Choosing a merch
platform for an artist.

The three routes

Most artist stores end up as one of three things. A hosted platform you run yourself, usually Shopify. A merch partner who owns stock, fulfilment and often the storefront. Or a custom build on top of a commerce API.

They are not ranked. They suit different acts, and the deciding factors are rarely technical.

Hosted platform

Shopify and its equivalents are the default for good reasons: payments, tax, shipping rules and fraud handling all work on day one, and any developer can pick the store up later. You keep the customer data, which matters more than most people realise until they try to leave a partner.

The trade is design freedom and per-order cost. Themes can be pushed a long way but a store that looks nothing like a store takes real work, and the platform's checkout is the platform's checkout. That last point is where drops go wrong — you cannot rewrite queueing behaviour you do not control.

Merch partner

For an act with a touring schedule and no appetite for warehousing, a partner is often simply correct. They hold stock, print, ship, handle returns and take the risk on unsold inventory. The artist's job shrinks to design approval.

What you give up: margin, the customer list, and control of the experience. Read the contract for who owns the data and what happens on exit. If the answer is that the list stays with the partner, understand you are renting your own audience.

Custom

Worth it when the store is the campaign rather than a tab on the site — a numbered drop, a bundle tied to a ticket, a physical object that only exists for a week. We tend to build these on a commerce API with a custom front end, so payments and tax stay someone else's problem while the experience is entirely ours.

The cost is ongoing. A custom store is software, and software needs maintaining. Do not build one for a catalogue of five t-shirts.

The drop problem

Any store can sell steadily. Almost none survive contact with a limited run announced to a mailing list at a fixed time, which is exactly what artist merch increasingly is.

What actually helps: hold inventory decrement at the payment step rather than at add-to-basket, so carts full of abandoned stock do not show as sold out; put a real queue in front of checkout rather than letting everyone through to fail; make the product page static and cacheable so the first flood never touches a database; and decide in advance what happens when two people buy the last one. It is a distributed systems problem wearing a t-shirt.

How to choose

If merch is a service to fans and not a business line, take the partner. If it is a real revenue stream and you want the customer list, run Shopify and spend the saved budget on photography and the product page. Build custom only when the way people buy is itself part of the idea.

Whichever you pick, keep the store on your own domain. A subdomain of someone else's platform builds their search rankings, not yours.