"How do you sell something online?" as a question, falls between "which came first - the chicken or the egg?" and "what is the meaning of life?" on the easy-to-answer scale...

You can have a quality product and not be able to drive traffic to it. You can get the traffic, but not get the sales. I directed a DVD piece on regional wineries a few years ago. Everyone loved it and was more than willing to watch it - they just didn't want to buy it. So marketability is a big deal as well.

From my own personal experience, I'm finding there is no difference between trying to sell a $20 loop library and a $20,000 movie. It's just different levels of the same challenge - how do you get people's attention and convince them that what you are offering is better than the hundreds of others out there who are doing the exact same thing?

I would seriously try to find some third party that was willing to act as a distributor - and not a passsive one, like eBay or Amazon. There are already people and busineses out there that have the connections to place product - and know what their customers are and are not going to buy. My advice would be to start there and see if you can lock down something that would interest both you and them. "Hocking your wares" can quickly become its own full-time job - and not a very fun one at that, if you're not familiar with (or interested in) the world of marketing & promotion.

HTH

Jessariah, I remember you mentioning your winery video a while back and it sounds like a great production and idea. I certainly could see that selling well.

I mention the Amazon route because I heard somewhere that if you are selling any media, books, dvds etc, that site really shines. I haven't been able to test that theory myself yet.

I've been selling my videos off my own site (www.prolefeedstudios.com) for a while, and recently signed up as an Amazon Advantage seller. Amazon gets a lot of traffic, and if you have something people are looking for, you'll make some sales. On the down side, Amazon takes a 55% cut, and you need to invest in a UPC number and shrink-wrapping gear. Maybe because they're so big, they're also extremely slow in making payments, acknowledging shipments, making web page updates, etc. I sell more off my own site.

The key, it seems to me, is marketing. You need to identify the target audience -- be it anarchist bicycle mechanics, wine-drinkers, U.F.O. believers or university anthropology professors. You need to contact every entity you can find that does DVD reviews: alternative news weeklies, trade journals, zines, weblogs, etc. You need to aggressively, honestly and entertainingly promote to those audiences. Internet and e-mail is cheapest, but you want to avoid crossing the line into spam. It's a lot of work, and you can start to see why distribution companies take as big as a cut as they do.

One tool I found really helpful in doing e-mail mailings is PHPlist, available from:
http://tincan.co.uk/phplist

Feel free to e-mail me off list (click on my UserID) if you have more questions. Good luck!

Sorry to bump, but I was hoping more people, especially some pros, would chime in on this some more.

Tygrus,

It's true that Amazon charges a 55% sales commission on products they sell for you on their site.

But Amazon also has a program where they offer to sell your products at a much smaller commission structure (15% or less), yet still provide to you most of the benefits that the 55% commission program offers.

This lower commission program is the Amazon Market Place seller program.

In the Amazon Market Place program, your items are listed on Amazon and can be found in the Amazon search engine.

Amazon takes the order, processes the payment, you ship the product to the customer, and then Amazon pays you.

Another channel that you absolutely should explore is pay-per-click advertising.

Put together a small exploratory AdWords campaign to discover if there's viable demand for the topic you have in mind before you actually produce the video.

You will live or die by the choice of topic.

Place a contact form (along with a small amount of sales copy) on the web site that you deliver ad respondents to, with a note explaining that the DVD is in production and that they can join your announcement list to be advised when the title is released.

Hope this helps.

I will post a proper review here once I get it up and running... but I have opted to use customflix (a wholy owned subsidiary of Amazon.com) to handle my DVD purchase, on-demand production, and distribution.

You can place their shopping cart "widget" on your website so it is mostly transparent to the purchasee.

Jeff

Jeff, the one thing I was interested in is how do the fee structures work when you use customflix and amazon at the same time? Both have their own individual fees and both are affilicated - whats the final fee like if you go with both.?
thx

tygrus