Sell Your Own Music on the Web
Without a Merchant Account...
Do you want to sell your own music on the web and need a way to take
electronic payments from your customers without the high costs involved
with a merchant account?
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You can sell your own music online. The following services all allow you to take credit card payments without the need for a merchant account because they handle the credit card payments on their own merchant account...
PayPal
PayPal is probably the web's most
popular and well known payment processor and one used by many
independent music artists to take payments on their websites.
PayPal
allows you to take payments from other PayPal users and also allows you
to take credit card payments, even if the buyer has no PayPal account.
PayPal then takes a cut of each transaction as its fee for the service it offers.
The
one great benefit of PayPal is that you need a merchant account to take
credit card payments. PayPal also offers you easy to use tools to take
payments on your site.
PayPal has become a huge company and as
always with huge companies there will be a bit of nag and hassle. This
is to be expected.
Unfortunately there aren't many competitors
for PayPal which means for now it remains one of the only few viable
options for taking electronic payments when you sell your own music.
I
suggest you always offer PayPal as a payment method because many PayPal
users prefer to use PayPal for their payments on the web.
Now,
while PayPal handles your payment processing it will not handle your
delivery. You can do this yourself, though there are also other services
available which will handle your payment processing and also the
delivery of your product for you.
You'll discover that many of
the services integrate PayPal while others make use of their own
merchant accounts to process your payments.
Here are a few other services you may want to take a look at...
Bandcamp
Bandcamp
is a free service which allows you to create a Web profile, distribute
and sell your own music and collect e-mail addresses for your mailing
list.
You need a PayPal Premier or Business account before you can sort your music on Bandcamp.
I
suggest you take a look at this page on the Bandcamp web site for more
information on how payments are handled.
I think Bandcamp is one
of the best services available for independent music artists who want to
sell digital downloads of their music.
Nimbit
Nimbit works on the freemium model where you
get the basic services and tools for free and special features at a
monthly or yearly rate.
The free account allows you to sell your
own music and also hard goods. Nimbit will take care off payment
processing and also fulfillment of your orders and take 20% commission
on each transaction.
You can use Nimbit Online Merchant Table to
sell on MySpace and blogs, and Nimbit MyStore to sell on Facebook. The
free account does not however allow you to give away your music for free
as you can with Bandcamp.
The 20% commission is higher than the rate you'll get when you use Bandcamp and PayPal micro-payments.
So,
I suggest you only take a look at Nimbit should you want to sell more
than just digital downloads as it allows you to sell hard goods.
Consider
the retail commissions carefully
and compare it to the deal CD baby (see below) offers you to see which
suits you best.
CD Baby
CDBaby.com allows you to sell both digital
downloads and CDs via the web. They will also take care all your
fulfillment for you. You simply need to upload your digital tracks and
send them your CDs.
In terms of selling music they offer
basically the same kind of services as Nimbit with slightly different
pricing. They take 25% of each digital download transaction and $4 for
every CD transaction.
CD Baby can also make your CDs available in
brick-and-mortar stores as special order items and distribute your
digital downloads via other major online marketplace such as Amazon MP3
and iTunes.
So, there you have it! You now know a few good
options to help you sell your own music on the web without the need for a
merchant account.
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