How To Use Affiliate Programs as Dropship Suppliers To Access Any Product In The World

Have you ever struggled to find hot-selling products from legit, no-fee dropship suppliers in the USA? Or maybe you’ve applied to a number of dropship suppliers, only to find they denied your application because you’re too new to dropshipping?

What if there were a way to access almost any product you want to sell — without worrying about being denied?

The 5th type of dropship supplier in this 8-part DropshipXL supplier series is what we call an affiliate dropship supplier.

Affiliate dropship suppliers are completely different from the previous four supplier types covered in this series: Open Door, MAP, Private Label, and Exclusive.

Many people have heard of affiliate marketing. However, not many dropship business owners are aware of affiliate programs — how to access them, or how and when to use this strategy in their business. Today’s training will walk you through the pros and cons of using affiliate dropship suppliers so you can maximize your profits with more flexible product options.

The 2 Pros of Using Affiliate Marketing Programs for Dropshipping

The first obvious benefit of affiliate marketing is that you can access hundreds of millions of products in less than 30 minutes.

Amazon’s platform now lists over 600 million products across its marketplace. Let that sink in for a moment — 600 million. Accessing products to sell should no longer be a limiting factor in your business. Any or all of those products can be added to your website or store for the public to purchase. All you need to do is sign up for Amazon’s Associates program here.

How Amazon Affiliate Marketing Works

When someone visits your store and clicks on an affiliate product, they’re redirected to Amazon after clicking the add-to-cart or buy button. If that visitor completes a purchase as a result of discovering the product through your website, you earn up to 10% commission on the product’s sale price. Amazon knows the purchase came from you because the buyer clicked your unique affiliate link. Your affiliate link is like a fingerprint — one of a kind, unique to you.

The second benefit of affiliate marketing for your dropship business is that you can list affiliate products on your store without needing to be approved by a dropship supplier. Some dropship suppliers aren’t even aware of this. A number of students mentored through the DropshipXL program have used the Amazon affiliate route after being temporarily denied as a direct retailer — and kept selling that supplier’s products through Amazon while their direct application was pending or being resubmitted.

The 2 Disadvantages of Affiliate Marketing

The first common complaint is that profit margins on affiliate products are much lower than on direct-supplier relationships. This is primarily true for physical product affiliate programs. Commission rates on physical product affiliate programs average 2–10% per sale. On a $100 product, that’s $2–$10 profit — before factoring in any traffic costs.

Compare that to getting approved as a direct dropship retailer with the same supplier, where your wholesale discount on a $100 product typically runs 12–20% or more. From there, you retail the product at whatever price the market will bear.

The second disadvantage is the difficulty of generating repeat sales. Once someone clicks your affiliate link, they go to Amazon (or another marketplace) to complete the purchase — and that customer relationship now belongs to that platform, not to you. It’s not impossible to generate repeat buyers, but your best tool for doing so is to capture their name and email address before they click away. More on that below.

Top 3 Ways to Make Money Promoting Affiliate Products in Your Dropship Business

The million-dollar question: how do you actually make money selling affiliate products?

The #1 best method is to promote them through trusted recommendations via email marketing. The right way to do this: first, acquire email addresses properly through your own store or content (never buy lists). Then build a relationship of trust by sending emails 1–4 times per week — educating your audience about your brand and solving their problems. Once that trust is established, promote affiliate products that genuinely solve their frustrations. Affiliate marketing is only consistently profitable when real value is being created for the reader. Transparency is everything.

The second best approach is native advertising — hyperlinking words and call-to-action buttons within helpful, targeted blog articles. The key is writing content that genuinely solves a specific problem your target audience faces, then naturally weaving in affiliate product recommendations. This is why blogs that serve a well-defined niche audience tend to make the best affiliate income over time.

The third strategy is presenting affiliate products directly on your store or website. This works on any platform — WordPress or Shopify. This method ranks third because for affiliate products to generate profit, some preliminary trust and value creation needs to happen first. That’s why email marketing and blogging remain the top two traffic drivers to affiliate offers. Direct page placement is best used as a supporting layer, not the primary channel.

Selling Affiliate Products on Shopify and WordPress

Adding affiliate products to your Shopify or WordPress store follows almost the same process as adding any other product. For WordPress, a WooCommerce Amazon Affiliates plugin available on CodeCanyon makes it possible to import Amazon products to your store in a few clicks. For Shopify users, browse affiliate marketing apps in the Shopify App Store for current options.

Where and How to Find Other Dropship Affiliate Programs

While Amazon gives you access to hundreds of millions of products, they still might not have everything you need. In that case, visit any supplier or brand’s website and scroll to the footer — look for a link that says “Affiliates,” “Partner Program,” or something similar. From there you can apply directly to that company’s affiliate program to access their products. This works for thousands of companies that don’t sell on Amazon or prefer their own affiliate channel.

You can also search for affiliate networks that aggregate programs across many companies — major platforms include ShareASale, CJ Affiliate (formerly Commission Junction), Impact, Rakuten Advertising, and ClickBank. Many niche-specific affiliate programs are also found through simple Google searches: “[niche/product] + affiliate program.”

Summary

Promoting products from affiliate sources like Amazon is one of the fastest and easiest ways to expand your product line. Just be clear about how you’re going to promote them — and lead with value. Affiliate marketing can become a powerful source of profit and a consistent stream of income for your dropship business when done with transparency, trust, and a real email marketing strategy behind it.