Limited Run

Sync Your Inventory Seamlessly with Trunk

2025-05-23T00:00:00+00:00

Managing inventory across multiple sales channels is a pain. That's why we partnered with Trunk, a tool that keeps your inventory in sync everywhere, in real time.

With Trunk, you can prevent overselling, manage bundles, and keep all your storefronts up to date automatically.

Connecting Your Limited Run Store to Trunk

We've made it simple to get started. Here's how:

Install the Product SKUs App
Trunk relies on product SKUs to track inventory. Before doing anything else, make sure the Product SKUs app is installed on your store.
Install the Trunk App from Our App Store
Go to your App Store and install the Trunk app. It's a one-click install.
Copy Your Credentials
After installing, you'll see an overlay with your store's username and password. Copy both.
Add Limited Run to Your Trunk Account
In Trunk, add a new sales channel and select Limited Run. Paste in your username and password from the previous step.

That's it. Your products will start syncing immediately.

This integration is available now for all stores. If you have any questions or run into trouble, reach out to us. We're happy to help.

New Inventory Filters

2024-07-23T00:00:00+00:00

When older items you aren't selling anymore are delisted from your storefront and new items go up for sale, your Inventory area continues to grow. With the new All Items / Listed / Unlisted filter, you can now narrow that list down to more easily find what you're looking for. Keep your old unlisted items, but get them out of the way, whenever you want.

We hope you enjoy this powerful new way to filter your inventory items!

Fan Club Feature Updates

2024-06-24T00:00:00+00:00

We were really happy to see that our recently launched Fan Club Products feature was so well received. Following that release, many of you asked for this feature to be extended to even more types of items.

Today, we're happy to announce that you can now password protect: Products, Bundles, Tickets, VIP Packages, and Variations across all of those items. When password perotecting at the Variation level, you'll be able to either leave the parent item (for example, it's Product), without password protection, or you'll be able to use it to override a password on the parent item.

Features on Limited Run have always provided a ton of flexibility so you can sell your way and we hope you enjoy this extended flexibility in our Fan Club Feature.

New Features & Pricing Updates

2024-05-17T00:00:00+00:00

This year Limited Run will turn 15 years old. In those 15 years we've only changed our pricing once, 7 years ago. Unfortunately, due to rising infranstructure costs, we'll be change pricing again, starting June 10th.

Most importantly, the max will remain at $250. This means, no matter how much you sell in a month, you'll never pay us more than $250. Our percentage fee, however, will be raising to 10%.

When we raised prices 7 years ago, we also released new features and integrations. This time won't be any different. Our first new feature is something that every store has asked for: Fan Club Products.

With Fan Club Products, you'll be able to require a password for a product to be added to a cart, so you can launch early and give your most important fans first crack. Fan Club Products is available now and we'll be continuing to release new features over the coming months, so keep an eye out.

We're grateful for the past 15 years of support and are looking forward to the next 15. Thank you!

— Nick & Tom

Facebook Pixel Support on Checkout

2021-01-24T14:00:00+00:00

The unthinkable has occurred. We released Facebook Pixel Integration. We know this was a highly sought after feature, but for reasons we're not going to get into on this blog, we hadn't wanted to do it. Most of the reasons are now gone so we decided it was time.

It's a very simple app. Install it from the App Store, add your Pixel ID, and you're done. If you're interested in what FB Pixel can do for you, check out these help docs and marketing from Facebook.

Redesigned Checkout Experience & More

2021-01-11T14:00:00+00:00

Hey everyone! We've done a lot over the last few months. Let's talk about them.

We're using a brand new paypal gateway. We've been hanging on to the old gateway for dear life because the new one didn't have all the features we needed. Recently that changed, so we did too. It's been an incredible addition to our checkout.

Speaking of the checkout, we redesigned it! It's looking great and the new flow is going to make it a lot easier to add new features to the checkout process. We'll talk more about those features in the future.

For our EU customers, we updated our credit card processing to use SCA. This is like an enhanced protection flow required by Stripe that lets you use a pin to confirm your purchase. Not all banks use this feature, so if some customers don't see it, don't worry. Most won't.

FREE SSL on all storefronts. This was a massive undertaking, but it's finally been completed. You can also use your A Record now, which is really convenient. If you don't see a lock icon or https in your URL, send us an email.

Everyone has their own way of doing things, and over the years we've tweaked and molded our standard exports to try and cover most of the customer requirements. Still there are some people that have been doing things a certain way for many years, and it just works better for them. So we built a custom exporter that lets you decide exactly what you want in an export, and nothing else.

To make your Bundle creation life easier, we released a Product & Bundle Duplication feature. This makes an exact duplicate of the product or bundle you're currently in.

Lastly, one of the most requested features of 2020, Phone Number Collection. This lets you request or require the phone number of your customer at checkout.

Is there a feature you really want? Take this survey and let us know.

Phone Number Collection at Checkout

2020-11-25T14:00:00+00:00

We're now collecting phone numbers for you at checkout. By default it's optional, but you can make it required by going into your Settings area, and checking the box to the left of "Require Phone Number at Checkout".

You can view phone numbers by expanding an order in your sales area. We've also added them to Custom Exports, Endicia and Stamps.com exports, and finally, to our ShipStation integration.

Product & Bundle Duplicator

2020-07-20T14:00:00+00:00

Creating Products and Bundles just got a lot easier. Now you can go into the editor of either a Product or a Bundle and click the Duplicate button at the top. This will automatically duplicate and take you to that new version. The only addition is that the words "Copy of" will be added to the beginning of the Product or Bundle name.

Custom CSV Exporter

2020-07-07T14:00:00+00:00

We have a new Custom CSV Exporting feature in the sales area. If you click Export, you're presented with the Export Overlay, and at the bottom you'll see a Manage Templates button. Clicking that will allow you to create templates for exports that can be reused. These Exports can be an Order per row, or an Order Item per row. Just like our standard CSV Exports.

We have a bunch of Shipping Service Integrations in our App Store, but if you use a service that we don't work with, this Custom Exporter will make it a lot easier to work with the service of your choice. You can also make custom templates for accounting, marketing, etc.

Thanks everyone!

Digital Sales are Fee-Free for May

2020-05-01T14:00:00+00:00

We're very happy to announce that for the entire month of May, all digital sales through stores will not be charged our 5% service fee. Sell as much as you want, and your balance won't be affected. Below are a couple of ideas we had for how to utilize this no fee month.

The simple move would be to create a category for your digital products, and promote it at the top of your theme. You can do this by going to Storefront, Pages, New Link To External, and then create a link to the category you created. Make sure you check the box at the bottom so it shows off the link in your navigation.

Another great idea involves livestream recordings. Right now doing livestreams and selling tickets to them is a great way to entertain your fans while they're stuck at home, as well as make up for some of the losses suffered from canceled tours. Well what if you took the recording of that livestream and gave it to a sound engineer? They could create a cleaned up version for you to sell as a digital product. While it won't be recording studio quality, it'll be better than what your fans heard, and I bet a lot of people would love to hear that.

For further explanation of how to post a digital product, please see this help doc. Good luck everyone and stay safe.

Ten Years Later

2020-02-15T14:00:00+00:00

When Limited Run launched back in November of 2009, we just wanted to put something out there for people to use and hopefully find helpful. For some reason though, everyone who used the platform didn’t say “oh yeah this is helpful.” They said, “This is totally changing the way I sell music and merch to fans.” That definitely gave us some pause. When you start a project for fun, or the love of building something, you just hope you’ll change your own life. You never think it’ll change other people’s lives too. But that’s exactly what happened. We set out to make our own lives better, and millions of people came along for the ride.

Limited Run has grown every single year we’ve been in business. We’ve taken zero investment, and we’ve done it with only 2 people. It’s a feat rarely seen in this industry. But we’re very quiet about it. We don’t post on Twitter, or send out tons of newsletters, or even write many blog posts. We don’t look for the spotlight. We don’t email news sites asking for articles to be run about us. We don’t advertise. We also don’t talk about the hurdles we’ve had to jump, or the people that have tried to hurt us, or the bones that needed to heal. We just do our thing, and users trust that the platform will operate at a higher level each year. That’s an incredible relationship.

What does it take to be in business for over 10 years? You must listen to your customers, look for opportunities, take big risks, and finally, always have a backup plan for when those risks don’t pay off. If you do all that, you’ll have a better than average chance of succeeding. But what does it take to just “be in business”? The desire to put yourself and your product out into the world. Sounds easier than all that other stuff, but it isn’t. This soap box derby only needs a single kick to get going, but that kick seems to take every ounce of strength you have.

Here’s to the next 10 years. Thanks everyone.

ShipStation Integration

2017-07-10T14:00:00+00:00

It's been a long time coming, but we finally released our ShipStation integration. If you don't know what ShipStation is, it's the best way to manage sales from multiple sources. For instance, if you have products on eBay, Amazon, and Limited Run, ShipStation's will allow you to see all the orders from those sources, in a single dashboard. They also work with packing and postage companies like Endicia, so you can immediately get the package ready to ship.

We highly suggest checking out ShipStation. Especially if you're running stores on multiple platforms.

If you have any specific questions, please get in touch. Thanks Everyone.

How To Report To SoundScan

2017-06-07T14:00:00+00:00

It’s been nearly 3 years since we released SoundScan reporting, and during those 3 years we’ve reported a whole bunch of amazing releases. A ton of which were Top 200 releases (humble brag). But even though we have so many people using our SoundScan app, and reporting to SoundScan on a daily basis, we still have a lot of people that don’t. This is why we wanted to lay out a comprehensive way to do this. It costs very little, and with our automatic app, it’s incredibly easy to do.

