Here's the thing nobody tells you when you're trying to figure out how to sell merch as an artist online: you don't need a shop. You need a page. There's a difference.
A shop means inventory management, payment processing, shipping settings, tax tables, abandoned cart emails. A page means "here's my stuff, here's where to get it." One of these takes a weekend to set up and the other takes four years off your life.
If you're already on Bandcamp, Gumroad, Etsy, or Spring — you have a shop. It works. People trust it. Don't throw that away to rebuild it somewhere worse.
The hub approach
Think of your artist site less like a storefront and more like a front door. Your actual selling happens elsewhere. Your site is just how people find the door.
The hub approach works like this: you keep selling on whatever platform makes sense for that product type, and your site has a single merch page (or section) that links out to all of it. Clean, intentional, easy to update.
This has real advantages:
- No transaction fees on top of your existing platform fees
- No new checkout flow to test and break
- You can sell on three different platforms and it still looks coherent
- Updating your merch means updating one link, not rebuilding a page
The downside is that you lose some data — you won't see the full journey from site visit to purchase. That's a real tradeoff. But for most independent artists, that data wasn't going to change anything anyway. You're not running A/B tests on your merch page at this stage.
Platforms that work
You don't need to pick one. Most artists spread across a few, depending on what they're selling.
| Platform | Best for | Fee structure |
|---|---|---|
| Bandcamp | Music, digital downloads, physical albums | 15% (drops to 10% after $5k in sales) |
| Gumroad | Digital goods, zines, sample packs, PDFs | 10% flat |
| Etsy | Physical merch, prints, handmade stuff | 6.5% transaction + listing fees |
| Spring (formerly Teespring) | Print-on-demand apparel, zero inventory | They take a cut, you set your margin |
| Ko-fi Shop | Small digital goods, commissions, support tiers | 0% on digital (5% on physical) |
None of these are perfect. Pick the one that already exists in your workflow. If you're a musician with a Bandcamp following, don't abandon it just because your friend uses Gumroad.
How to present your merch
This is where most artists mess up. They either list nothing ("merch coming soon" forever) or they dump a wall of links with no context. Neither works.
What actually works is treating your merch page like a curated thing, not a catalogue.
Show the thing, say what it is, make it easy to buy. That's the entire job.
A few specific things that help:
- Use real photos. Not mockups. If you have a shirt, photograph it. If you have a zine, photograph the actual pages. People buy things they can picture themselves owning.
- Write one sentence about each item. Not a product description. Just one sentence that sounds like you wrote it. "These are the shirts we wore on the last tour. Black, heavy cotton, runs small."
- Group things logically. Digital stuff together. Physical stuff together. Limited or sold-out items at the bottom (or off the page entirely).
- Keep the link obvious. "Buy on Bandcamp" or "Get it on Etsy" beats "click here." Tell people where they're going.
You don't need a product photo carousel. You don't need a price displayed on your site if it's on the platform. You don't need to reinvent anything. Clean and clear beats fancy every time.
Build the page
If you're building from scratch, the page structure is simple:
- A short intro (two sentences max — what you sell, where it ships, anything relevant)
- Your items, each with an image, a brief line of copy, and a link out
- A note about restocks or custom orders if that applies to you
You don't need columns or a grid system. A single column of items with good images and clear links is more readable than a cramped product grid on most screens.
If you want to add a new item later, you add one thing. If a product sells out, you remove it or mark it. The whole thing should take ten minutes to update, not a deployment.
This is exactly the kind of thing misfitlinks.me is built for — a clean hub page where you can put your Bandcamp link next to your Etsy link next to your Gumroad, have it look like one cohesive thing, and not spend your weekend fighting a drag-and-drop shop builder that wants you to enter your "store currency" before you can even see what the page looks like. Build the hub. Keep the platforms. Sell the stuff.