Every one should start a web shop, its funny, hard and areally interesting experiment. I created ours in the winter of 2006-07. It was very strange programming at places, and the web hotel is not very good at telling me about upgrades and server flaws, so some really natural things has taken lts of energy in vain. But t is still a very funny thing to do.
Economically it is not very expensive. Of course, if we bought the shop from some other programmer it would have cost us quite a lot. But now the costs are the following: 150 euros for the deal with the bank, 95 euros for the deal with the payment service provider and then 0,3 euros to the bank per transaction and 0,2 euros to the payment service provider per transaction. It is not very much. We use the same webserver as our Gramtone space, so its free. In our cooperative record company it will be a great asset.
We want to use it as a factory outlet, for cheaper prices, strange deals and some merchandize that we cant sell elsewhere. Also, we want to set a standard for a personal and cool web shop. The ones I have seen so far, from Itunes to the services you can buy or rent on the web, are just extremly boring. Ok, they might be efficient, but it’s like the worst kind of warehouse-system, just listings and no human feeling. One had a surfer-sporty layout, but still worked like the most uninspiring list of MP3:s. So we are trying to put some content in, some video and to place ourselves into it, for the audience to understand that we are there, just behind the coding.
There are some logistics involved of course. I suppose it would be very hard to run a web shop alone. But we are quite a few, adn orders have to be carried out fast and correct. There also has to be a customer service, and the economic overview. So 4-5 people will be intensly involved in this shop. The shop is finished and are starting up as soon as we get the first albums back from pressing.