What is SoundScan?

We should probably explain what SoundScan is and how it works, before we dive straight into the weeds. SoundScan is the music sales arm of Nielsen. Nielsen, of course, is a global information and sales tracking company. It’s almost like analytics for product sales. But SoundScan can only track the sales of your release, if you tell them what it is. This is where UPC and ISRC codes, come into play.

UPC = Universal Product Code

ISRC = International Standard Recording Code.

The first thing you must do, if you want to report your sales to SoundScan, is get a code. If you want to report a digital and/or physical album, you need a UPC. You can get this code from a number of different places. The best place is whoever you’re using to get your physical release manufactured from. But there’s a million other places too, just do a Google search.

Let’s Talk About Confusing Things

After you obtain the UPC, you still need to tell SoundScan you have it. This is where a lot of confusion starts to take place. Many people don’t realize you need to register that code with SoundScan. Or sometimes they forget. If you don't do that, they will have no idea that you're releasing an album. Here's the kicker: We don't know that you didn't register it, so we're going to report it anyway. That makes for a very exciting investigation. The code must be registered at least 2 weeks prior to the release date of the album. You can register the code here.

More confusion happens when SoundScans rules for reporting aren’t followed. For instance, you can’t sell an album for less than $3.49. I think you can understand why. Lets say you put your album out for $0.01, and then offered free shipping. You’re probably going to sell a lot more than if you sold them for $3.49 + Shipping. Not many artists could subsidize a release like that, so it’s against SoundScan’s policy to do so. Another important point about this. $3.49 counts discounts. Meaning, you can’t sell an album for $10, and then give out a $9 discount code, and then report those sales to SoundScan. They won’t be counted.

Want to hear about even more confusion? We get a lot of emails from people saying they sold X amount of copies of their new album, but when they received the email from us stating how many of those sales were reported to SoundScan, the amount was significantly less. The reason it’s less is SoundScan only counts sales taking place in the US. Meaning if you sell a copy to someone in Germany, it won’t be reported. Please remember this before you freak out.

Lastly, we want to link you to our help doc on how to report using Limited Run. If you follow our doc, you shouldn’t have an issue. But if you do have an issue, please contact us and we’ll point you in the right direction.

v3 Features Are Now Available

2017-04-19T14:00:00+00:00

As many have probably noticed, v3 is available and if you head into your dashboard, you'll see an overlay that asks you if you want to enable it.

Thanks for everyone's patience this year. We know it took a while for this to come out, but we didn't want to put anything out there, that wasn't ready. We tested everything extensively, with a whole ton of stores. If someone thought a feature didn't feel right, we went back and changed it. If someone thought a feature didn't work right, we went back and fixed it. We were on a mission to make v3 features perfect.

We have some more great features coming to v3 this year. Maybe even as soon as next week.

If you have any specific questions, please get in touch. Thanks Everyone.

New Theme

2017-03-14T14:00:00+00:00

This week we have a nice feature to announce. Well, it's not really a feature, it's a theme!

Our friend Andrej Presern whipped up a whopper of a theme for us, and we're super happy to make it available to anyone on v3. It's a slick theme that's going to be a great addition to our arsenal.

The next time you hear from us, we're going to announce the launch of v3. We've been working hard to get this ready for everyone, and we hope that when it's availabe, everyone switches and loves it, just as much as we do.

If you have any specific questions, please get in touch. Thanks Everyone.

Fulfillment API

2017-03-02T14:00:00+00:00

This week, we're going to try and help out companies that have their own in house shipping and warehousing software. We call it the Fulfillment API.

This is a simple enough feature to explain. Basically we wanted a way for companies that run their own warehousing and shipping software, to still be able to use Limited Run as their online store platform, but not have to export using the dashboard. This is where the Fulfillment API idea came from. It will allow you to pull unshipped orders, without having to go into the dashboard at all.

There's something else it does too. It will allow you to change inventory levels for stock requests or issues with inventory. For instance, lets say a client contacts you and asks if you can send them 3 shirts. Instead of going into the dashboard and searching for the product, then editing the inventory manually, you can do it right through your own warehousing software, that's connected to Limited Run through the Fulfillment API. Another good example is lets say you find some damaged goods, or even worse, you don't find the goods at all! This is an unfortunate reality when dealing with physical goods. Sometimes they just "disappear". Hopefully this helps you manage issues like this, a little easier.

If you have any specific questions, please get in touch. Thanks Everyone.

Pre-Orders

2017-02-06T14:00:00+00:00

Last week we announced a Tracking Number Importer. It’s going to solve the problem that arises, when you need to ship out a lot of orders, and don’t want to manually add the tracking numbers. The example we gave was when a preorder ships. Pre-orders are a stressful time, and we’re doing our best to make your lives easier. That’s what we’re going for with v3. Make your lives easier, by reducing the work you put into running your store. You might also see a pattern with our announcements. They all seem to be connected, in some way. For instance, we just mentioned how the new Tracking Number Importer, is going to work great for shipping preorders. And the feature we’re announcing this week, is actually called Pre-Order!

All a pre-order is, is a an order that doesn’t get immediately shipped out. The standard reason is the release date for the album hasn’t been reached yet, but you want to start selling the album now. Seems simple right? It is, but there's just one issue. When you take an order, that order goes into your Unshipped section. Whether it’s a preorder or not. Which means if you want to continue shipping out non pre-orders, you need to sift through the section like a gold panner. With the new Pre-Order feature, we’ve solved that problem. Here’s how:

Pre-Order

We said easier, right? All you need to do is check the box, and then any order containing that product, will get sent to a new area in your Sales Section called "Pre-Order".

Another really cool part of this feature, is how it's handled in the cart:

Any order containing a product on Pre-Order, will have "Pre-Order" written next to that product in the cart.

Now you might be asking, "Well what happens when the product is off pre-order, and you want to ship them out?" Well, that's easy too. Just go into the product, and uncheck the box. Then all those orders containing the product, will immediately move to the Unshipped section!

And the last part of this feature we'd like to tell you about is how it's retroactive. So when we launch v3 (hopefully in about a month), you can go into any product that you currently have on Pre-Order, and check the box. This will move all past orders into the Pre-Order section. And immediately clean up that Unshipped section. Whoa!

If you have any specific questions, please get in touch. Thanks Everyone.

Tracking Number Import

2017-01-30T14:00:00+00:00

Last week we announced Stamps.com integration, and this week we’re going to stick with the shipping theme and talk about tracking numbers.

Right now if you want to include a tracking number in the shipped email you send to your customer, you have to do it one at a time. That’s a rough process when shipping out 500 preorders. So for v3, we thought it was a good idea to solve this shipping stumbling block.

Tracking Number Import

What’s great about this importer is it’s so simple. All you need is the tracking numbers, and the order numbers. We’ll connect the dots after the import. Then just Ship them. Another cool thing about this importer, is when used in conjunction with Stamps or Endicia, they can export you the exact info you need.

Next week it’s time to break out some more heavy hitters.

If you have any specific questions, please get in touch. Thanks Everyone.

Stamps.com Integration

2017-01-23T14:00:00+00:00

Our first two feature announcements have gone over real well with everyone. We're getting a lot of great feedback and even people asking to switch now! Hopefully v3 will be out at the end of February, beginning of March. That's what we're shooting for. Till then though, we're going to keep announcing more features.

This week that feature announcement is Stamps.com integration!

Stamps.com

We've had Endicia for a while, and a lot of people have asked us about Stamps.com. So we're super happy to have this available in v3.

If you don't know what either of these services are, we can explain. Both are postage on demand services, that allow you to bulk buy and print shipping labels for your packages. These services are great for shipping a lot of packages in one fell swoop. It's something that would make your life a million times easier, when shipping out a preorder.

The other really cool thing these services usually provide is a discount on shipping costs. They're sort of like a Mass Mailer, in a way. Since they're buying tons of postage from USPS, USPS gives them a discount, and then they pass part of that discount onto you. It might only be a couple percent, but that adds up when you're shipping a lot of packages.

If you have any specific questions about Stamps.com, head over to their help section or contact them here. If you have any questions about our integration please get in touch with us.

Thanks Everyone. See you next week!

Campaign Tracking

2017-01-17T14:00:00+00:00

Last week we announced a fully integrated newsletter system for LR v3. It’s going to completely change the way you think about, and execute, newsletter sending. This week, we want to talk about Campaign Tracking.

Right now there’s a very big hole in social media, ads, and newsletter. We have no idea how all this translates into sales. No one knows if their post on twitter is working better than their post on some old forum. Now you might say, “Who cares, I’m going to post on them all anyway.” Well there’s 2 things to think about here: One is, if you knew what post did better, then you’d know which community you should nurture more. And two, if you knew which post did worse, then you could tweak the way in which you posted it, the next time around. For instance, maybe posting day or night matters. Maybe you need to make it shorter/longer, or use more/less graphic language. Maybe you want to get someone else to post it under their username, and compare those results to yours. There’s a million ways to go about it. But the main issue surrounding all this is, without a way to track it to sales, you have no idea where to start.

