 Selling merch is something so many musicians do so badly. If you watch the comments of Instagram or Twitter replies to the musicians, fans can play to them about how bad their merch is and how they wish they could just get their act together. But if you make some basic choices, you can do it well so easily. So in this video, I'm going to tell you the best options of how to sell merch whether you have zero fans or tens of thousands. Hi, I'm Jesse Cannon, a music marketing nerd who's teaching musicians how to go from zero to ten thousand fans on YouTube and this is Muse Formation. So one of the biggest miskeptions people have about merchandise is it only works if you're a huge artist, which is totally wrong and has been changed drastically like much of the rest of the music business by streaming music. The fact is, even if you have ten passionate fans online, you can often sell two of them merch if the desire is good and you make them aware of it to both fund your music and create walking advertisements that help create curiosity about your music and get you more fans who will buy your merch. This makes merchandising your music one of the biggest wins for you. Obviously, there's a lot to discuss around merchandising your music. But today I want to talk about the strategy behind selecting which merch platform is best for your merch. And in future episodes, we'll get into a whole lot more on strategy to increase merch sales and do it as well as possible. Even if you have zero fans, if you plan on going hard on promoting your music, you should enable merch sales so you can take advantage of people who are excited about you to both become a walking advertisement for your music as well as fund it. So even if you have no interest in your music, I think it's always a good idea to get a merch store ready. Since if things start pulling up for you, you enable every fan who has that rush of loving your song to be able to buy it and you're able to take advantage of enthusiasm right as it hits and not miss any opportunities. So many artists miss out on that initial wave of enthusiasm when they first blow up and countless dollars they could have used to fund their next single to build upon that enthusiasm and are left crying about it. But let me also say without getting in the weeds too much, that only happens if you put up good designs that work emotionally with your music. If you just make a MS Paint design and do the comic sans, it's not going to work out well. You need to research the community that you're in musically and the scene around your music and make sure you're putting out merch that's as good if not better than the merch around you. So let's say you have no fans. Here's how I would do merch. We want you to make a merch store through a print on demand service since that means they'll only print shirts or other merchandise whenever somebody orders it and you'll have to put no money down so you waste no money doing this just the time it takes to upload the designs to the website, which I imagine you have a decent amount of. You can take the designs you already have for your singles or your logo as long as they're good and turn them right into things that can be sold and make money off of. Right now my two favorite stores for doing this are Printful and Manic Merch. Until recently, the problem with print on demand services was the prices to do it were astronomical and fans would complain that the merch people would sell through them were more expensive than their favorite RS merch, but now you're able to make high quality merch at a competitive price to other RS and what they sell. As far as the two services I just recommended go, Printful has a lot of bells and whistles and a lot of really fashionable t-shirt designs and things that kids like and if you're selling to highly fashionable people, they're really the way to go. Whereas Manic Merch is a more simple bare bones merch provider that can be set up super easy and has a bit better profit margins. The key with these stores is to price your merch so that you make a small profit off of a high quality design. Now what does that mean? As I've discussed in plenty of videos that making visuals that align emotionally with your music not only helps your promotions go further, but those designs can also help you sell merch, which is why it's important to invest in design since it makes people take you seriously as an artist and it helps you sell this merch that helps fund your music in the future. Of course the downside to this is that these stores don't really have a lot of options for customizing to look like your own store and don't feel as fancy as the nice merch stores of your favorite artists. The way around that is to get a store through Big Cartel or Shopify, which can integrate with Printful so you can still take advantage of print on demand services, but you end up paying Big Cartel or Shopify's fees on top of it, but the store can look much better and you can sell digital downloads as well. But the problem is you then pay fees for another store on top of Printful and lose profits, but if you're worried about how your aesthetic looks, then this can be worth the money. But if you have no fans, you can always upgrade to this as you have a demand for your merchandise and more people are gonna be seeing it. The other option I recommend is if you have some