shopify or wordpress WooCommerce to build an independent self-built website. Currently, most commercial self-built website templates have created separate affiliate product pages to help specifically promote and sell affiliate products and obtain rebates.

If you are a YouTube channel blogger and have the ability to make your own videos, you can also get rebates by adding an Amazon affiliate advertising link under the video.

There are many ways to do it, just watch the Eight Immortals cross the sea and show their magical powers.

Comply with the Amazon Alliance rules to avoid account suspension

Just like Amazon stores, the Amazon Alliance also has the risk of account suspension. Therefore, be sure to follow some of the rules of the Amazon Alliance and do not touch the red lines.

Share a few classic cases of Amazon affiliate websites. Some look like e-commerce websites, converting sales through Buy On Amazon on the product page, while others look more like blogs, through evaluation and comparison. Convert sales.

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Wait, these websites are just for reference. For website owners, you can learn from them Marketing methods, for Amazon sellers, you may be able to talk to these websites and place link ads to promote the sales of your own products on Amazon.

Finally:

The Amazon affiliate program does not have much risk and has no threshold. It seems simple, but in fact it is not easy. Affiliate pays more attention to content creation and marketing promotion. Compared to being an Amazon seller, this is a professional job. Of course, it is also professionally difficult. If you can get a good harvest in affiliate, you will have no intention to become an Amazon seller.