Frequently Asked Questions
OK I’m interested – What are the next steps to get my own store?
We need to following to set up your shop:
- your band’s name
- your band’s website address
- a contact email address
- a contact postal address
- a band logo image ( need be no bigger than 100 pixels in height )
- product images ( need be no bigger then 200x200 pixels )
- product descriptions ( track lists if audio, sizes etc if t-shirts, that sort of thing )
- any downloadable files you want to sell ( MP3s, WAVs, FLACs, PDFs, whatever… )
- bank details for the account you want payments made to.
If you are selling CDs, and want to also sell them as downloads, tell us what format and we will rip the CD for you and put it up for download. If you send us audio files please note we will insist the quality is good, minimum quality being CD audio converted to 192 bit MP3.
Once we have the above, we can create your shop.
Once we have some stock of all the products you want to sell, we can make it live and ready for your customers to start buying.
Lastly but not leastly, you link your website to your new shop. we cannot do this for you, and its vital that you do it clearly, as it is your website that will get customers into your new shop.
We cannot make your products sell for you. If nobody visits your site and clicks through to your shop, nobody will buy anything.
Please only send us an amount of stock you estimate to sell in a month. If you think you’ll sell 5 CDs, send us 5, if you think you’ll sell 500, send us 500. We will email you payment reports detailing sales monthly ( provided you’ve had sales ) so you will know when we need more stock.
If you do have a sudden rush of sales we will email you requesting more of whatever is needed.
We can only keep our costs so low by keeping our stock levels minimal.
How do I send you many or big files? I tried to email you images and the email bounced
We only need small images for your shop, so you should have no problem emailing them to us.
Our email server will bounce emails greater than 2MBytes…
If you need to send us many or big files ( MP3s, WAVs, FLACs, large images, etc… ) please put them in a single .zip file first, and send us that using an upload service such as senduit
How do I style my shop to match my website?
The short (technical) answer is: you can override our default CSS file with your own…
We tend to assume that if you have your own website you (or your web designer) knows all about CSS, if not, here’s a brief low-down:
CSS (Cascading StyleSheets) applies style information to web pages. They are the domain of the web designer, but are not too tricky to use.
Until you supply us with your own edited version, your shop will be styled with our default corporationrecords.css
We would recommend using the FireFox web browser, and installing the Web Developer Toolbar and the superb FireBug web page inspector.
The Web Developer Toolbar will let you “Edit CSS” and apply the style changes immediately to the loaded page, so you can vist your shop URL, click “Edit CSS” and see the effect of changing settings.
If you are struggling with finding which bits of the page have which bits of style applied to them, then click the green tick in the bottom right of the FireFox window to launch FireBug, then click the revealed “Inspect” button.
Now, as you move the mouse across the web page FireBug will reveal information about the bit you’re pointing at, including (on the right side) CSS information.
Assuming all goes well with your tweaking, you can then save the edited CSS file, and send it to us. Do remember to send us any new images your edited CSS file references.
If all the above is too much, and you do not have a web designer at your disposal, our technical staff can be hired at market rates .