Many software companies sell their products online, before I made Starcars freeware I had an account with BMTmicro to handle payment processing and full version distribution.

This was good. It meant that they could handle all that backend stuff and I didn’t have to worry about getting an expensive merchant account with some bank. As well as separate services to handle all the different ways that one can pay over the internet - Visa, Mastercard, Amex, Cheque… etc… All that was taken care of.

Now my other hobby, I play in an independant band. (Meaning we’re not signed to any label and we own 100% our own material and image. You can check out our myspace page here)

We just recently recorded a 5-Track EP that we’ve been selling at gigs. For a couple of weeks now, I’ve been wanting to setup an online store so that people who can’t come to our gigs can order, and pay for our EP easily and securely.

I looked at three different services that we could use to sell our CD.

Google Checkout - At first this looked really good. No transaction fees until 2008 and I enjoy using many of google’s other free services that they offer. Unfortunately it’s only avalible in the United States and the United Kingdom. Being located in the boondocks of the south pacific, this immediately wrote Google Checkout off as a potential solution.

Yahoo Store - I heard about yahoo store through Paul Graham’s blog. (Which all geeks should read.) He was the founder of a Viaweb whose product eventually became Yahoo Store after they where bought by Yahoo. Unfortunately Yahoo Store was overkill for what we needed. Remember we have one CD for sale. Yahoo Store is a complete online store solution, and to really get the most out of it you would need multiple products. And the pricing was too expensive (at $39.95 per month, with 1.5% transaction fee) for us to maintain for just one product.

PayPal - And now we come to PayPal, the Merchant I ended up deciding on. The main reasons being - no setup or monthly fees and the ability to forget all that shopping cart stuff and just let the user purchase an item by clicking on a custom button, which you can then embed into your webpage. Perfect for the band with one CD to sell. The transaction fees we pay are 3.5% of purchase price + $0.30 usd. Not bad. Setting up the account was easy. Navigating around inside of PayPal’s control panel proved a bit more cumbersome but I managed to get a custom order form and a custom logo setup in less than an hour.

I’ve yet to finalise the design of our order button (remember we want to embed it in our MySpace and our webpage, but when I do, I’ll post the results here)