Hi everyone! Does anyone here run an online shop? What did you use? How did you set it up?

Here's the thing... I want to sell some of my songs. It's an experiment. There are plenty of places I could go join and pay to set up a page to sell music, but since I already pay for my site and all the traffic for my music eventually comes to the site anyway I thought it would be much better if I sold the tunes myself on my own site. Total control and all. I see there are basically four different shop set ups available through cPanel. Are these good or is there something better? I want to use Paypal for payments and such because I already have a Paypal account. Any advice would be great!

Thanks!

-Bonnie

join alertpay HERE
add a buy now button to your website

My customers and I have all had great experiences using PayPal and their functions. It's pretty easy, and I can help you with the HTML part and/or walk you through the PayPal setup part.

You can do all this by upgrading your PayPal account to a business account.

Hmmm... The only problem there is, does it cost to upgrade the Paypal account to a business account? I guess I should go check. I haven't done anything with this issue yet because I was rebuilding my band site.

I'm in the middle of a crossroads on this thing... I'm about to join CDBaby and possibly ASCAP and if I join CDBaby they do digital distribution through major places like iTunes and Rhapsody, etc. (This all came about due to a fiasco over a dubious contract with a tiny film company.)

I had wanted to set up for sale three tunes on my site. I was just going to use the little Paypal "buy now" buttons, but then I thought about things like how I would send the mp3 to the folks who buy it. I mean, if you search hard enough and are clever enough, you can find all the mp3s on my site without any trouble. How would I keep people from doing a search for the pay only tunes and getting to them without paying? And if I didn't post them on the site, how would I get the tunes to them? I'm selling 320kbps mp3s. These things are huge as far as online downloads go. I couldn't email them. Maybe a password protected directory?

I do like to come up with complicated problems, don't I?

-Bonnie

paypal upgrade cost nothing.
the only thing is all the "incoming" money (payments to you) will be discounted in a ~ %0.45 (paypal commissions on incoming payments)

Thanks for the advice and the offers of help, guys.

I went with the Paypal button thing. I looked at the Paypal shopping cart page and they wanted $20 to set up a Merchant Account in order for me to use them. I just wanted to do a trial run and see if anything happens so I used the free encrypted button maker and put them up on the site. I have no idea if I'll make even one sale, but it's worth a shot.

Thanks again!
-Bonnie