Hi Chelsea,

My advice is to start with something free and which integrates with Aweber and offers a custom redirect after order option, like Paypal. Then, once you start making enough to cover the costs of a shopping cart and credit card processor you could upgrade if you want to. I personally use 1shoppingcart and authorize.net, but that runs me over $150 a month before CC fees. There are cheaper options, but you'll end up spending at least $70/month if you get your own credit card processor.  

There are fraud risks and shipping hurdles no matter what you use, but in my experience they are pretty minimal. Especially with music. It's not a high risk market at all.

But feel free to explore other options as well. There are so many out there and new ones popping up all the time. Just make sure they at least allow you to redirect to a custom url after the purchase. That's key.

Hope that helps.

Nice. I've known about woocommerce for years but haven't ever checked it out. My concern with a wordpress plugin is always security as wordpress is so easily hacked. What do they offer for security?

Hey Soren, 

I see, I assumed you were using a credit card processor and the plugin was passing the card info. If you are using paypal then yeah, I'd say you're totally fine.

Hey Chelsea, while I realize the question was for Soren, I thought I'd just chime in again and say that the majority of your orders will always be pretty straight forward. No matter what precautions you take there will be some cases of fraud, shipping losses, etc. And it will be very rare that you have orders come in from Nigeria and Pakistan, and places that are high risk. That said, if you allow it, it will happen. I remove some of the super high risk countries but allow most. And when something doesn't feel right I just email or call the customer and tell them I need to call them to verify their order because it got flagged by my security settings. In pretty much every single case I've ever had, if it was fraud they never got back to me. But again, most of the CC fraud is for higher value items than music so I really see this as minimal, and any losses will be dwarfed by profit.

Hey Chelsea,

I don't know how the plugin is set up, but tags alone should not be an issue at all.

As for eBay for exposure, I'd apply the 80/20 principle here. And put your energy on the twenty percent that gets 80 percent of the results. Putting merch on eBay is not likely to be one of those things, in my opinion.