One of the quickest ways to start selling your music and merchandise on the web is to sign up with a site that provides a simple Ecommerce store. There are a lot of them out there that have varying levels of functionality, customization, and cost. This review will cover one of those sites: bigcartel.

Overview

Bigcartel bills itself as providing “Simple Stores for DIY Rockstars” and they do a good job at providing the basics of an Ecommerce store. When you’re ready to start selling your CDs, T-shirts, or other merchandise to your fans, you can simply sign up, create your own store, and start raking in the cash. In addition to bands, they also specialize in stores for record labels, and clothing companies.

What you’re really signing up for is an easy to use product catalog and shopping cart. It’s something that will guide your fans through your inventory (albums, songs, merch) to find what they want to buy, allow them to add or delete it from a shopping cart, and checkout. It’s up to you to do the fulfillment part of the process which includes packaging the product, shipping it, and making sure your fan is happy… including handling returns.

Once all your products are set up, and the site has been customized to include your colors, logo, etc, you’ll need to create a PayPal account. This will allow your fans to use credit/debit cards, or their own PayPal account, to put money in your pocket.

Costs

The basic account is free but you can only sell 5 things and there are some limits on how much you can tailor the site to your needs. For about $10 a month you can up it to 25 products, customize your site more (including your own domain), and use discount codes. For about $20 a month you can have 100 products and more customization.

What’s really nice about the site is that they won’t be taking a cut of what you sell. PayPal however does take a portion of the money that flows through their system, usually somewhere around 3% of the cost plus $.30 for each item. It’s not a bad price for the ability to accept credit cards, but because there is that transaction fee of thirty cents you’ll want to avoid selling really cheap items.

Final thoughts

Bigcartel is somewhat limited in that you can only customize certain parts of your site but that’s also what makes it more focused and easy to get started. The main draw-back is that they don’t have specific support for selling digital products (like your MP3s) but they’re working on it. To get around this limitation one band decided to take orders for digital versions of their songs, and then send an email to the fan with the MP3s as attachments. A little crude but it gets the job done.

All in all, this is a good service that can help an artist get paid for his or her work.