Selling CDs on the web can be a lot of fun, but it can also include some major headaches. Creating and maintaing a web site, attracting customers, finding fast and reliable suppliers are just a few of the tasks a successful merchant must deal with every single day. It is not easy, but with a little savvy it can be done. And yes, Virginia, there is such a thing as making profit on online music sales.

Unlike brick & mortar shops where the merchants can impress customers simultaneously by product selection, display and arrangement, sales clerk interaction, colors, lights and even perfumes, online merchants' tools are severely limited. In essence, it can be said that your web site is your company.

A music retailer's success, even survival, is frequently determined by their product listing - their database.

Besides being limited on tools, you also only have a few seconds to convince a new visitor to stay. If you do not engage the shopper's attention right away, click! and he/she is in someone else's virtual store. Beam me up, Scotty!

On the other hand, with a little creativity this handicap can be turned into an advantage. With a great web site, even a very small company can make an impression of a powerhouse; something you just can not do with a physical store. There's no way you can make a superstore impression with a 10x10 foot brick & mortar shop, but with a good database and eye-pleasing site design even a one-man company can make a superstore impression on the web.

And there lies the rub: Your database is your web site. Anyone trying to maintain their own CD database bigger than a few hundred items, quickly finds out it is an impossible task. Soon you are torn between running your business and maintaining your database, and in the end both activities suffer. Unless you have a dedicated personnel working exclusively on the database, it just won't work.

Even if you do have people available, an in-house database still may not be the best option. Why? The cost. Doing all the work exclusively for your own use is an extremely expensive undertaking, costing thousands or even tens of thousands of Dollars a month. You can lease the same (or better) database from data vendors for a fraction of that cost. How come they can do it "cheap" and you can't? The answer is ´Economy of scale´. The data vendors spend the same horrendous amount of money you would to maintain the database, but by leasing it to multiple clients they can spread the cost. It is more of a bean-counting than a rocket science.

Although leasing a database is much cheaper than maintaining your own, the prices may be still out of reach for small merchants. We at CDI are well aware of this cost barrier and are doing all we can to keep our prices as low as possible, in order to make our data affordable to the widest number of music merchants. We do not publish a price list because the prices depend on many factors such as the number of countries the client requires, the update schedule, the data breadth, etc. Rather than publishing a convoluted general price list, we quote the actual price in each case individually.

To initiate the process, please fill out the following short form and we will get back to you as soon as possible with a free, no-strings-attached consultation. By the way, if apart from data you also need an integrated e-commerce application (storefront, extranet/intranet, credit card agenda, shipping etc.) along with web hosting, we can do that, too.