eSIM affiliate or eSIM reseller?

Two ways to earn from the same eSIM

Every travel eSIM brand of any size runs an affiliate programme: you place a link, a traveller buys from them, and they pay you a percentage of the sale. Every eSIM reseller platform offers the opposite deal: you buy the eSIM at wholesale, sell it under your own name at your own price, and keep the difference.

They look like two prices for the same job, and people compare them as if they were. They are not. They are two different businesses that happen to end in the same traveller getting online, and the differences show up long before the commission rate does.

Read the last row twice. It is the one that decides which model you should be in, and it is the one nobody puts on a comparison page.

What an affiliate link actually pays

Affiliate commissions on travel eSIMs are quoted as a percentage of the sale, and the published rates are generally in the single digits to low teens. On a twenty-dollar package that is somewhere between one and three dollars — after the customer clicks your link, does not clear their cookies, and completes the purchase inside the attribution window.

That is not a criticism. It is a fair price for what you did, which was to send a stranger to somebody else’s shop. The brand carries the eSIM cost, the payment fees, the support desk, the refund risk and the legal relationship. You carried none of it, and the commission reflects that.

Read the programme terms for two things before the rate: the attribution window, and whether repeat purchases by the same customer are credited to you. On most programmes the first sale is yours and every later top-up or trip belongs to the brand.

The last point is the one that compounds. A traveller who buys an eSIM once tends to buy again — a top-up on the same trip, a new package on the next one. As an affiliate, you are paid to introduce them and then they are gone. Every dollar of that second and third purchase is somebody else’s revenue from a customer you found.

What a reseller keeps, and what it takes on

A reseller buys the eSIM at the provider’s wholesale price and sells it at whatever the market bears. Gross margins of 25 to 40 per cent on retail are ordinary; what comes off after that is the subject of another post. The point here is the shape of the money, not the size.

• The margin is yours on every sale, including the top-up next week and the trip next year. The customer is on your list and comes back to your store.
• The price is yours. You can run a promotion, bundle two destinations, or charge more than the brand does because your audience trusts you.
• The brand is yours. Your name is on the store, on the email that carries the QR code, and in the traveller’s inbox when they need help.
• The support is yours too — the “no service” message at two in the morning, the customer who deleted the eSIM, the refund request. Somebody has to answer, and it is you.
• And the setup is real: a provider account to open, a payment gateway to be approved by, a store to configure, legal pages in your name. It is measured in days, not minutes.

None of that is a reason to prefer one over the other. It is a description of what you are buying with the higher margin: a business, with the obligations a business has.

The break-even, worked

Assume an affiliate programme paying ten per cent, a reseller gross margin of thirty per cent on the retail price, a payment gateway taking three per cent, and a platform subscription of fifty dollars a month — round figures for the arithmetic, not anybody’s price list. Here is what a month looks like at four levels of sales.

The reseller column is thirty per cent of sales, less three per cent for the gateway, less the subscription. Below roughly two hundred dollars of retail sales a month the subscription eats the margin and the affiliate wins. Above it the reseller pulls away, and the gap widens with every sale because the subscription is already paid.

The number that decides

Two hundred dollars of monthly sales is about ten travellers. If you can honestly see ten people a month buying from you — a newsletter, a tour group, a blog with destination traffic, a travel agency desk — the reseller model earns more from month one, and the difference grows. If you cannot, an affiliate link is the right tool and there is no shame in it. The mistake is not picking the wrong model; it is picking the reseller model without an audience, which is the subject of a post of its own.

Start affiliate, switch when the numbers say so

The two models are not exclusive, and the sensible sequence for most people is to use the first to find out whether the second is worth doing.

1. Put an affiliate link in front of your audience for two or three months and count the clicks and the conversions. That is a free measurement of demand you would otherwise have to guess at.
2. Work the table above with your own numbers: your conversions, the platform’s actual subscription, your gateway’s actual fee.
3. When the reseller column wins for two months running, open the provider account — approval takes days, so start before you need it — and set up the store on a trial while you wait.
4. Swap the affiliate link for your own store address. Your existing content keeps working; only the destination changes.

Esimbit is a reseller platform, so we are not neutral here — but the arithmetic is, and it says the reseller model is the right one only past a threshold. Our plans have no revenue share and no sales cap, which moves that threshold down but does not remove it. A fourteen-day trial is long enough to find out where yours is.

• Who should not become an eSIM reseller →
• eSIM reseller margins, all the way down →
• How to start an eSIM reseller business →