traction and have a few hundred people who are starting to buy merch from you, is to go the traditional route and fulfill merch yourself, which you pay for upfront, store it somewhere and then pack it and ship it yourself. I particularly like this option for musicians out there who are gonna be touring road warriors or have some momentum and wanna connect with their fans a little bit more through the merch they sell. If you're a band that's gigging regularly and already has merged, this can be a great option and you can obviously make more money doing this as you're not paying for the print on demand services to ship it out and fulfill it for you, which costs so much money. But the other advantage to this is what we will talk about extensively at some point. Tony Shea, the founder and CEO of Zappos, talked about this concept of random acts of wow. Where the company would do little things that would excite customers so much that they would then talk about Zappos on social media or tell their friends, like, I can't believe they did this for me, like ship it even sooner and make sure that the product had a little extra treat. With the Group Man overboard that I used to manage, we had a huge, huge merch line and we took a hint from this. We ran our own merch organization and the band would customize writing messages to fans that often made a play on their name or wrote a personal message to them about something in their merch orders. We dropped stickers and postcards in with the orders and the amount of shares we got about people being like, wow, I can't believe they did this, really did great advertisements to keep growing our merch brand, which really, really blew up over time. If you want to do this yourself, I recommend selling on Bandcamp or Limited Run. I find Limited Run to have many cool options and with them you get a free mailing list provider that kills two birds with one stone and can cut down on the fees you're paying each month for that. Since they both allow physical items and digital downloads to be sold, they are both a great solution. Just remember, if you're planning to fill these items yourself, there's tons of headaches with it. Bad shipments, wrong sizes and tons of other issues that you need to take care of that will get fans angry with you if you don't handle them properly. While this may seem minimal, when about two out of every 100 orders have an issue with it, it can really bring you down. But I will say this, I really like it for artists that's starting to do well as personal interactions you can have with their fans can really grow them into super fans as I'm always talking about building relationships. The fans that buy from you open a door for you to build a relationship that can really, really grow if you do it right. But once your merch store is doing really well and you have hundreds or thousands of paying fans, you don't wanna fulfill it yourself because it takes too long. So I like to do this through Printful or through a merch fulfillment company, but I highly recommend moving your store to something like Shopify as they offer the best tools in the game in exchange for some pretty high fees. Whether it's having excellent SEO so fans can find your merch easier onto just a great trustworthy interface that keeps the people order from you up to date or just having a clean interface with that customer's trust who wanna buy from you. In fact, in a future video, I'm even gonna argue that Shopify is the best platform to build your music website on for most artists. Since you could kill two birds with one stone by paying for just Shopify instead of a separate website since Shopify is all the functionality and more of the best website platforms out today. But it's true power lies in the ability to market and present merch in a professional way. And if you're gonna be selling tons of merch, they are at this point are the best tool in the box for helping you sell merch more effectively. I would work up the scale on your merch and dies over time and choose the roots I outline here. If you have any tips or questions on merchandise companies or how to do this properly, leave them below in the comments. Thanks for watching. Am I missing anything? Is there any other way you would have done this? I need to know your questions and what no one else is telling you since I wanna answer them. So leave them in the comments since I answer every comment in every post. I hope you liked this video and if you did, please like, subscribe and get notified. And I'm gonna be breaking down the concepts in this video along with how to promote your music and how to make songs you're happy with in the future. I have a Facebook group linked below that is only helpful information. No playlist or con artists. Only artists having helpful discussions allowed. If you wanna learn more about me, work on a record with me or check out any of my books, podcasts or anything else I do, go to jessecanon.com or at jessecanon.com on all the socials. One last thing, there's two playlists here. One is on how to grow your fan base from zero to 10,000 fans. And the other is on how you make songs you're more happy with. And the other is on how you promote your music with Spotify. And the other is specially chosen to match this video. Or you can hit the subscribe button below and stay tuned as I have tons of tips for musicians.