Hey everyone! James here from The Better Band Bureau,
and I discovered something really interesting
while I was doing research for
my upcoming workshop which is called
Merchandise In The Modern Music Industry.
That's on January 30th,
Wednesday night that is
and it is at 8:00p.m.
Eastern Time.
So if you're interested in earning more money from merchandise
and really pumping that income
stream to its greatest potential, definitely
check that out. There'll be a link in the comments
or description below for you to look.
But so what was going on as I was
researching for this is there are some apps
for tracking merchandise that I've used before
I wanted to see if there were any that
had popped up since I had last done research
on this and since I had last compared
apps.
And what I did find is that there's a new player
called Merch Cat
and they have an interesting offer.
They're much cheaper than some
of the other competition including the
main player out there right now who I'll go
over in the workshop on Wednesday.
This one, Merch Cat,
they have pretty good pricing.
It's $7.99 per month
or $84.99 per year.
And that comes with inventory tracking
both at your shows
and in your warehouse
or storage area which is pretty awesome.
That's a big deal there because you're able to have
the two separate inventories
and transfer things back
and forth. What really caught my eye about
Merch Cat though, was that they have
a fan store.
So the tracking app that
you use when you're at your shows selling merch
will also double as an online
store for your merch where people can place
orders for you to ship it to them
or they can preorder it
and pick up the items at a show.
Which, that's something new, that's something unique
that I don't think I've ever seen before.
So I'm really excited about that,
And I wanted to take a look at the app.
I'm going to sign up for it right now I've never
done this before with Merch Cat
and see how it goes see how easy it
is and you can follow along.
I'm going to do it on my phone they do have a web site as you can see.
This is the main website that they have,
which is basically a pitch for their product,
and they have the Merch Cat Fan website.
Let's click on fan
and then they tell
you about the app, basically.
I'm kind of disappointed
that they don't have an online store,
that you can only as a fan buy through
the app, but it's still cool that they have
the app in the first place
and maybe they will have online stores
in the future and maybe that's just a feature
that I'm not currently seeing
and they do have it,
It's just not on the main page.
But anyway to
get back to checking this out
we're going to sign up for Merch Cat
on my phone right here.
Let's see how it goes.
Create a free account
artist name.
Well I'm not representing an artist right now
so I'll put in my own
name as if I'm a solo act
So that was far as I could get without paying
to use the app.
But I reached out to Vanessa who runs
Merch Cat
and had a great chat
with her about the app
and she showed me some of the features.
And she also gave me a
code so I could sign in to the app
and do this video for you guys
and show you how it works as well.
So I'm really grateful to Vanessa over
at Merch Cat, I think she has a really great product
here and I'm excited to show it to all of you!
From this point on it's no longer my reaction
to the app because Vanessa was kind
enough to give me a demo
via screen share so I could
understand better how the app works.
But now I do have a better idea of what
to show you because I can see what is
most important to you.
So I think this will be a more concise video overall
than it would have been if I was just exploring the app
while I was shooting.
So without further ado I'm going to cut back to the video
I shot the other day on how to use the app.
If you have any questions just leave a comment below
or go to the Merch Cat website
and reach out to Vanessa.
She's really nice and I'm sure she'll help you out
with any questions you might have.
And again thanks so much for watching.
I'm going to continue the demo now.
First of all, in the lower right
is the menu button. Hit profile
and there you can see I changed the artist name
to Reel Big Fish, just because I realized
for the show import from Bandsintown,
it has to be an actual artist.
Obviously I'm not gonna sell any items as Reel Big Fish,
but I just needed to put in something for
example purposes.
And, the subscription is active
because Vanessa the developer was kind
enough to give me a demo of
the app so I can show you how
it works which I think is really awesome.
And then I enabled
Square point of sale.
So that's that for the
basic account settings.
Then, if you go to Merch Cat Fan,
this is where you would set up anything
to do with the Merch Cat Fan app which
is where fans can purchase merchandise in advance
and pick it up at the show
or it's a webstore in app form
and they can purchase merch
and you ship it to them.
Both are very very cool ideas
I think because it all integrates to one system
and it means you don't have to track two separate inventories
which I think is really good because the
DIY artist has enough on their plate.
You don't have to have more. So to start,
you just slide over use Merch Cat Fan,
and then you'd connect to Square to receive payments.
You tap it
and it will ask you to sign in.
Once it loads which I'm not going to do right now
because I'm not going to be selling anything
I had already enabled ship to home home,
it's disabled by default.
