MP3 eCommerce?
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- WhiteFace
A friend of mine is setting up a record label and is looking to give people the option of buying & downloading tracks from his website.
I thought he may be able to do this via iTunes or something similar but have no past experience in doing so.
His budget is very low so a bespoke ecommerce solution is out of the question, but he's hoping there's a way of using Paypal or some other existing service to achieve this.
Has anyone here had experience with this sort of thing?
Thanks a bunch.
- trooperbill0
magento and prestashop both cater for that and theyre free.
one thing he should know is that its really easy to request a refund for digital goods so i'd look into the legalities of that otherwise loads of people will buy then refund their purchases which will cost him loads in chargeback fees.
- trooperbill0
oh and its going to cost him LOADS in bandwidth so his hosting fees will be sky high.
- Ruffian0
He's going to have to host the files somewhere, right?
Paypal or no paypal, it will be hosting that costs the most. So why not go with magento any other ecommerce software?
- 23kon0
Magento is great, we finished a site a month or two ago. First time we'd used it. Wasnt for a music site though.
What about using one of those services that sumits your music to all mp3 sellers like amazon, itunes etc. They do all the submitting work for you, you just pay a fee.
- WhiteFace0
Thanks guys, Magento & prestashop seem very complicated though, can you customise how many menus etc you have visible?
- ideaist0
https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bi…
I'm thinking about using a customized version of http://www.e-junkie.com/ but looking for something a little cleaner / more customizable...
- acescence0
magento is crap! so incredibly slow and super convoluted template system. if you want a very simple system, use wordpress and the Shopp ecommerce plugin.
- Noggin0
I think itunes/amazon is the way to go... theres plenty of guides on the net or you can just use CDbaby.com, they offer a lot of digital distribution.
- ukit0
If you want something completely customizable, you can achieve this using Expression Engine and two of Solspace's plugins. There is one that allows you to integrate e-commerce using Foxycart and another that will let you store encrypted media files and offer them for download to your users depending on their purchases. It requires a bit of tweaking/ coding work though.
- ukit0
On second thought, doesn't Bandcamp achieve what you're asking?
Never used it but it seems pretty simple.
- acescence0
another route is just directing people to other sites for the purchases. i've worked with these guys and they're great. they've got a web-based control panel that lets you manage all of your music and assets, and they handle the relationships with itunes, amazon, beatport, etc..
- moth0
You could license it to us: http://peoplesmusicstore.com
Which isn't really what you're asking for but still...
I've built several mp3 download shops and to really brutally honest - bandwidth wont be such a big problem because mp3s don't fly off the shelves!
You just want something snappy and secure.
Any cart software would suffice. In fact, done well, just a simple paypal cart integration would suffice and fall into budget.
He can hire me if he wants ;)
- moth0
The size of the catalog should really decide the solution. If you've only 15 releases you can do without a monster cart system that asks too much of the user. You literally could then add products as single pages in word press with a custom paypal button for each.
- JazX0
http://www.soundcloud.com is fantastic.
- jerseyred0
A good friend of mine and I have done this - http://www.asimplesound.com - we used a service called http://www.easybe.com/ which sells a php solution for digital downloads. It has a great back end solution for creating albums, collections, song samples, and most importantly, digital delivery.
We're in the middle of redesigning our site because we have over 1000 tracks with a variety of different musicians (music for modern dance) but this solution is cost effective, dependable, and intuitive.