Campaign Tracking

Introducing, the way to track it! With our Campaign Tracking app, you’ll be able to decipher exactly how all those posts and emails are affecting sales. And what’s great about it, is it works off the very simple UTM Parameters standard. Here’s a link to the Google UTM Builder. All you're going to do is create the link, with the link builder, post it as usual, and we do the rest. It's really that simple.

Another slick little trick in the Campaign Tracking app, is that blue sold number is clickable. And when you do click it, it takes you right to the sales area, and shows you all those sales.

And finally, we've made this incredibly easy to use with our Newsletter feature. in fact, you don’t even have to do anything but click a checkbox. That’s right. You click a checkbox, and we automatically create the UTM links for you. Then as soon as one registers in the Campaign Tracking App, we start tracking sales.

Google Ecommerce Tracking

Another way we’re letting stores track sales is with Google Ecommerce Tracking integration. This is a free Google product, that works alongside their Analytics product. Much like how our campaign app works, it lets you track sales, and how they worked with campaigns. This is going to allow stores to work more closely with marketing companies, who have a lot of experience with Google and their offerings. To read more about this product, head over here.

If you have any specific questions, please get in touch. Thanks Everyone. See you next week!

2017-01-10T14:00:00+00:00

Last week we announced a brand new direction for Limited Run, and we promised that the features we’d be releasing would blow you away. And the first feature we want to blow you away with, might be the most important one we’ve ever released. That feature is Newsletter.

We spent nearly all of our free time in 2016 on a Newsletter system that’s so powerful, we’re going to change our entire branding to promote it. Here’s a small part of what it can do:

Subscriber Groups

Probably the most amazing part of our Newsletter system is Subscriber Groups. This will allow you to email nearly any combination of newsletter subscribers imaginable. For instance, let’s say you wanted to email everyone who bought something from the band Field Mouse, that’s also in a 100 mile radius of New York City. You can do that in a few clicks. This would be extremely helpful if a band that you signed to your label, had a 30 stop tour, and you wanted to setup 30 unique tour stop emails. You might say, "Hey why don't I just email everyone the entire list of tour stops?" Sure, you could do that, but bombarding people with info on a band, they might not be interested in, is a great way to lose subscribers. And emailing only people who bought a product related to that band, is a great way of targeting only the people who are interested.

You can create a group based on the most simplest condition, to the most complex. What if you launched a pre-order for the vinyl version of a new album. There's 2 colors, black and green. The black is coming to you from the plant on time, but they're having trouble with the green. Maybe you want to ship the black out on time, then email everyone who bought the green copy, tell them about the delay, and give them a 10% discount code as an apology. Whoa!

Let's combine the 2 above ideas, into one pinpoint accurate newsletter email. What if you wanted to email a 5% off discount to everyone who has ordered a product from the band X, but HASN'T pre-ordered their new album yet. That's not only possible, but extremely easy.

Fully Customizable Templates

You can use one of our great templates and customize it with our editor, or even tweak the source with html. And if you’re feeling lucky, you could build a template of your own from scratch.

Switching From Another Service?

No reason to worry about email addresses you've collected from your previous store or newsletter service. We'll let you import all of them, so you can manage everything from your Limited Run store.

MailChimp Template Import

Our system is compatible with MailChimp, so if you wanted to switch from them, to us, just choose "Import Mailchimp Template" when creating a new one.

What Are The Limits and Cost?

Now when we tell you this, I don't want you to lose your mind. It'll be impossible to use this system, if you have no mind. There are no limits on this feature. You can have as many subscribers as you want, and you can send as many emails as you want. And how much extra are you going to pay for it? Nothing. Zero. Nada. There are no feature restrictions with v3. If you're on it, you get unlimited EVERYTHING.

This is just a taste of what's possible with our fully integrated Newsletter system. You'll also be able to see stats, schedule emails, and much more. It's a complete replacement for whatever you're using now, and not only that, but it's most likely twice as good! If you have any specific questions, please get in touch. Thanks everyone.

Limited Run v3 is Coming Soon

2017-01-04T14:00:00+00:00

What's Been Happening?

When we started Limited Run back in 2009, we had one goal in mind: Create a place for our friends to sell some records. We never dreamed that we'd be powering stores for the biggest artists and labels in the world. But now we are, and in 2016 alone, we handled close to $20 million in sales through stores.

What about stability? Well, over the last 4 years we've had zero downtime. This means that our software has never once, not even for a second, had an issue that took down the platform. Not during some relaxing morning, or when our stores were selling out in seconds. You'll be hard pressed to find any platform that can even sniff that uptime.

But how much investment have we taken? And how many employees did we need to achieve this? We're extremely proud to say that we've never taken investment, and we're still only 2 people. You might see that we rarely tweet, email you or write blog posts. Now you know why. We don't have the time! But that needs to change, and hopefully in the future we can add a third or even fourth person to the team.

So What's Next?

For the last year or so, we've been working hard on a new direction for Limited Run. This new direction will be launching soon, and part of it will be new pricing. It was very hard for us to come to terms with the fact that we needed to make this change. We've had a monthly fee for all 7 years of our existence. But without risk, there can be no growth. The new pricing plan will be 5% of sales. No monthly fee, no product limit, no digital fees, no storage fees, no feature restrictions. Just a straight 5% of sales. Anyone on the platform before that, can choose to stay on LR v2, at their current price and plan. If you decide to make the switch sooner, rather than later, we're going to have some promotional discounts that you'll be able to take advantage of.

While we'd love you to switch to v3 out of the goodness of your heart, we realize it's going to take features. So our job over the next couple of months is to convince you that the features are worth the change. We believe they're worth that, and more. And we're betting our lives on it. Stay tuned.

Card Included Has New Features!

2015-08-17T14:00:00+00:00

Some of our older customers might remember us launching a side project called Card Included, back in 2012. Some of our newer customers might be thinking, "What in the world is this?!". We can explain. Card Included is a self-serve download card service. It began as an easy way for labels and bands to include a download card with vinyl, but it's grown into something a lot bigger. Now, some people are using it as a way to promote their music in person. They hand them out at shows, or keep them in their pockets like business cards. Others are giving out private download URLs online. We even get the occasional author, looking to promote their book.

Card Included has been chugging along happily for the last couple of years, without a single update. And until recently, we never felt like it needed to be changed. It was basically perfect. Now it's not basically perfect, it is perfect. Here's what we've done:

Embeddable Redemption Widget

It's been a long time coming, but we finally did it. We now have an embeddable redemption widget for your own site. So if you know HTML, and can add the widget code to your website, there's an option in Step 2 of the designer, that says "I plan on using the embeddable widget". If you check that, we'll provide you with the necessary code, after your purchase. This also means that we'll be using your own URL on the cards we send you! Pretty awesome, we know. You'll also get an easy way to customize the widget's colors. You'll only need to do this once. For future orders, just check that box, and if you're using the same URL, you won't need the widget code again.

Digital Street Date

This new feature, works just like on Limited Run. You can specify a date you'd like us to prevent downloading until. It's an important feature for people sending records to stores, distros or out on tour with a band on your label.

Fan Location Downloads

Any time a fan uses a code to download a release, we automatically get their approximate location. With this new feature, we allow you to download a list of these locations. This list is a great way to help you plan future tours.

Artwork Support in Overlays

A while back we came up with a super slick way of letting people use any website as their download page, without needing to know or use HTML. Basically, you give us a URL, and we load that website, behind an overlay. In that overlay, it has your release's info, and a way to download it. Now, we stepped up our visual game, and let you add artwork to that overlay. To get the artwork just right, we added a spot to upload it in Step 1 of the designer.

Mobile Download Override

There's so much confusion about how mobile downloading works. The easiest way to explain it is, it doesn't. The experience is terrible on mobile. This is why we block downloads when a fan goes to the link on a mobile device. A lot of people don't realize how bad mobile is for downloading, especially on iOS. They contact us, wondering why their fans are prevented from accessing the files. They believe we're the reason it doesn't work, which isn't true. But, at the end of the day, we don't want to leave anyone hanging, so we decided to make this possible with a secret feature. If the user believes they can download and unzip the album, on their mobile device, all you need to do is tell them to add "?m" to the end of their download URL. This will unlock the download, and let them proceed. But we need to stress this, it's a bad idea.

If you have any questions, please get in touch. Thanks everyone.

Daily SoundScan Reports & More

2015-08-14T14:00:00+00:00

We have a bunch of things left to tell you about for our final post of the week. Let's do this in list form:

Daily SoundScan Reports

Yes, we do SoundScan reporting! I know it's not on our homepage, but we do it! We do a lot of things that aren't on our homepage. Sometimes we even think the homepage has too much info on it. But that's a discussion for another day. So on the reporting change, SoundScan recently switched from weekly reporting, to daily reporting, and we've updated our system to reflect that. If you didn't know that we already did SoundScan reporting, check out this help doc.

Support For New TLDs

If you want to use one of those wacky new TLDs like .coffee and .design, in your custom domain, then you'll be happy to know that we now support all of these.

Uploading Your Own Fonts

No surprise here. We now let you upload your own fonts, while editing files in your custom theme. The way we handled this in the past was just embarrassing, so we're glad this is taken care of now.

Reversed Search Results

This one seemed so obvious when a customer pointed it out, but it was the first time anyone has ever said anything. We used to return products oldest first when searching a store. That made no sense. We should have been returning the newest products first! Search for a band, and you want to see their newest preorder, right at the top. Duh.

