Direct Selling from your website via Paypal

[Deeprig9]

Anyone have experience with this? I know a paypal vendor account would be essential, how much do they take per transaction?

The BIG question is, how much bandwidth would it use and how expensive is the bandwidth? I can't get a straight answer out of anyone I know in the web business. They all steer the conversation toward me paying them to build me a fancy new-fangled website....

Basic question- Sell an album from your own website, say a 60 minute album, how much does that cost in bandwidth from the carrier? 10 cents? 2 dollars?

I know godaddy and other hosts have different pricing structures, but what's the average? If I sign up for 100 gigs, and I get lucky and sell alot of albums and go over my bandwidth allowance, do I get hit with a $5000 overage fee or anything like that?

Who's got experience doing this?

Thanks!!!

[Deeprig9]

Basically, how can we sell our music online without a middleman? Middleman is necessary for warehousing cd's but why in the world do we need itunes and such when we can just sell the stuff ourselves?

[matt5409]

i'm a web designer and i can tell you now - bandwidth is not an issue and selling online is easy.

PayPal would suffice, as would Google Checkout (i would recommend it actually). what you would need to concentrate on most is having a good website. i can't stress enough how a bad website might degrade your image.

as for the production of CD's, you would do it on a supply and demand basis surely? You would sell digital downloads too - but if you wanted a custom system you'd have to hire a professional to code it.

[Will Chen]

Bandwidth limits vary greatly by provider, but shouldn't be too much of an issue. I will concure with the previous poster, good website design is esential. Additionally, I wouldn't expect people to flock to your site to buy your music. You will need to spend at a minimum a couple hours a day in online promotions planning in addition to promoting at gigs. Additionally, while most bands really love fancy flash based sites, it really hurts search engine optimization and that will be the key to driving traffic to your site. That's where being on something like iTunes is beneficial. You have a greater opportunity of someone accidentally finding and buying your music.

[Deeprig9]

The idea is that you'd get a better quality file, like wav files if you buy from the site directly, and not have to pay the Itunes commission.

But yes, it would be available on Itunes also. But as far as pushing album sales at the show or other marketing, people would be steered to buy from us directly so we make more money, but if they buy from Itunes for whatever reason, they could do that too, we just wouldn't make as much money. It would also allow us to sell singles and other bonus stuff without having to pay the Tunecore fees or the CDBaby commission on top of the vendor commissions, to just throw up a single we slap together.

But that's good to know the bandwidth isn't a big issue as I thought, I just constantly hear web friends jammering and jawing about their bandwidth costs, and bandwidth theft, etc etc, leaving me with an impression that it can be very costly to transfer files and such.

Would it be worth it to get an older Dell as a server and just run the site from my home? Would 3.5mbps be adequate for this? What would my upper limit be on activity on my server with 3.5mbps?

My old cable connection was 6 mbps, but they recently downgraded their service, while jacking their fee, typical monopoly assholes, but life isn't fair.

Thanks!

[Will Chen]

You could try hosting your own server, but you'll still have to pay an IP service to traffic to and from the server as well as an additional cost for a static IP address. Also, you'll need a backup power system and a backup data server. When it's all said and done, it will probably be cheaper to pay for the hosting. Everyone I know who's tried self hosting hasn't done it for very long. I should add that bandwidth is not free, just not as expensive as it once was. I would highly reccomend a trial run to try and estimate what your throughput will be.

[Will Chen]

Forgot to ask, what is the iTunes commision? Paypal clearance varies, but on my last transaction is was 6% on $10.

[marcellis]

I'm a paypal vendor for my other business - not music.

Paypal has made me money. It also allows me to take visa/mc/amex/etc,
without the hassle of going through a bank. Paypal takes $5-7 or so per hundred of every transaction if it's a credit-card based transaction. I'm not sure of the forumula. But it's worth it to me to have clients pay with cc's and I don't have to hassle with banks. Paypal clears it.

It's easy to move money from PP to your bank and vice versa.

Paypal has made me money. It's super!

[Deeprig9]

Itunes takes 30%.

$10 album= $7 profit with Itunes

$10 album= $9.50~ with paypal on own site

Probably not worth it unless we start selling alot, the hassle and server etc.

Thanks for the info, I really appreciate it.

[mike_cook]

I provide online session work(drums and percussion)i use pay pal to invoice my clients and each trannsaction is $2.00 i use sendthisfile.com to send my tracks and for clients to upload thier songs at my website i am alloted 10,000 MB per month and the fee for the website is $20.00 a month.Hope this helps

[Deeprig9]

I provide online session work(drums and percussion)i use pay pal to invoice my clients and each trannsaction is $2.00 i use sendthisfile.com to send my tracks and for clients to upload thier songs at my website i am alloted 10,000 MB per month and the fee for the website is $20.00 a month.Hope this helps

Thanks! That does help. With that kind of deal, you could sell about 130 albums inside of 10 gigs, per month. What happens if you go over? If I got more popular than I thought, in some weird foreign country, and I get 5000 albums downloaded in 3 days, and the plan is only for 10 gigs, then what?

