If you’re already using Bandcamp for digital downloads of your music, then you know what a powerful sales tool the platform can be. But if you limit yourself to only selling those digital downloads, you’re leaving money on the table. Here’s a brief guide to the benefits of adding merchandise to your Bandcamp store.
You’ll Make More Money
Since Bandcamp added the merchandising feature to their platform, sales of merch have reached $59 million USD. That’s a lot of money that most likely wouldn’t have found its way into artists’ pockets without the simple merch integration in their Bandcamp stores.
You can add CDs, vinyl, t-shirts, artwork, baseball caps, anything you can think of. According to Bandcamp sales of CDs increased by 14% last year, while vinyl put in an excellent performance with sales growth of 48%.
You don’t need to order huge volumes of physical product and run the risk of having merchandise sitting around unsold. It’s not difficult to find suppliers for short order runs of t-shirts and CDs. In fact, CD duplication can often be obtained with orders as low as 100 copies, giving you a low-cost way to test the water.
Bandcamp Customers Trust the Company
When you attempt to sell merchandise from your own website, you may face a couple of problems. You need to integrate a storefront, a shopping cart and a payment facility, and you have to overcome the barrier that’s always present when a customer is presented with an unknown entity.
While people are comfortable buying from big online brands like Amazon and eBay because of the guarantees these companies offer and the security of their payment gateways, people are less confident about buying from individual websites ,and shopping cart abandonment is a big problem.
You may have even felt that way yourself and clicked away from a sales page because you didn’t want to take a chance on losing your money.
Since Bandcamp is a well established and highly trusted platform, customers won’t have those concerns and will happily purchase from the site. Bandcamp can offer a level of familiarity and security that you can’t match on your own website.
Bandcamp Makes Merch Sales Easy
Bandcamp gives you seamless product integration, giving your physical merchandise prominent placement next to your digital offerings.
Plus, their Discover feature allows music fans to browse for merch directly on the site or in their app, and this feature drives over 20% of the sites sales. What does this mean for you? When you add merchandise to your product line, you’ve got even more chance of exposure outside of your fan base.
Order fulfillment is easy too. You can keep track of customer details, print off address labels and packing slips, and mark orders as completed right there in the Bandcamp system.
Digital music is great, it’s instant and it’s portable, and fans can buy a single track or a bundle of your entire work to date, but a lot of people want a physical copy of the music they buy, especially if they want to give it as a gift. Even if you don’t want to get into other merchandising opportunities, selling a CD next to your digital download is a smart way to catch some extra sales and improve your bottom line.