Redesigned Cart & Checkout Overlays

2015-08-13T14:00:00+00:00

We're known for our extremely fast and streamlined checkout, but it's been a challenge to get all our features to work, in such a small area, over the years. This is one of the reasons why we always had a horizontal cart. It gave us more room to fit features like Checkout Note and Discount Codes. But after we decided to add the Gift Card feature, we realized that the old cart needed to be reimagined. But we also knew that our checkout had serious brand recognition. No one does a cart like us. No one is as fast as us. No one is as no nonsense as us. Your customers know it when they see it, and they respect you more for choosing Limited Run, because it says you're concerned about their time and money. It's become almost like a status symbol, in the direct to fan world. And we really appreciate that.

So with that in mind, we came up with a new vertical cart, that not only fits all the features you could possibly install in your store, but also kept that classic LR style in place.

Here, our friends at Topshelf are using Discount Codes, Checkout Note, and our new Gift Card feature.

At Run For Cover, they don't use the Checkout Note. Probably because Tay was getting too many marriage proposals.

And In The Clouds doesn't use anything but Discount Codes. Why? We have no idea. But they better get on Gift Cards asap!

So there you have it. The new vertical cart, same as the old cart, just cooler.

If you have any questions, please let us know!

Sales Summary by Variation Export

2015-08-12T14:00:00+00:00

We recently added a really helpful export to our sales section. This one summarizes the sales you've received, by variation. For example, if you're a label, and you need to pay royalties on a variation level, you can now easily see how many of each variation you've sold. Plus, you'll know how much revenue you've received from the sale of each variation.

To enable this new export, go to the Sales area of your Dashboard, click the arrow attached to the Export CSV button, and then click Export Preferences.

Preventing & Dealing With Fraud

2015-08-11T14:00:00+00:00

One of the toughest things we've had to do in recent months, is come up with a strategy to help stores prevent fraud, when using our Stripe integration. Why we're doing this, and not Stripe, will become clearer as the post goes on.

CVC Verification

The first, and simplest thing we do, is ask your customers to put the CVC code in when checking out. Stripe takes that code and matches it up with the credit card number. If the CVC check fails, Stripe should decline the purchase. The issue is they don't decline it by default. You, as the account holder, need to check the box in your dashboard to make sure this happens. To make sure you decline any card where the CC number doesn't match the CVC, go into your Stripe account, click your name in the top right hand corner, click Account Settings, then in general, scroll down to where you see "Decline: Charges that fail CVC verification". It's extremely unfortunate that this isn't on by default. It seems completely and totally logical to us that it should be on, but for some reason, Stripe doesn't think so, and we've asked them on multiple occasions. Update: Good news, everyone! For new Stripe customers, the default setting for this has now been reversed and will decline on a failed CVC. However, if you're already using Stripe, you should double check your settings there to ensure this is enabled.

Zip Code Verification

The next thing we've done, is add a zip code verification to the checkout. The billing zip or postal code associated with the card your customer is trying to use, must be entered, and verified. If it doesn't match the card, it gets declined. But again, this doesn't happen by default. So if you'd like the card to be declined if the billing zip code is wrong, check the box in your Stripe dashboard. If you don't want it to decline, leave it unchecked. Either way we're still asking for it on checkout.

Order Flagging Rules

While this isn't really preventative, since it's taking place after the purchase has already happened, we have a flow going here, and we don't want to screw that up. So, the last thing we'd like to tell you about is Flagging Rules.

With Flagging Rules, you can specify a multitude of rules by clicking the gear icon on the top left of your Sales area and then clicking "Manage Flagging Rules". When a new order breaks one of those rules, it will get highlighted red in your sales dashboard. Now, once again, this won't prevent an order, it will just alert you to an order that broke your rule, and allow you to research it. Then if you choose to refund them prior to fulfilling it, you can do that from your Stripe or PayPal dashboards.

Obviously this Flagging Rules feature can be used for other things, beyond fraud detection, but this is it's main responsibility, and focus. Maybe in the future we'll add other rules that will make it even more useful for different tasks, but for now, this is it's only purpose.

As always, if you have any questions, please feel free to contact us.

Introducing Gift Cards

2015-08-10T14:00:00+00:00

We just released a beta version of our new Gift Cards feature. It's available to everyone right now, by going to the app store and installing "Gift Cards". This feature is extremely powerful, and if you plan on using it, you should read the help doc very thoroughly, before attempting.

Here's an overview, just to whet your appetite:

Product Gift Cards

The first and most common way to use this feature, is by creating a standard gift card. For example, you can put a $25 gift card up in your store, and customers can buy that card for $25, and they'll get an email with a gift card code. It works just like normal gift cards work, with some Limited Run style and flare, tossed in there.

We tell you how much is left on the card. Now that's nice. We also let you sell gift cards, for less than they're worth. Meaning, you could sell a $25 gift card, for $20. You can even do a name your own value gift card. So if a customer wanted to be super cool, they could choose to buy a $13.37 gift card.

The second way to use this feature is a percentage based gift card. O.o huh? That's right. You can create a card that gives the customer a percentage you specify, off their next purchase. You might be thinking, "Uhm, that sounds dangerous." Well it is. This is why we let you put a limit on the value of that percentage. For instance, you can give someone 50% off their next order, up to $10. So if they placed a $15 order, they'd get $7.50 off. But if they placed a $40 order, they'd only get $10 off. We also let you restrict them to certain categories, and the amount of items in the cart. The next thing you might be thinking is, "When the hell am I going to do that???" Here's where you need to use your imagination. A great example of how to use this feature, would be to bundle a percentage based discount, with another product. Oh by the way, you can bundle gift cards with other products! For instance, "Preorder the new BAND ALBUM, and get 5% off your next purchase!". Now that could be an exciting sale. The list of how to use this type of gift card is endless. But remember, this isn't a toy.

Private Gift Cards

The last way you can use gift cards is in private. This means you can create a gift card from the Apps > Gift Cards menu, and completely bypass the storefront by sending it directly to your customer. This comes in very handy when you want to reward a loyal customer or apologize for a delivery person.

Once again, please make sure you read the help doc. It explains all the ins and outs, of how this feature works. Also remember, this is a beta, so if you see something, say something. Thanks!

Read & Shipping Only Store Access

2015-01-13T14:00:00+00:00

We just released a pretty awesome addition to our Multiple Managers feature. In the past, you could only add full access managers. But now, we've added two additional types for people with access:

Observers

This is the most limited access type. An Observer has read-only access to the entire dashboard and can perform exports from any area. But, they can't make any changes to the store. For instance, they can't go in and launch you're nicely setup preorder, a week ahead of schedule. That's nice.

Shippers

A Shipper has read-only access to the entire dashboard, like an Observer, but they also have full access to the shipping related screens and features. So a Shipper can see your sales, print shipping documents, export from anywhere, mark orders as shipped, etc. This is great for that kid you hire to ship your stuff, while you chill on the couch and watch Twilight Zone reruns.

We hope this helps everyone manage their store easier. And as always, if you have any questions, please feel free to message us.

Happy Holidays!

2014-12-16T14:00:00+00:00

We have a bunch of cool features to announce. We're calling this the Happy Holidays Collection. Let's get to it!

Endicia for Mac

A while back, we emailed everyone and said we were testing a new Endicia for Mac integration. We're happy to say that the testing went incredible, and store owners are saying it's completely changed the way they ship orders.

"Just floored through 20+ orders in the time it normally takes to do 5-7. This rules."
- Topshelf Records

So since it's fairly obvious this feature is in tip top shape, we've released it to everyone! You can now find it in our App Store.

Printing Invoices

Just in time for the end of the year, we now have a way for store owners to print Limited Run Billing Invoices that will contain a summary of the selected month's charges and payments.

To do that, go to Settings > View Balance > Print Invoice (at the top).

StoreFeeder Integration

In the US, our Endicia for Mac integration is the right move. But what about our friends across the pond in the UK? Well we have an awesome new integration that should solve all your shipping woes, as well. It's called StoreFeeder. StoreFeeder is going to help you buy and print postage at record speed. It's also going to manage your physical storage. Especially when combined with our next new feature.

Product SKUs

With this new app, you can now add SKUs to variations. This is a pretty cool addition because it helps with so many interesting things. For instance, a unique SKU is one of the most important parts of good bookkeeping. Check out your Sales CSV Export after adding a SKU to a variation.

Improved Order Filtering

And lastly, in the sales overview area of your dashboard, you can now click on any total, free, or paid order count for an entire month, week, or even a single day, and see just those orders. This is perfect when you've just released a free download to fans and want to quickly see only the paid orders for a time period.

Thanks to all who have continued to use Limited Run throughout the years. We're really looking forward to 2015. There are so many incredible features we want to add. And as always, follow us on Twitter to find out about them as soon as we release them.

New Discount Features

2014-11-24T14:00:00+00:00

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are coming up quick, so we decided to tackle a few needed Discount App features. Let's start with the simplest, and work toward the most amazingly cool.

The Zero Discount

In the past we stopped people from making a discount, that actually didn't give a customer a discount. This was to avoid screw ups and confusion, related to screw ups. But after much thought and pondering, we actually found a use for the Zero Discount. Let's say you made a discount called FREESTICKER, and told customers to put that in and you'll toss in a sticker. Well, in the past, this wasn't possible. You'd have to ask customers to leave a note. Blahhhh, that's dumb. Now with the Zero Discount, you can make a discount just for record keeping and fan/customer engagement!

Now you might be saying, "Hey, this isn't a new feature! It's just you correcting a platform limitation!" Well damn, take it easy. We were just whetting our appetites.