Then you enter your address to enable
shipping
and then once you've done all that you can enter your social media
links and your website.
Which means that fans can find all of
those when they're in the Merch Cat Fan
app so they can stay connected
with you. And then you tap update profile.
Now going back to the main screen,
we're going to add some inventory.
So you tap inventory,
and you add an item.
I'm going to say it's a t-shirt
but since I don't have a picture of a t-shirt I'm
gonna add a picture of my dog.
He's awesome.
And we're going to call it dog t-shirt.
There you go.
The price let's call it 15.
The cost. This is the cost of the
item. So if it costs you $4.50
you'd put in $4.50 which
is known as the cost of goods sold.
The SKU is optional, we can leave that out.
But we do need to put it in category since this is a T-shirt,
we'll put it in as apparel.
And then it's going to ask what it is,
so we're gonna say it's unisex
and this is a medium.
Now when we get to count there's a few things
to watch out for.
Count, the top one, is
the total amount of this item you
have in stock.
No matter where it is whether it's in your
basement, your warehouse, your garage
on the road with you, wherever it is.
So let's say this is a fresh batch
and we had one hundred printed
so we have one hundred
but we're just doing a quick weekend tour.
We're not going to sell that much,
so we only took 20 with us.
The show quantity will come in later that doesn't
really matter for now.
But you might be wondering, "well what about
other shirt sizes?"
What you do is you hit save and duplicate
and then you can fill in the item again,
but you add in
gender
and size. We'll put in large this time.
The count we'll again put one hundred
and 20
and then we hit save.
Now obviously you could do that for every single shirt size,
but I'm just adding two for the sake of example.
So, that's how you add inventory.
You hit back and you're now at the main screen again.
Now that you know how to add inventory,
it's time to add your first show.
So you tap on shows.
And you tap add.
And you have two options: you can use Bandsintown,
or you can add a show manually.
I'm just going to go with Bandsintown.
Reel Big Fish has some shows,
I'm going to add tomorrow's show at The Blue Note
click submit
and there's the Blue Note in Columbia, MO,
And when you open it up
you have the option to start store.
But we're going to hold off on that for just a second.
When you import shows from Bandsintown, it adds
the venue information.
But it does not add the street name
a street address. Just city,
zip code and state.
So you want to add that information
if it matters to you.
Which if you're reporting
to Soundscan through another application
then you do need that information.
In addition, if you're using Soundscan
you need to fill in the contact email
and phone as well as their name.
That's the venue representative
who will sign off to vouch that, yes
this has been sold on this date.
I don't care about that stuff since this is just an example
and I'm not going to be reporting my sales
So I just hit save.
Now that I've gone over the address
with you and we're back on the main page
for the show we're, going to enable road
merch only which tracks
inventory separately so it knows that you're deducting
from the road merch rather than
the warehouse merch.
You can add the hall fee which
is the venue's percentage
and it sucks
but unfortunately a lot of venues do take
a hall fee.
The app does give you the opportunity to split
it into different percentages for merch
and music because many venues do charge
separate fees depending on what
item you're selling.
So let's say they take 20 percent
of merch
but only 10 percent of music
and then we tap save.
It bounces us back to that main page,
but now we're ready to go
ahead and start selling.
So you tap the show,
then you tap start store.
I'm not going to enable this right now because I'm not actually
selling anything.
Now we have our count in
and we're fresh on the tour so we know 20
of each is accurate,
that's our count.
Or pretend I just counted all 40 shirts right now
and we're all set on that.
Proceed to confirm.
And now I can sell.
So let's say I sell
one medium dog T-shirt.
Add it to cart, go to checkout
and hit take payment.
Now it's bouncing over to Square because
in the settings I had enabled
Square. You could also enable PayPal
or cash only.
You do have to make sure that you're signed into the
Square app before it tries to
bounce over to Square, otherwise it won't load properly.
Now I'm not gonna swipe a card because I don't want to charge myself.
I'm just gonna put in cash
and I'm going to say they gave me
twenty dollars
and tender
it'll say five dollars change
and does the person want a receipt? They don't want a receipt.
I hand them their change
and there we go.
Now it says complete, I've been paid fifteen
dollars.
That's how fast it is to sell items
with this app. I love it.
One last thing I want to show you about
the sales section is how you can
do discounts or comps.
For example, you're doing buy one get
one free
you add two of the item
you go to check out
and you can just adjust the price in the
cart right there
and set it to fifteen dollars
instead of 30 because it's buy one get one free!
Take payment go in I'm going
to do cash and this time I'll do exact because
it's easier.
