Well, it's been a couple days now since my band's new online music store went live, and I'm somewhat surprised to announce that the site is working great!
We haven't sold a huge amount of copies of the new album yet, which is alright, but it is nice to see some familiar names signing in and downloading a few tracks or the whole album from time to time.
We're using Zen Cart, as I mentioned before, to run the site, and have configured the PayPal IPN module to handle credit card/electronic payment processing for us. I wasn't sure how well that would go over at first, but we haven't received any complaints about it yet and it's nice to see a slow trickle of money accumulating in our PayPal business account.
The nicest thing about running the store so far is that when people sign up, even if it's just for the free downloads, I get to see their name and contact information in the Zen Cart administrative interface. It's already allowed me to re-connect with a couple old friends whose email addresses I'd lost over the years, and hopefully things will continue as the site becomes more well-known and we add more music to the inventory.
In any case, I'm happy with the results so far, no major glitches, and it looks as if this might be the start of a long-term project for me and the other Urban Matadors.
- Mark