Scheduled Start and Stop

Here's an important one that's going to help a lot. Now you can schedule a discount code to start and stop at a certain date and time. Extremely important if you're running a Black Friday sale that starts at Midnight. Who can stay up till Midnight, nowadays? That's crazy time. Even if you could, you're going to need sleep so you can pack up all those orders you're going to get!

Feeling a little better about this update to the Discount App?

Discount By Product Category

Heyo!!! This is a huge feature. As you can probably guess, this new feature will allow you to apply discounts to one or more product categories. So maybe you'd like to keep a "Sale" category around all the time, and have a discount applied to everything that's in it. Then you can just go into products, and add the product to the "Sale" category, and bingo! The item can have a discount applied to it! Sounds pretty awesome right? Well it's even more powerful than you think.

A feature we've gotten so many requests for, can also be done with product category discounts. What if you had 50 products in your store, but only want to make a single product be available for discounts? In the past you'd need to mark every other one "Ineligible For Discounts". Blahhhhh, that's dumb too. Now you can create a category, hide it from your store, apply a discount to that category, and stick a single item in it! It's an incredible feature, that we're super happy with.

Be honest, you're impressed right?

Any questions, just send us a message!

Our New Theme Song

2014-08-13T14:00:00+00:00

We've been itching to make this announcement for weeks now, we have all new responsive themes!

We're going to be honest, this should have been done a long time ago. It's the only area that Limited Run was lacking in, so we're super excited to put this issue to bed. We've also signed on the great and talented Andrej Presern, to keep designing for us for the rest of eternity (aka a long time). He's done an incredible job on the new themes and we've already laid out plans for more.

To take the brand new themes for a spin:

Go to your dashboard.
Click "Storefront" > "Theme" at the top.
Scroll down and click "Add" next to any theme you're interested in.

Thanks to everyone who's stayed patient with us while we worked this out. We hope it was the worth the wait!

We Now Report to SoundScan

2014-07-09T14:00:00+00:00

In the beginning of 2009, when we started building the first iteration of our platform, we predicted that vinyl sales would be taking off in the near future. This is why we invented features like Cart Limiting, because we knew the world would need it one day. Nielsen just released this year's first half numbers and, as suspected, CD sales are in the tank, but vinyl says are up 40% over 2013's first half numbers. And it's been this way for nearly 30 quarters in a row. We think it's only fitting that we announce SoundScan Reporting!

Now obviously we're not just a vinyl selling platform anymore. We added an incredibly powerful digital system, as well as Bundles and VIP Tickets. All can be used in conjunction with our SoundScan integration. It even works great for pre-orders. You can start selling your album, and then after the release date arrives, we'll automatically report all sales to SoundScan.

You can get started by heading into our App Store and installing the SoundScan App. Here's a help doc on how it all works. If you have any questions, drop us a message.

A Few Custom HTML Updates

2014-06-24T14:00:00+00:00

We just released a few updates that should prove useful for people using our Custom HTML features.

Custom HTML Pages in Your Theme's Layout

The first thing we did involves creating a Custom HTML page (Storefront > Pages > New > Custom HTML). Now you can choose to have it rendered inside your theme's layout, or with its own custom layout. This will make creating a page, that blends right in with your theme, a lot easier.

Adding Files to Themes

The second thing we did is give you the ability to add your own CSS, JavaScript, Snippet, and Config files to your theme. And you can also delete non-required theme files. This is almost a necessity when taking on massive store/site building projects like Topshelf Records did.

Importing & Exporting Themes

The third, and last, thing we did was give store owners the ability to Import and Export Themes. If you're a designer, and you have a base theme you like to use for all the stores you're working on, or if you like to design using your own text editor, this feature will make that possible. Also, since importing and exporting is so simple, anyone can use it to move already customized themes to their friend's store, or if you're a label, you can use your theme for one of your band's stores.

If anyone has any questions, feel free to message us!

Editing Customers & Resending Order Confirmation Emails

2014-06-03T14:00:00+00:00

We just released three great features that will make your life a lot easier.

Change a Customer's Email Address & Name

This first feature lets you change a customer's email address and name, which can be done in the "Sales" > "Manage Customers" area of your dashboard. Also, if you change a customer's email address, to the address of an existing customer, all the order stats for both customers will be combined!

Resend an Order Confirmation Email

The second feature we just released lets you resend order confirmation emails. The cool part about this feature is you can specify the address you want the email to go to. This obviously works with the changing email feature, but it's also a great way to handle a customer who lost their original order email.

Order Action Menus

The final thing we did was clean up the "Sales" area a bit. With these two new features, it was getting pretty cluttered. Expanding an order made it gigantic, difficult to work with, and hard to scale in the future. We've now added an actions menu to the right of every order (that's the gear icon). If you click that, you'll see a whole slew of helpful features, some we bet you didn't realize we already had.

Learn More

To learn more about changing a customer's email address and name, check out this help doc:
http://help.limitedrun.com/articles/184-updating-a-customers-name-email-address

To learn more about resending order emails, check out this help doc:
http://help.limitedrun.com/articles/185-resending-a-customers-order-confirmation-email

And if you have any questions, feel free to send us a message!

LR Interviews: Bad Timing Records

2014-05-21T14:00:00+00:00

We recently did an interview with a small US label called Bad Timing Records, which is owned and operated by Thomas Nassiff and Zack Zarrillo.

LR: So how was Bad Timing Records created?

Zack: Thomas told me he was looking for someone to start a record label with. I replied, "Stop looking. I’ll do it with you. Seriously, don’t ask anyone else please." Then it was something like, "Can you teach me everything I need to know? I only know how to blog."

Thomas: I had a desire to do something where I had complete control - or, as it turned out, complete control with a good friend - over the goings-on of something that I created and could call my own. Building this up ourselves is a legitimate thrill.

You two aren’t just the label owners, you’re best friends too. Were you worried about that before starting the label?

Zack: We are definitely BFFs, despite our differences in height even. I think it was kind of a no brainer for us, right, Thomas? We worked so well together on things beforehand whether it was for PropertyOfZack and AbsolutePunk or management and Paper + Plastick that we didn’t have a concern. It was kind of like, "This should be simple," in terms of working together. A year+ later, I’d say we’re more in tune to each other than ever. He is my #workwife. And sometimes my #realwife.

Thomas: Zack and I worked closely previously on joint shit with AbsolutePunk and PropertyOfZack; he also manages a band called Light Years which Paper + Plastick signed. The workflow was so easy on those two things that I never had a worry or a false start on wanting to do the label with Zack. There aren’t really many other people that I would want to work on something every single day with, at least in terms of something that is done out of passion and for fun. We are alike in the sense that there is always an urgency to get things done in an efficient and logical manner. We also have certain strengths and weaknesses, and certain optimisms and pessimisms, that result in us sort of balancing each other out.

You guys look like you’re doing a "Never Been To Press" model, are you going to sign bands in the future?

Thomas: Absolutely. There was a certain ideology behind that. The core idea behind kicking the label off with reissues of older albums that have never been pressed before is twofold: 1. We press some fucking great records that we love and that other people want on wax and 2. We use the opportunity of handling those reissues to foster a trust between Bad Timing Records and the general vinyl community. You can kind of see that blossoming in the first blog we did announcing Acceptance’s Phantoms. We wanted people to know that we could handle our shit and that we had our shit together from the outset, and now that there is (hopefully) a trusting loose relationship there, we feel more comfortable putting out something brand-new ourselves. We will have at least three totally new releases over the summer and fall with full-blown marketing and publicity campaigns behind them, and at least one of them will be from a band that no one reading this has ever heard before, that we actually signed just last week. In my opinion, it makes a lot of sense because now we can introduce you to a brand-new band without having to introduce ourselves in the same breath. We don’t have to tell you that we know how to do mail-order; you’ve already seen us handle several thousands of orders.

Zack: I’m definitely getting excited to take the pressure and potential stress of something that has no prior backbone (like a reissue does) and making it into a success. I think Thomas and I have had to do that with our other businesses, and this is kind of that all over again. It is, however, so nice to know that people at this point are rooting for us and will check out what we put out next. The rest of 2014 is kind of nuts.

Vinyl is hard business to get into. Lot of things need to happen before placing an order. Was this trial by error or did you have experience before?

Thomas: I've label managed Paper + Plastick Records for the last few years. Vinnie Fiorello, who owns P+P, taught me most everything I know about putting out records. I also grew to have ideas of how I would want a label to be viewed in the public eye, which inspired us to do things like minimalistic marketing and removing pre-orders from the equation. No pre-orders for releases that don’t need pre-orders, ever. Anyway, my P+P experience didn’t prepare me without fault for this, but it gave us a jumping off point. With our first release, Acceptance’s Phantoms, we were so so lucky to have a wonderful woman named Traci at Sony/Columbia as our rep for the project. She helped us out in a ton of tough spots where we didn’t know what to do, and she was extremely patient the entire time. Additionally, Frich and Lou from our pressing plant, A To Z Media, were also extremely patient and willing to help us out at the beginning. So certainly, us getting our footing wasn’t without a little luck and a little help.

Zack: I don’t have anything to add to this except that Traci has been my spirit animal for 14 months and I hope she somehow finds this because she is a saint of wax.

You guys just put up a new record that sold out in seconds. How are you shipping a million orders at the same time?

