help Selling Downloadable Goods

best way to sell .JPG art files

[4crests]

I'm looking for a good way to sell my digital artwork. I have about 100,000 files to sell. I am currently selling them online with a website that specializes in downloadable goods via paypal. However, they charge me 25% of each sale. I'd like to find a cheaper solution, and possibly one that takes credit cards also. I need to be able to Bulk Upload my data via CSV file or similar. I need to upload the product description, price, a thumbnail picture and also a full size 300 dpi image for the customer to download. This would need to be some kind of service that allows UNLIMITED bandwidth and storage space. I want to pay somewhere between 5% and 15% of each sale. I'm not really interested in building my own website, although something like a ecommerce Plugin for wordpress might be a possibility. I haven't looked into that much yet. I've already looked into payloadz, ejunkie, tradebit, and a couple of similar ones, but they don't fit my criteria. Anyone have any advice for me ?

[enigma1]

IMO you would need an e-commerce store for it. Likely you will display and categorize the artwork. There are many open source e-commerce packages check sourceforge.net there are many, I use osCommerce and has all of the features you're looking for mainly from contributions.

Of course you will need to use a payment processor and you will pay a commission for each sale to the gateway, but should be less than what you want to pay.

For the b/w storage a virtual server would do and you wouldn't need huge resources because you could deploy a thumbnailer for the listings, cache images and only allow customers who buy to be able to download full images.

[limoshawn]

what's your average $ per sale?

[4crests]

$9

[limoshawn]

ok, that's good, at that price point you're not going to get killed with merchant fees.

now i know that you said that you do not really want to build something but this seems like a pretty easy, straight forward build and you'll get a lot more out of it than you would trying to make an off the shelf deal work for you.

you could set up a simple database driven site. this would help with the initial upload, using a phpmyadmin to upload your csv file with your image information. after the initial upload you can set up a back end where you can upload images individually as you get new ones.

set up a merchant account and a gateway account for processing cards, you could also keep the paypal option.

organize the front end of the site by category. use php to display restricted thumbnails, a simple checkout integrated with your payment gateway and database which allows the customer to download the image file or have the image file email once the payment is complete.

the only other thing you may need is a site search but if your categories are solid you might not need it.

it may sound like more work than you wanted but having been through this before i know that trying to make an off the shelf product work is usually more trouble than it is worth. the only off the shelf product i have ever liked is WordPress, never found an eCommerce solution that was more solution than problem.

[4crests]

Great advice... thank you. If you know anyone who can build this kind of a site for me, please sticky me. In the meantime, I think i'll try the wordpress route.

[limoshawn]

i wish i had the time to help you with it, sounds like a fun project.

[4crests]

I found one of the Moderators on this site that has a site similar to payloadz and tradebit. I'm going to give his site a try, and also go ahead with the wordpress ecommerce solution and see which one comes out best.