Thread: eCommerce Business Models

There are all kinds of ways to make money online. I thought we could share some business models currently out there. Whenever approaching these models, you will have to find something that will make your business better than all the rest. The purpose of this exercise is to list all the business models we can think of that are used online today, and then maybe we can take that list and see if we can develop any possible new models that have yet to be thought of or implemented.

The Drop Ship Model
You sell someone else's products and they ship from their location to the customer for you. The customer pays you and you pay the manufacturer.

Direct Sales Model
The products are your own and you do all the work.

Affiliate Marketing Model - Referring traffic to someone else's products and receiving a percentage of sales.

Advertising Model - This is where most of your website sales come from straight up ads. Membership is free, but you offer banner ads, text link ads, and content ads to potential clients. This can be direct sponsors or you can use 3rd parties such as doubleclick, etc

Online Downloads Model - Multimedia downloads (music, video, images), eBooks (term-papers, recipes, novels). Downloaders pay a small fee to get the info they need.

Server Leasing Model - Web hosting, backup storage, bandwidth (torrents), CPU rental for number crunching, storing images (flickr etc)

Charitable Model - These include non-profit organizations such as political and religious affiliations. You receive donations to fund your cause.

Paid Memberships Model - Members pay to join your website and in return receive things that may benefit them like special coupons, information, chance to win products, etc.

Please add any other models you can think of.

Some ecommerce businesses also startup where the products offered on their site are dropshipped, and then they move to a combination of dropshipped and direct sales. Some also start out as solely direct sales.

There are five distinct eCommerce business models form the basic structure for the wide variety of websites today. The five categories are called vanity, billboard, advertising, subscriptions, and storefront sites.