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After reading this post I would like to draw on the experience of the EE ecommerce gurus.

I’m looking to create a “itunes like” music store for a very niche market using EE and I guess either CT or BR.

Besides customers registering and buying music, artist should be able to create an account and best case secenario, upload their own music, album art, set prices etc. and check sales reports. Worst case, I upload everything and set prices, but they must be able to log in and see sales reports or at least receive them via email. Is this possible using CT or BR. I’m thinking it’s a job for CT, due to it’s flexibility?

I guess I would use EE and setup 2 types of member groups, customers and artist. I’ll then have to tie in whatever ecom addon I go with to the customer group, so that they can purchase music but also tie it into the artist group and related products so I can generate reports using something like NSM Reports, I dunno. Is this at all possible?

Thanks
nomoretables

Ok after thinking about it some more, maybe I should start with version 0.1

I’m setting up a digital music download store and trying to figure out if CT, BR or Expresso will do the job. As far as I’ve read CT and Expresso seems the most flexible. But maybe I don’t even need full blown solution like above since I’m not going to sell physical products, the main feature I need is sales reports. Would something like MB Shopping Cart and NSM Reports not work.

My main concern is sales reports per record label, artist, album rather then per song, so I can pay the artist/record labels their % of sales.

1. With sales reports in mind I’m thinking different channels will be different record labels so I can generate a sales report for an entire record label using that channel, or would it be better to have a channel for every artist and use categories for record labels? Again with sales reports in mind, let’s say record label are channels, then channel entries would be music albums, and artist would be a field in the channel entry or should I rather use categories for artist?

2. Can the above reports be done natively in CT or would I need something like CT Admin and is the above strategy a good way to integrate EE and CT for the reports/digital downloads

3. For version 0.1 of this project I won’t mind manually generating reports and email it to artist/labels, but ideally I would want the artist/records labels to be able to log in and check their sales records, or at least have the system mail it to them automatically, is this possible?

4. Also for a future version I would like artist/record labels to upload their own music and album art, but then there’s the question of quality control etc. so for now they would send the physical cd to us and we would rip the mp3’s, but just out of curiosity would this be possible by creating a group called artist and one called recordlabels in EE and have them register and upload their own stuff?

5. Would it be possible to pay the artist/records labels their % automatically

Thanks
nomoretables

I don’t think any of the cart systems have a level of detail for order reporting like you suggest, at least out of the box.

Carthrob might be worth looking at because it stores orders as Channel entries, so you should be able to log orders and use custom fields and possibly categories to filter order data. You’d need to build your own templates for viewing order data but as it’s channel entry data it’s fairly straightforward.

I haven’t enough experience of the the other carts to comment further, though have you asked on the Cartthrob user forums, you might find some extra info there?

Hi Rob, yes I have posted on the various cart sites, no reply yet, but just thought maybe there was a easy solution that I was perhaps missing. Thanks!