Zack: It hasn’t been too terrible, actually. We have a rule where we don’t put vinyl for sale until we physically have it in our office. We’ve all been burned by lengthy pre-orders and failed promises, and we never want to lose trust with our customers on a level like that. Also, we have a great mail-order employee. Emily kicks ass and pre-packs orders ahead of time. For this one, we pre-packed about 200 or so records of the first pressing, but the second pressing was a whole other beast. Thomas can talk more about that.

Thomas: I love Emily. She is the mail-order overlord. That’s all I have to say. When we just started out, we did the Acceptance orders on our own and I didn’t want to hire someone else to do it for us. I wanted to take trains back and forth between NYC and Philly to do mail-order with Zack on weekends because I’m a control freak. But I’m extremely happy that Emily is doing it instead, she’s great at it.

Zack: I know I said Traci is my spirit animal. She still is, but Emily would be my spirit animal if we weren’t the same age and if she couldn’t beat me up. Shout out to Emily.

Like it has been mentioned above, you guys aren’t doing pre-orders. You’re waiting till the records come in, and then you’re putting them up for sale. A lot of labels believe this is risky. But do you guys think doing pre-orders is actually the risky approach?

Zack: We started talking about this above a little but, but I think it’s a yes and no answer. We started a label where only one of us had any experience. We needed to make customers trust our entire process, which is why we’ve kept this method going for so long now. We’re getting comfortable with experimenting now, though.

Thomas: There’s a fair amount of risk in both approaches. If you do the pre-order in advance, you have some money in the bank to buy the records with. Maybe if the pre-orders really, really tank then you can cancel the pressing and refund your customers. But if you do a pre-order and you get an unexpected delay at the plant, then people are pissed off at you and they associate you with that for a long while. Being associated with, ahem, ~bad timing~ and poor customer service is a huge, huge deterrent in growing a label that focuses on the niche of physical products. In our case, we both put some money into Bad Timing at the beginning because it was something we wanted to do; we agreed from the outset that if we never saw the initial investment returned to us, we’d be okay with that because we were trying something new and we wanted to see what we were capable of doing. The result of that was the label essentially sustaining itself following that initial investment. We still haven’t paid ourselves back, but it’s been worth it because we’ve been able to avoid pre-orders and essentially be free of worries since Bad Timing is, at its core, a side project for us.

Bad Timing looks like it’s hitting a home run with every release. How do you weigh helping out a friend’s band, with making sure you release something that sells?

Thomas: The Acceptance release had an insane reaction. That got us started and we owe a lot to the band for being helpful to work with on that release; but we also marketed that release in a way that I hope was interesting and intriguing. Since then, we’ve tried to keep as much electricity surrounding Bad Timing as possible, meaning we want people to anticipate our next release before we announce it. The result has been a pretty slow and steady roll-out of releases and I think we’ve done a pretty good job so far. I think we’ll always have a balance between working with bands we love and wanting to put out records that keep the label afloat; the end result isn’t really something that I can just explain in conversation. It involves a lot of back and forth between Zack and I, and without a doubt the conclusion is different every time and completely unique to the situation.

Zack: Thomas and I tend to have good guts. Like Thomas mentioned above, we signed a band that no one that will ever read this interview before we announce that band has ever heard of. I feel really confident in people liking the band because I lost my shit when I heard that band. I was annoyed I couldn’t buy that band’s music on vinyl, etc. We want to make people want to have that music, and we want to be the label that gives it to them.

Thomas Nassiff is a web content manager at Fuse TV in New York City, a senior editor at AbsolutePunk.net, label manager at Paper + Plastick Records and co-owner and founder of Bad Timing Records.

Zack Zarrillo is best known for PropertyOfZack, a music blog started in 2009 to focus on the Warped Tour scene. Nearly five years later, POZ has become one of the go-to destinations for music news and content. In 2013, Zack started managing bands under Synergy Artist Management and primarily works with Knuckle Puck, Light Years, Real Friends, and Hostage Calm.

Support for 24bit & 96kHz Lossless Audio

2014-05-14T14:00:00+00:00

We recently made a really cool upgrade to our digital conversion system. We would previously only convert up to 16bit and 44kHz, but now, if you upload 24bit and up to 96kHz tracks, we'll preserve that quality and deliver it to your fans if they choose to download lossless music from you.

Great sound quality is something that's really important to us. This upgrade keeps us at the top of the sound quality game and we plan on staying at the top, from now on.

Add Your Own Service Fee

2014-04-23T14:00:00+00:00

You can now add your own Service Fee, on top of our Service Fee, to tickets. This is usually done for a venue, booking agent, or even an artist, that has negotiated a specific fee for themselves.

It's extremely easy to do too. Once in the Adjust Service Fee overlay, you specify what fee you need to charge, and then we show you the total fee charged to the fan at the bottom. We also let you hide the service fee from the fan, if you want to build it into the ticket price instead.

If you have any questions, feel free to send us a message!

Setting Usage Limits on Discounts

2014-04-17T14:00:00+00:00

We just released a major update to our Discounts app. In the past, there was no way to limit the amount of times a discount could be used, but if you head into the app now, you'll see a new section that makes this possible!

This is a super powerful addition. Not only can you set up a discount like "10%OFF" and give the next 25 people access, but you can even make a single use discount, and then randomly generate the code you want to give out. This is ideal for giving that special someone in your life a discount. Awwww how cute! (Or maybe you just completely botched somebody's order, and you want to make nice-nice.)

Plus, if you combine this new feature, with the direct discount link generator, you can make the entire world's life, sooooooo much easier.

If you have any questions on how to use this feature, feel free to contact us!

VIP Tickets & Packages

2014-04-16T14:00:00+00:00

When we released our big dashboard upgrade back in November, we mentioned that moving Tickets out of the App Store, and into your Inventory section, would make more sense in the coming months.

Well that month is finally here!

Our new VIP Tickets feature is a combination of the two most powerful things on Limited Run: Bundles and Tickets. You can now create a package that includes both products and tickets, but just like Bundles, you don't need separate inventories. So for instance, let's say you wanted to do a Meet & Greet, but also include your new album, a shirt, and a tour poster. Here's what it would look like:

But what's really great about this, is that you'll still be able to use all of our incredible Ticket selling features. Like for instance our mobile Will Call list, which is perfect for use at multiple backstage doors, or before a fan gets on the bus.

VIP Tickets are one of the biggest revenue generators for a full time touring band or artist, and we believe this feature will empower them to explore new possibilities.

If you have any questions, feel free to message us!

Charging Sales Tax or VAT

2014-04-08T14:00:00+00:00

It's been a long time coming, but we've finally made it possible for you to charge your customers Sales Tax or VAT! You can charge by country, state, or county (in the US). You can even have multiple tax rates in each jurisdiction, that charge different prices for the different types of products you sell. For instance, sometimes in the US, sales tax for clothing is different than sales tax for a CD. If you set up different prices for each of these types of products, and a fan checks out with both of them, you'll charge them one rate for the CD and another for the clothing.

In addition to supporting multiple jurisdictions and rates per tax rule, you can optionally have digital items and an order's shipping price included in a tax's calculation.

To get started with charging tax, first head into the App Store and install the Tax Rules app. Then, check out this help doc.

If you have any questions, just send us a message!

The Weight is Finally Over!

2014-04-03T14:00:00+00:00

Our Simple Shipping solution is a great way to easily get your product up for sale, with little effort spent on shipping prices. But what if you want to fine tune the price of shipping? That's where our new Weighted Shipping app comes into play. With Weighted Shipping, you can assign a specific weight to each type of product in your store, and then set prices across multiple weight tiers & methods. It's perfect for fans that check out with a lot of products at once, because you can factor in as many price breaks as you'd like. With Simple Shipping, there's only one price break.

Packaging Weight

To tune your shipping prices even further, you can optionally set a packaging weight. Then, if someone buys 3 LPs from you, they only pay for the packing material weight once. If you had factored that weight into the weight of the LP, then they'd be paying that weight 3 times.

Setting Lower & Upper Bound Limits

You can optionally limit a method by weight, if you set the upper bound limit, and then create a new method that has the lower bound limit, right above the other method's upper bound limit. Works great for USPS Standard and Priority Shipping.

Enable Weighted Shipping Today

Switching your store to weighted shipping is easy. To get started, just follow these steps:

Go into your dashboard by signing in on the homepage.
Click "App Store" on the top right.
Click "Install" on the "Weighted Shipping" app.
Click "Inventory" in the dashboard navigiation.
Click the gear icon on the left and then click "Manage Shipping".
Click the "Weighted Shipping" tab.

From the "Weighted Shipping" tab, you'll see your existing shipping profiles. First, add a weight to each profile. After that, use the "New Location" button to configure price tiers for each shipping method you'd like to offer to your customers. When you're done, click the "Switch to Weighted Shipping" button on the top right and your new weighted shipping configuration will be live.

For more details about how to use Weighted Shipping, take a look at this help doc. And as always, if you have any questions, feel free to contact us.

Simple Shipping Now Has Shipping Methods

2014-02-18T14:00:00+00:00

We just released a really cool update to our Simple Shipping feature that will allow you to create multiple methods for shipping to each location. It also means you won't have to manually set a shipping method on each order when marking them as shipped.

Drastic times, call for drastic measures. If the album your fans have been waiting months for, finally gets released, and they've got to have it in their hands, "LIKE NNOOOOWWWWWW", then the new multiple methods addition to Simple Shipping will be their savior. Now you can make any type of shipping method available, easily and quickly. So for example, if you're in the United States you can have Media Mail as an option, as well as Priority, Priority Express, and others from other carriers.