[mike_cook]

I don`t know i`ve never went over but you could go to their website(sendthisfile)and ask them i`m sure

[lambcast]

Anyone have experience with this? I know a paypal vendor account would be essential, how much do they take per transaction?

The BIG question is, how much bandwidth would it use and how expensive is the bandwidth? I can't get a straight answer out of anyone I know in the web business. They all steer the conversation toward me paying them to build me a fancy new-fangled website....

Basic question- Sell an album from your own website, say a 60 minute album, how much does that cost in bandwidth from the carrier? 10 cents? 2 dollars?

I know godaddy and other hosts have different pricing structures, but what's the average? If I sign up for 100 gigs, and I get lucky and sell alot of albums and go over my bandwidth allowance, do I get hit with a $5000 overage fee or anything like that?

Who's got experience doing this?

Thanks!!!

You may want to look at this set for release June 2008 www.retailzip.com :)

[mikezawitkowski]

Bandwidth limits vary greatly by provider, but shouldn't be too much of an issue. I will concure with the previous poster, good website design is esential. Additionally, I wouldn't expect people to flock to your site to buy your music. You will need to spend at a minimum a couple hours a day in online promotions planning in addition to promoting at gigs. Additionally, while most bands really love fancy flash based sites, it really hurts search engine optimization and that will be the key to driving traffic to your site. That's where being on something like iTunes is beneficial. You have a greater opportunity of someone accidentally finding and buying your music.

I don't think that having your music on iTunes hoping someone will trip across it and make a purchase is valid. Yes, there are features that iTunes and other retailers implement to encourage buyers to discover music: recommendation engines, "others also bought this album," etc. The real value of being on iTunes is the fact that it is a retailer that has built consumer trust. A fan is more likely to give his or her credit card info to iTunes then a random widget or retailer that the band recommends but they've never heard of. (On the flipside, that random widget may have have other features or price points that make it more attractive.)

Even after your music is available at iTunes, there is a good deal of legwork that needs to go into promoting that music on and offline. Links directly to your iTunes landing page, urls and download cards, and encouraging reviews or extra press to provide iTunes buyers with more information about the album. If you are a big enough act to be in the running for a feature at iTunes (or any other store) for your new album, then that's yet another level of time and energy to spend marketing your release.

[zuzz]

I just read a little about Google checkout and they charge you a $10 fee if there is a chargeback. eek. Anyone know if PayPal has a chargeback fee?

[esco_448]

Try paypal or google checkout.
I am using paypal for my business, since google checkout is not available in my country.

[bassluvr]

Google pages offer free webspace and domain registration for like $10 a yr. i'm not sure how much storage space they offer, but it's worth looking into. with google's resources, they're probably your cheapest/reliable bet as far as online storage

[myfavguitarist]

Simple answer: www.myfavoriteband.com
You build your store on that site, and it uses PayPal to charge customers. Order notifications are emailed to you and you ship the items. If they order MP3s, the MP3s get sent to their email, so you don't have to do anything. You can charge whatever you want for your products, sell as many products as you want (including MP3s), and it's free. The only % taken out is PayPal's minimum fees, which is roughly 2.9% + 0.30 cents.
Now for your website part: the code to the store is provided to you, so you can copy/paste it, embedding the whole store into your website. You can then sell directly from there. It's super easy.

[veracohr]

I used to have a PayPal cart on my website before I got pissed off at PayPal and closed my account. It was easy as really good pie to set up. As far as in action, I don't know, because no one ever bought my CD.

[BlueStrat]

I don't think that having your music on iTunes hoping someone will trip across it and make a purchase is valid.


Maybe maybe not. But that's how I discovered alot of guys I would never have otherwise. I have bought probably 15 or 20 digital CDs in the past year alone from unknowns (to me) while looking for something else. I'd guess I'm not alone.

That's the appeal of itunes- you're a market presence more apt to be seen by browsers. Doing pay pal on your own website couldn't hurt but you are then left with having to steer traffic to your website and count on people specifically looking to buy or at least interested in what you're selling. It's a bit like opening an auto parts store that only sells starters for 1999 Ford F-250s.

[Bensbeenjamin]

I agree with matt4509, since everyone has broadband now it's probably a lot cheaper to run a website with your music on it, with my latest experience with Paypal I wouldn't do business with them again unless I had to. So definitely check out Google Checkout. And having a good website doesn't mean you have to have everything so flashy, just have it laid out in an easy to navigate format, for instance I personally don't like drop-down menu's unless you can click on the drop-down menu because it's a pain having to hover over the button to get what you want. Just pick some good strong colors make the website easy to read and navigate and you should have no problems.

[lambcast]

This just became a heck of a lot easier as of last night.

Please see my signature for more info.

[loneleaf]

I totally disagree wit Bensbeenjamin as I myself run a Vietnamese music website as the admin of the Hiphop music box. I know how useful Paypal is when it can help to protect ur own account from untrustworthy purchases. This one works as an insurance for ur goods n ur own sake. Tho it costs u an amount of money to keep the account on its right track, it's good to create a Paypal account if u want to make more deals via the internet trading.