Online Sales of Downloadable items

As far as we know, we are the first and only company to offer customizable stores to sell your downloadable files. The time has finally arrived!!!! Now you can sell your music,ebooks, ringtones and any other downloadable file you have the rights for. Downloadable sales are transacted a little differently then physical sales on our website and this article will hopefully help in explaining the differences. When you sell a physical good, you collect the money in your PayPal account and then remitt the money to IndieMart. Downloadable files work a little bit differently. When a downloadable file is sold from your site, for example a song you created, the transaction takes place on the IndieMart payment gateway. IndieMart holds the money for the merchants and remitts it to them after there is a balance of $25 or more owed to the merchant and only after the merchant requests IndieMart to do so. As a result of us processing all the transactions we are able to keep our fees very low for the sales of songs. If merchants were to sell songs for $1 and use their own payment gateway, they would be lucky to recieve 60 cents from that money. IndieMart only charges 15 cents per transaction and 5% of revenue. Compared to other sites that sell downloadable files, this is almost 1/3 of the price. Also these other sites don't give merchants their own URL or customizable site to sell from. This is truely a revolutionary moment in the selling of downloadable files on the net.

New Features

Over the last week we have introduced a few new features for you free store that I will discuss now. While we are going to be adding dozens of features over the next couple of weeks to get ready for our full scale launch out of Beta testing, these features currently being mentioned now are available for all store owners on IndieMart as of this moment.
We have introduced a new messaging system where customers can message stores and ask for more info about the products. As well the store owner now have a comment system underneath there products so buyers can comment on what they like about the product and how they feel the product can be imporved. This can offer valuable advice to the store owner in determining which products are getting the best feedback. We have also added a rating system where IndieMart users can vote on their favourite products or stores and give them positive feedback.
This is only a small sample of the many features we have launched and the many more features we will be launching. Stay tuned as we are coming out with something soon that we feel will revolutionize the online music and ebook industry!!!

indiemart.com 's first ever video blog by co-founder Dallas Gains

Please understand this wasnt done by professionals and we hope you enjoy :)

As always all the best and optimal business growth from all of us here @ indiemart.com



co-founder
Dallas Gains and the indiemart.com team!

htttp://www.indiemart.com

Getting to know the Indie Wizard

We developed the Indie Wizard to help our merchants as quickly and effectively create free online stores. While the Indie Wizard isn't meant to increase traffic to your store (don't worry that is coming up), it is a quick way for you to get a professional looking store. By filling out all the information on the Wizard you give your store a much greater chance of ranking highly on our search results. The Wizard consists of 5 points to help you get started to selling goods. By using the wizard you will go step by step to simplify the process. The first step is to upload a logo, while the second step is to pick a premade theme. Also you can customize a theme by yourself if you know CSS coding. Step 3 takes you to our customized layout page where you will be able to add any social media sites, create a blog and move modules around. Step 4 is uploading your products and the final step 5 is turning your store from private to public. Assuming you have all your files on your computer and are uploading no more then 10 products, the Indie Wizard can get you a create looking store in under 15 minutes. Of course the more time you spend on your store and the better it will look. I recommend at least 1 hour setting up your store which will include products, blogs, and connecting to your Facebook, Twitter, Myspace or YouTube.

Websites to judge the effectiveness of your marketing

Creating a website isn't enough if you want to be successful on the Internet now a days. 20 years ago, you but up a site and you were basically the only game in town for selling a certain product online. Now the online marketplace has become more competitive and tougher to make sales then off line. Yet some individuals make great money selling online with low overhead and great margins while others struggle to make even one sale. While may goal of this blog isn't to necessarily give you marketing tips, but to present you with websites that will help you score your efforts (Albeit on a scoring system they have created)
The first website is www.websitegrader.com
IN their own words they say It provides a score that incorporates things like website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors. It also provides some basic advice on how the website can be improved from a marketing perspective"
The same creators of website grader also came up with a grader for your Twitter page. Which should be an indication to you just how important a Twitter page is.
You can find it http://twitter.grader.com/ basically this tool allows you to judge the effectiveness of your twitter page vs. over 2 million in their system based on their predetermined metrics.
The final website that I will mention is http://www.seomoz.org/ which is basically an easy to use SEO optimizer where you can rank various aspects of your website and see where you need to improve. It is available for free and an upgraded version for a fee.
Knowing how effective your marketing is to search engines is key. Every social bookmark you create and every social media page you start for your business shouldn't be judged only on how much referral traffic it brings in, but also on the residual traffic that search engines will drive to your site due to your efforts.

Recent Press

I would just like to share some recent press that we have recieved in the month of January. The biggest news comes from a website called Killer start ups. YOu can check out the editorial here http://www.killerstartups.com/eCommerce/indiemart-com-creating-a-store-made-simple
I must admit it was a great review and one I am more then happy to mention, written about us on a top ranked website. Another article which featured IndieMart was on feed my apps which is basically a website which compiles interesting webpages and applications from the internet. We are planning something very big in the media which I am not at liberty to speak of at the moment, but hopefully it will come together in the next 4 months.
Nothing pleases me more then having independent websites give us positive reviews which validates all the hard work our team at IndieMart has put in to try and put out the best possible product. Hopefully we can have many more positive reviews in the future and like always I will be happy to share it with you.

Even Lower Fees

In our about us section we have made a promise to keep our fees as low as possible. Due to our strong growth in our first few months of operation we have reassessed our objectives and decided it was possible for us to decrease our fees even further. Under our old fee structure, free stores were able to list up to 10 products at one time and were charged 2.9% per transaction while premium members were able to list unlimited items and charged 0.9% per transaction. Now free members can list unlimited items and are charged 2.9% per transaction while premium members can list unlimited items and all transaction fees are waived. We would like to thank all the merchants that have signed up and made this possible. As we grow and generated more revenue we will try to pass any savings as possible to our merchants. Our goal is to create the best selling experience possible, we hope this move is one step closer to that goal.