To start adding new methods, check out this help doc.

And of course, if you have any questions at all, you can send us a message.

Newsletter Opt-In and MailChimp Integration

2014-01-16T14:00:00+00:00

We're about ready to drop a whole bunch of features on you! First up, MailChimp Integration and Newsletter Opt-Ins.

We've heard from a lot of people interested in asking their customers if they'd like to sign up for their newsletter during checkout, so we added this capability. With the Newsletter Opt-In feature, you can customize the message shown in the cart, as well as set the default to be opt-in or not.

Next is MailChimp Integration. If you've never heard of MailChimp, it's one of the best newsletter services out there. They have a really cool free plan that lets you send 12,000 emails, to 2000 subscribers per month. We've made it so that if you connect your MailChimp account, your existing customers, as well as any new customers, automatically get sent to a MailChimp list of your choice. If you have an opt-in message enabled, just your customers that opt-in will be sent to MailChimp.

To enable MailChimp Integration, first make sure you've signed up for their service. Then...

Go to the "App Store" section of your Dashboard.
Install the "MailChimp Integration" app.
Connect your MailChimp account.

After returning to your dashboard, you can now enable MailChimp Integration by following these steps:

Go to the "Sales" section of your Dashboard.
Click the Gear Icon.
Select "Manage Customers".
Click the Gear Icon.
Select "Newsletter Preferences".

You'll also find the opt-in feature in the same "Newsletter Preferences" area.

As always, if you have any questions, please feel free to send us a message. Enjoy!

Our Most Requested Feature Ever

2013-12-10T14:00:00+00:00

Today, we're happy to announce the release of our most requested feature of all time: Bundles! It's taken us a long time to wrap our heads around this baby, but we did, and we know you're going to love it.

Bundles, You Say?

So what exactly is a bundle? A bundle is when you take two or more variations, from one or more products, and combine them into a single purchasable package. It also makes it so you don't need to split up the inventory on those products. For instance, let's say you had a CD and a Hat, and you wanted to sell them separately, but also as a package. You can create the CD and the Hat as separate products, then create a bundle of both items together. When someone buys the bundle, it deducts from each product's inventory, and keeps everything in sync. This means you could have a CD with a 1000 piece inventory, but sell it as a package with a ton of other products, and not have to allocate inventory for each package ::insert eye bulging emoji here::!

Also In Bundles, Only In Bundles

To make bundles even more useful, we've added a new availability state to regular products. By default, available products are visible, and purchasable in your storefront. But you can also hide an entire product from your storefront, and make it only purchasable from within bundles.

So Much More

Bundles are so incredibly powerful, they have their own spot in the new Inventory section, right next to your Products. To make your first bundle, head into your Dashboard, click "Inventory" at the top, click "New Item", then click "Bundle".

For all the details on inventory, cart limiting, sale limiting, and more, please take a moment to check out the Bundles FAQ.

And as always, if you have any questions, please feel free to send us a message. Enjoy!

Dashboard & Sales Upgrades, Just in Time for Black Friday

2013-11-21T14:00:00+00:00

If you just logged into your dashboard, and were wondering what in the hell just happened, we're here to explain!

We've just released the framework to our new dashboard, along with some cool updates to the look and flow. Right now it doesn't seem like much of a change, because most of it is under the hood, but trust us, this is a monster update. Let's look at some of the changes.

Navigation

Right away you probably noticed that the Navigation is different. Sales stays, but we're now calling Products, Inventory. Next, we've changed Modules, to Apps. Modules was a cool term, and it made total sense to us, but truthfully, it made no sense to store owners. It also felt a little like a junk draw. We had tons of stuff thrown in there, that really needed a better home. Now, when you click Apps, you'll only see the Apps you've installed. We kept Storefront, but moved Settings to the right, because it's a screen you rarely ever go into. Lastly, to the left of Settings, we have a new link called App Store. As you can probably guess, this takes you to the old Manage Modules screen. We believe this layout makes a lot more sense to both new and existing store owners.

Sales Overview

Now let's look into each section. First is Sales. We've added a little gear icon on the left, that houses some filters that aren't used often. Here you'll also find your Customers section. If you remember, it had been in the Modules menu, but since we changed that to Apps, and are only putting Apps you install in there, it needed a new home. Next to the gear we added a button called Overview. If you click that, you'll be taken to our new reporting section. This new section is a lot more powerful than the previous one, so it deserved a very prominent spot in your dashboard. Here's a couple of ways we improved it:

First, if you look at the top, you'll see that you can now view daily reports by week, month, or your own custom date range.

Second, if you scroll down after you've select a time period to report on, you're going to see the totals for that time period. This is going to help a lot with bookkeeping. If you click the number of total orders, for either the entire time period, or just one day, it will take you back to your main sales area, and load up just those orders. You can then export them to CSV. You might also notice something else that wasn't here before, up to the second reporting on today's sales.

Inventory

The next screen we tackled was Products, which as we stated before, has been changed to Inventory. As you can see, we no longer consider Ticket Selling an App that you need to install. We're bringing it right to the forefront. This will now be standard on all dashboards, but it won't be the default screen. We'll always default to Products. The reason we wanted to make Tickets a standard feature from now on, will become more apparent in the coming months. For now we can only say, trust us :).

You also see another gear icon on the left hand side of the Inventory screen. Once again, we put all the different actions like Sort and View, in there, but we also included some of the screens people rarely go to. For instance, Shipping is located in there. 99% of the time, when you want to create a new Shipping Profile, you do so when you're creating the product. But every once in a while, you need to alter a profile, that's when you'll need to go to the Shipping section. The same thing goes for Digital, Venues, and Categories. These are things that are added from inside the Product or Ticket Creator, but live in a different area that's rarely touched.

Bonus Updates

Another very cool addition to the dashboard are bookmarkable search URLs. In the past, our URLs didn't change when you searched for products and orders. But now, after you search or click an ordered total in your Inventory section, the URL updates, which will allow you to share or bookmark it. So let's say for instance, you just put up a new release and you wanted to have a bookmarked link that goes directly to the sales for that record. You could do a search inside your Inventory section, the URL would update, and then you can bookmark it, so any time you wanted to go right to that release, you could. It's a simple upgrade to the dashboard, that should make life a whole lot easier.

The last and final thing we'd like to talk about is our new Bug Bounty program. Since the dashboard has so many changes, and Limited Run is a small team of just 2 dudes and a bulldog, we believe our greatest resource is customer feedback. That's why if any of you find a bug in the dashboard, we'll waive your next monthly fee. Now, we want to make something clear. This needs to be a bug. Meaning, a feature must not work the way it was intended, and it breaks. We love designers and all, but if you contact us saying that we're off by a pixel somewhere, we might have to add a month to your balance, instead of giving you credit for one. We're kidding! Seriously though, it needs to be a legitimate bug. If it isn't, we'll sic Napoleon on you.

We have a ton more planned for the coming months, so be sure to follow us on Twitter for the latest.

New Sales Exporting Features

2013-09-24T14:00:00+00:00

We recently made an improvement to how you can export your sales. In the past, you could only export each order as a single row in a CSV file. This worked well when using it with a shipping service like Endicia. What it wasn't good for though, was bookkeeping. Now you can choose whether you want to export your sales to CSV as "One Row for Each Order" or "One Row for Each Order Item". This new choice will put each item bought on it's own line, regardless of whether it was ordered with other items.

Changing your export preferences is easy:

Go into your dashboard by signing in on the homepage.
Click "Sales" in the dashboard navigation.
Click the down arrow attached to the "Export" button.
Click to enable "One Row for Each Order", "One Row for Each Order Item", or both.
Click the "Save" button.

After updating your export preferences, select each sale you'd like to export, and click the "Export" button like you normally would. Depending on your preferences, one or more zipped CSV files will start downloading.

For more details on exporting a list of your orders, take a look at this help doc. And if you have any questions, feel free to contact us.

Credit Card Support Now Available in Waaay More Countries!

2013-08-28T14:00:00+00:00

We have awesome news from Stripe, our credit card processing partner: They're now beta testing in six additional countries!

If you're in Australia, Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland or The Netherlands, head over to Stripe's Global Page and use the "Get Notified" form on the top right to request access. Once they've added you to the beta, you'll be able to enable credit card processing in your store's dashboard.

And if you're in the United States, United Kingdom, or Canada, and you're not already using Stripe to accept credit card payments from your customers and fans, you're making a tremendous mistake!

To enable Stripe, just go into your store's dashboard, click "Settings" at the top, click the blue "Connect With Stripe" button, fill out the short form, and in just a few seconds, you'll be accepting credit cards.

And when we say just a few seconds, we're not kidding!

It's spooky how easy it was to setup @stripe and accept credit cards through my @limitedrun store at http://t.co/n22qBljIN3.
— Wells Tipley (@wellstipley) August 22, 2013

They might even send you cupcakes!

Got sent cupcakes from @stripe just for taking part in their beta. Congrats on the UK launch! http://t.co/U3vii2lov2
— Tangled Talk Records (@tangledtalk) August 21, 2013

As always, if you have any questions, please send us a message.

Direct Transaction Links to Stripe & PayPal

2013-07-16T14:00:00+00:00

One of the nice little features Stripe makes possible is the ability to link directly to a transaction inside your dashboard. As you can see, this makes it really easy to jump right to a related credit card transaction when managing sales in your Limited Run store.

