How to build an online store for your band
First came the cheap recording equipment, which turned everybody into a bedroom recording artist. Then, the web arrived, turning all these bedroom recording artists into bedroom recording labels, able to sell records (in theory at least) to a massive global audience.
Now, many artists are great at making music in their bedrooms, but not so savvy when it comes to selling it from them, so in this post I’m going to outline how to create a good online store that makes it easy for people to purchase your wares.
There are three main approaches you can take, with various pros and cons – so let’s look at each in turn.
1. Use links that point to existing retailers
The first method of creating an online store, and possibly the easiest, is to simply create a page on your website called ‘store’ and place a few links on it to online retailers that are selling your music. That could be Amazon, Apple Music or another high profile site that sells music.
There are three main advantages to this approach.
First, you don’t need to fulfil anything yourself — there’s no weekly walking down to the post office and sending stuff off to your customers.
Second, depending on the site you refer people to, your music may be chart eligible if you sell it this way.
And finally, many people shop regularly with these companies and will be very comfortable with buying your products from them.
You can also use this approach for selling merchandise — there’s quite a few ‘print on demand’ sites like Printful and Printify that allow you to upload JPGs which can then be added to t-shirts, mugs, wall art etc. When somebody buys your merch from one of these sites, the item is made to order.
2 Use PayPal or Stripe
Although selling music via established music sites is very easy, and has several advantages to it, you may find that selling your music ‘direct to fan’ is more profitable. By managing the whole sales process yourself, you get to keep most of the proceeds.
If you only have one or two products to sell, then selling them through PayPal is a really easy way to do this — you simply create a couple of ‘buy now’ PayPal buttons and add them to your site. This means you can accept payments easily and fulfil any items yourself.
PayPal charges a small transaction fee per sale: around 3%. But this is much less than the 30%-50% fee you can expect to pay if people are buying your music from a retailer.
Stripe also works in a similar way, and may be a more obvious option if you regularly sell merchandise at gigs (thanks to its dedicated point of sale features that let you accept payments via a card reader at events).
3 Use an online store builder
If you have lots of products to sell – i.e., a big back catalogue and a wide range of already-manufactured merchandise items – and you are fulfilling orders yourself, you may find it easier to go with a more comprehensive ‘online store builder’ solution. These are basically paid-for web apps that let users without coding skills build a store by themselves (using templates as a starting point) and sell products easily.
There are now lots of options available on this front, but Shopify is probably the best-known of the bunch; it provides a really easy way for bands to create an online store from scratch. You can also use it to sell a large catalogue of products on an existing site (although you might find competing platform Ecwid or WooCommerce slightly better for this, particularly if you’re a WordPress user).
Like Stripe, it’s also a very good option for selling at gigs via a card reader and other selling hardware.
The other advantage of using Shopify is that it integrates neatly with Spotify.
Squarespace and Wix are also good options for building an online store (but they are not quite as feature-rich on the e-commerce side as Shopify, WooCommerce or Ecwid).
If you’re in the fortunate position of selling music in quantities that might see you charting, then you might want to consider Music Glue. Sales through this platform are chart eligible — however, you will have to apply to use the platform and you can expect the company to take a large commission on your sales if your application is successful.
On the plus side, however, Music Glue has a lot of music-specific features that you won’t find on other e-commerce platforms, like merch manufacture. You can also avail of fulfilment services using Music Glue where, for a fee, the company will post all your CDs and other merch out on your behalf.
Remember: give your fans some options
Even if selling direct to fan is the most profitable option for you, you should keep in mind that many people prefer to buy music from the big retailers.
Accordingly, even if you are using PayPal or an online store builder to sell your music, it's still worth offering people the option of buying your music using Amazon or Apple.
By all means encourage fans to buy direct from you, and explain that this is the best way they can support your band...but give people the option to buy elsewhere – or you could lose sales.
An Amazon sale, even if less profitable than a direct-to-fan sale, is better than no sale at all.