What are the most profitable products to sell online? While there’s many ways to sell products online, one of the simplest ways to do it is with a business called affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing lets anyone sell products and services online, without actually having to own the product personally.
This has a number of benefits compared to physically buying and selling products yourself:
- Automation – the selling of other people’s products online can be automatedÂ
- Scale – you can scale up an affiliate business globally, with very little hassle
- No need to deal with customers, queries or returns
- No product handling or postage – this is all dealt with by product owners/distributors
Affiliates are third party product referrers. They use their unique affiliate links to send customers to existing products and services online. When a sale is made (through their affiliate link), they earn a commission based on the sale. There’s no personal handling of products or dealing with customers. This makes affiliate marketing one of the simplest businesses which anyone can use to earn an income online.
But there’s a downside too. Many affiliate products pay peanuts. So even with hard work, it can be difficult to make affiliate marketing pay, if you’re using the wrong kinds of products. Amazon, for example, is one of the most popular places to shop online. A recent Forbes article states that 89% of consumers are more likely to buy from Amazon than another e-commerce platform.
But for affiliates Amazon may not be the best bet. even with the most profitable items to sell on Amazon, the commissions are still very low. Amazon too is known for cutting affiliate’s commissions, so once you have built an affiliate site, your commissions could even be slashed again!
Most Profitable Products To Sell Online: Commission Percentage
Amazon pays its affiliates between 1% and 20% commission although most products on the site will fall in between 1% and 10% with only the category of Amazon Games in the 20% category.
That’s pretty low and if you’re promoting a product valued at $100, you could earn as little as $1 for your efforts! If that’s the case you’re going to need to sell a huge volume of products in order to make your Amazon affiliate business a profitable enterprise.
There’s definitely a better way to do things. eBay has a similar partner program to Amazon and the commission structure is a similar one. I made the mistake of only using Amazon and eBay for quite a portion of my affiliate journey. They can be useful as an additional income, but I wouldn’t base your affiliate career on only those two platforms.
Most Profitable Products To Sell Online: Digital Products
Digital products can be a much better bet for affiliate marketers. With affiliate products you can earn much higher levels of commission.
With a digital product, there’s no postage or handling costs involved. A digital product can be downloaded or accessed from anywhere globally. All you need is a laptop and internet connection (and a credit card) to purchase and use digital products online.
Digital products pay more to affiliates – usually between 30%-40% of the sale value. That’s a massive leap upwards from Amazon’s commissions and physical products in general. So it is definitely worth considering selling digital products as an affiliate.
The best digital products to promote in terms of commissions are high ticket digital products and subscription affiliate products. High ticket items are those with a much larger price tag than your standard affiliate product. With a high ticket price, and a high level of commission, you stand to earn considerably more for any sales you generate than with a low value physical product, for example.
- Physical product @ 5% commission and $100 value pays: $5
- Digital product @ 40% and $1000 value pays: $400
Just by starting your affiliate journey with this knowledge can place you far ahead of many other affiliates who don’t know this. See also most profitable digital products.
Most Profitable Products To Sell Online: High Ticket Physical Products
But there’s also high ticket physical products you can sell as an affiliate and although I don’t recommend Amazon, there’s a few high valued products on Amazon which might be appropriate if you have the right marketing strategy. But Amazon isn’t the only place to find high ticket items. Here’s a site called Hammacher Schlemmer which sells super high ticket items which sell for over $100,000! Hammacher.com pays affiliates 8% commission which means if you sell the “Amphibious Sub-Marine Watercraft” at $300,000, you can earn $24,000 in commission!
Here’s a few other items you can find on the site for over $500:
To find the more expensive items, you can browse by price using the filter in any given category:
High Ticket Digital Products
While one sale of a high ticket physical product (such as the submarine above) can earn you a $24,000 commission, not many people are in the market for such an item. Therefore, to sell this kind of product can be tough. But digital products are sought after in many topics and niches, particularly if they help people solve common problems.
For example, a popular product is a dating app. The dating industry is worth US$2.5 billion per year or there about, and is in the top most popular three categories/niches: health, wealth and love. While a dating app may not be a high ticket product, sales can carry recurring commissions. So if you refer a customer to a dating app, you can continue to generate ongoing commissions for the lifetime of their custom. Since 50% of young people are single, but don’t want to be, you can see there’s a huge need for such a product.
By finding needs in society and fulfilling those needs with affiliate products, you can make money by connecting people to useful products. Another important desire in society is to have more freedom and flexibility in terms of work/life balance. A recent study by Gallop showed that 85% are dissatisfied in their jobs. One of the most profitable areas for affiliates is the “money making online” niche.
This isn’t surprising given the huge dissatisfaction from the work force, the replacement of many jobs with automation and the desire to work less and earn more.
High Ticket, Medium Ticket & Subscription Products
One of the most profitable things to sell online is online training for people who want to escape the 9 to 5 and quit their job by building an online business. There is a huge demand for this kind of online course/curriculum. While there are many courses which cater to this need, the most profitable ones have a product range which includes:
- Entry level products – low value products/courses which most can afford
- Mid level products – higher cost items with more training/resources
- High ticket offers – high cost items which offer more personal training and coaching
- Subscription items which carry recurring commissions – membership products
Because these are digital products, they typically carry higher rates of commissions than physical products and therefore can be more profitable. With a product range, you can offer lower value products to more people and high value products to those who want them. This is a win win for affiliates who use this kind of high ticket sales funnel. They can sell multiple products through a single funnel, including high and low ticket items and subscription products.
Have a look at some of the commission structures for this kind of product range:
To access this product range you can create a starter account here, or learn more with this free webinar.