No thanks to the receipt,
and that's it. We're done with selling.
Now, if you at the end of the night
looking to close down your shop
you hit the X in the upper left
and tap stop store.
Yes I'm sure I want to stop the store
and then it offers an inventory count out.
I know that my numbers are accurate because they're made
up, but you might want to actually count
and make sure that you're not missing anything.
Let's say we did count
and we found that for the large,
wes we did sell two of those
and we have 18 left but for the medium we only sold
one...
But we also only have 18 left.
So I tap adjust
and change the number.
And that's how we account for our losses.
Then I confirm,
and it generates the report for
this show.
One last thing I want to show you is how
the reports in the app work.
So from the main screen you tap on reports
and then you can see here all the items
sold for the current month,
three months, six months, nine
months, one year,
or since you created the account.
So I'm just gonna go back to current month,
and you'll see here there are quite a
few more items sold than in the demo.
But, that's because I was fooling around
the app testing it, seeing what
I could do.
And you will see at the current inventory
I have ninety six medium
and ninety six large shirts
of the dog t-shirt
then in the upper left the green menu button
if we tap the shopping cart this will let
us see the breakdown of each of our individual
shows.
So I go to info
and see the artist information
and the venue information, as well as the date.
Then there are three separate reports
and these are very important to understand.
The artist report includes all
sales for the show.
This means that it includes pre-sales
and any purchases fans made at
the venue but asked to be shipped
to their home.
The venue report does not include
the pre-sales
and shipped to home sales, because the
venue should not be taking a cut
out of those sales.
This is where the hall fee comes in
and you can see that on the shirts that were sold
the venue took 15 percent which means
they took four dollars
and 50 cents out of the 30 dollars
gross profit.
This means that the artist kept twenty five
dollars and 50 cents.
You can see the breakdown here,
that one medium was sold for 15
dollars. The Buy One Get One Free
that we did the two large were for $7.50
each, which works out the same.
And then the loss we reported
was for zero.
And it's quantity negative one.
Scrolling a little further down, the venue
representative and the artist representative.
This is where you'd have the venue representatives
sign to verify your SoundScan sales.
Going back up.
We have the inventory report.
This is where you can see what you have left
of each item.
You counted in with 18 of each.
We adjusted negative one for the medium because
it was lost and we sold one medium
and we sold two large.
Leaving us with 16 of each
and three items total sold.
Just going back to the main menu.
That's about it for Merch Cat basics.
Now I want to make it clear that even though I was in communication
with Vanessa the founder
and CEO of Merch Cat she
did not ask me to promote this application.
I had reached out proactively to her.
I'm not getting any sort of affiliate deal
I am making nothing from talking
about this application.
It's just something that I stand behind.
I think it fills a large gap
in the industry between top
tier apps like atVenu
which are very expensive
and have lots of features that the average person
just doesn't need.
And other smaller apps that
they work but they're not great.
This app, Merch Cat, has a lot
of great features that I think everyone should have
and I really love the Merch Cat Fan
app that goes with it to
run your web store through an app
and allow preorders of merch
at your shows.
I just think that's an absolutely wonderful idea
and I fully support it.
Having spoken with Vanessa I know
she is 100 percent there for the artist.
She wants to talk to people
and learn their stories.
She wants to help people,
and I think that's really great
and that's something that we need more of in this industry.
And I also think that from what I've seen of the
app, this is honestly something I
would use.
The other apps I've tried some of them including
atVenu
and others
and they do what they're supposed to do
but not as easily
and efficiently as Merch Cat does.
So I encourage you to check out
the Merch Cat website,
the link will be down below in the description.
And if you have any questions, reach out to me
or reach out to Vanessa.
I'm sure she would be happy to help
you. And of course even though I have
limited experience with the app I
did get the demo training
and I've been using it today to shoot
this video and I think it's something that's really
cool so I will try to
help you if I can as well.
Now if you want to learn more about Merchandise
In The Modern Music Industry, I have a workshop
on that very topic.
It's about how you as an artist in 2019
can make money off of merchandise
and use it to help your career
go from a hobby musician to
full time.
So I think you should check that out as well
if you're serious about making this your career.
It's on Wednesday January 30th
at 8p.m. Eastern Time, which is 5p.m.
Pacific, and that will also be in the link
below. And just because you watched this video
I'm going to give you a discount
code for ten dollars off of that workshop.
So I really hope to see you there.
There are very limited seats left,
so I hope you get your ticket
soon and I hope to see you there.
Thank you so much for watching
and I hope you have a wonderful day.
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