But with PayPal, this sort of thing wasn't always reliable because of the way they structured transaction URLs. Fortunately, a store owner (and fellow NY'er) informed us that PayPal recently changed how they handled this. So now if you click into a sale in your store's admin area, you'll see the same "link out" icon next to your PayPal transaction IDs, just like you previously saw for Stripe transactions.

And on a side note, if you're in the US, Canada, or the UK, and haven't added Stripe to your store so that your customers can pay you with a credit card, what in the world are you waiting for?

Will Call List Update

2013-07-10T14:00:00+00:00

We just released a small update to the Ticket Selling module's Will Call List. Sometimes parents buy their kids tickets to a show using their PayPal account, and because of security reasons, we only add the name that's associated with that PayPal account to the Will Call list. Plus, it's easier than making every buyer type out the name they want on it. That takes time, and you know we're all about fast checkouts. Anyway, to solve the "Parent Problem" you can now edit any name that appears on the Will Call list.

As you can see from the ~~Vine~~ gif above, changing a name is easy:

Go into your dashboard by signing in on the homepage.
Click "Tickets" in the dashboard navigation.
Find the Show you're looking for and click the "Will Call" link on the right hand side.
Find the person's name you need to update and click the arrow on the right hand side.
Click the "Edit Name" link.

Name changes will appear on the interactive Will Call list, as well as the printed PDF.

On a related topic, make sure you have the "Customer Checkout Note" module installed so the buyer can tell you they're getting the tickets for their kids and what names should appear on the Will Call list.

To install the "Customer Checkout Note" module

Go into your dashboard by signing in on the homepage.
Go to your store's "Modules" > "Manage Modules" area.
Install the "Customer Checkout Note" module.

See you next week!

News Module Updates

2013-07-02T14:00:00+00:00

We have a nice little update to the News Module we'd like to tell you about.

Back Dating

First, to help people moving to Limited Run from other sites and services, we've added back dating support to posts. This way you can add all your old posts into the module, and still have everything appear in order. Honestly, we should have had that in there already, but alas, sometimes we forget stuff.

Exporting Posts

Next, we added support for exporting. Sometimes people outgrow our News Module, and we want to make it really easy to export all your posts. Hey, we're not jerks, which can be refreshing at times. Right?

Feed Reader Support

Lastly, we added support for RSS feed readers. Ever since Google announced they would be shutting down Google Reader, there's been a huge influx of new RSS feed readers launching (everything from our favorite, Feedbin, to free alternatives like Feedly, Digg Reader, and Aol Reader). These new services have really gotten a lot of people talking about the good old days, when RSS was king. So to keep with the old times, which are once again the new times, your news section will now automatically get a feed (just add ".atom" or ".xml" to the end of your news page's URL), and your store's news feed will now be auto-discoverable in most readers. This means if a fan drops your store's URL into their reader, it should automatically yank the feed and add it to their subscription list.

We have a lot of big things in the works, so keep your eyes on our blog and follow us on Twitter to stay up to date with everything. And as always, thanks to everyone that's using and supporting Limited Run!

Improved Products Overview

2013-06-25T14:00:00+00:00

Last week you saw the release of our new module called "It's Available!", which is going to help everyone keep their customers and fans informed about pre-orders and back in stock items. Something we didn't discuss in that post, but alluded to with one of the screenshots, was our newly updated products area.

You might remember that the badges next to your "Sold" column that indicate whether a product is unlisted, coming soon, or available, were all one color. Well we wanted to freshen that up and make it easier for you to see, so we picked out a few bright colors for each state. We've also added a smaller badge next to individual variations that aren't in stock. And along with that new variation badge, we added a new product state called "Some Available" which lets you know that, within a product, there are some variations that are available and some that are "Out of Stock". Lastly, we've faded the "Not Listed" badge a little because we wanted to make it more obvious that you haven't made those products visible in your storefront yet.

In addition to the updated badges, you may have also noticed that we renamed the "Remaining" column as "Left" and improved the spacing across all of the stats columns to be more uniform. This will help make it easier to quickly review your sold counts and remaining inventory. And if you've installed "It's Available!", you'll see that "Sold" is no longer next to the badges. Instead, we have a new column called "Want". This is going to tell you how many people "Want" a specific item that's "Not Available" or "Out of Stock". And if you click that number, it's going to bring up the Pending Requests screen, which will let you review and send out notification emails.

Finally, if you're using the Ticket Selling Module, we've added these same improvements to the "Tickets" area of your dashboard as well!

Keep your eyes open next week, because we'll have some more great "News" for you. Heh.

Introducing The "It's Available!" Module

2013-06-18T14:00:00+00:00

We've just released a new feature that's not only going to help you sell more music and merch, but also help you to easily see how in demand your "Coming Soon" and "Out of Stock" items are. We're calling it the "It's Available!" Module, and it's extremely versatile, so let's take a look at how it works.

Pre-Orders

Probably the biggest and most important use of "It's Available!" will be alerting your customers about an item that just went up for sale. Specifically, pre-orders. A typical scenario for a pre-order involves a label or band announcing that on a certain date, a new album will be available. Beyond that, things get complicated. Labels and bands might release the time it will be up for sale. That time may not be met. Massive amounts of refreshing happens. People get annoyed, frustrated, post nasty comments on Facebook pages, threaten to jump from rooftops. Just all around ugliness. So to avoid said ugliness, customers can now choose to be notified when the item becomes available. They do this by entering their email address into the "It's Available!" notification request screen. As soon as you make the item available for purchase, you'll be prompted to send out notification emails to everyone that requested.

Out of Stock Items

Another great use for this feature is on items that are out of stock. For example, clothing that's not available in a certain size or maybe when the current pressing of a piece of vinyl has sold out. With both these items, it always helps to know what the demand is for an item you're considering printing or pressing again. Just going by emails you get, or comments on social media networks, may not tell the whole story. With "It's Available!", it makes it extremely easy for customers to let you know they're still interested in a certain item.

Other Cool Stuff

Just like your "Coming Soon" products, fans will want to be notified right when tickets for a show become available. So, we made "It's Available!" also work great when you're selling tickets.

Another thing we did with this feature is to let you choose which customers you'd like to notify. You can of course notify everyone at once, but maybe you have a VIP list or maybe just some really great customers you'd like to give a head start to. On the other hand, maybe you know the email address of a vinyl flipper and you'd like to leave them out. Either way, you have control of who gets notified and when.

Lastly, when anyone makes a request, their email address will also be sent to your Customers Module and included in the CSV download so you can add them to your newsletter.

Okay, I'm Sold!

To get started with "It's Available!", just follow these steps:

Go into your dashboard by signing in on the homepage.
Go to your store's "Modules" > "Manage Modules" area.
Install the "It's Available!" Module.

As always, if you have any questions, please send us a message.

Buckle Up, Credit Card Processing is Here!

2013-04-02T14:00:00+00:00

You may remember a while back we launched a second payment option for our other service Card Included, which let you pay us with a credit card. Then more recently, we added another way to pay us on Limited Run, when we gave you an alternative to our Pay As You Earn (PAYE) system. This new method allowed you to pay us once a month with a saved credit card. Noticing a trend? We were preparing for something big, and when we do that, we're extremely thorough. Well, we can finally say that we're done preparing!

Stores can now accept credit cards, directly from their customers, with our brand new Stripe integration!

Stripe, if you don't know, is an incredible new payment gateway that allows sellers in the United States and Canada (with more countries coming soon) easily accept credit card payments from all over the world, and then have that money go directly into their bank account. With our Stripe integration, you don't need to know any code or be a developer, you just need to click a button in your store's settings area. It's that simple.

Not Your Grandfather's Gateway

Traditionally, credit card gateways have always been complicated and intimidating. Most want you to fill out lengthy forms and fax them in for approval. We like music from the 90's, not technology. We want stores to sign up and start selling. Stripe keeps us in the 21st century with a simple online sign up process, and a one-click "Connect with Stripe" integration. You'll be up and running in just a few seconds.

Another way Stripe separates itself from the gateways of the past, is in fees. No monthly fees. No minimums. No international fees. No extra fees for accepting American Express. And no extra fees for refunds. Stripe only charges you a standard 2.9% + $0.30 transaction fee. That's it.

Accept Credit Cards Right in Your Store

Our PayPal checkout is the best in the business. We take a lot of pride in how quick and easy it is. We did this because, as our name suggests, we specialize in features that enable stores to sell fast selling items like music, toys, shirts, tickets, and more. But a credit card checkout is usually a lot more complicated than a PayPal checkout. Think about the last time you paid for something online with a credit card. Most likely, the experience was pitiful. Well pitiful was not going to fly with us. We can't have the best PayPal checkout on the planet, and then have some slow, dragging, time consuming checkout with credit cards. We wanted one small checkout screen, we wanted it to think for you, and we wanted to avoid email when redeeming digital. Basically, we wanted the easiest credit card checkout process available. Here's how we did it.

Once you connect your Stripe account, customers will see two buttons in the cart. One will be "Pay with PayPal" and the other will be "Pay with Credit Card". The PayPal checkout works exactly the same as it always has.

There's only one screen your customers will see when paying with a credit card, and it's tailored to fit what they're buying. It's slim, and it's small, but it packs a punch.

Back in March of 2012, a company called Kicksend significantly reduced bounced emails by detecting possible typos in email addresses. We were so impressed by this, that we incorporated their open source project into our new checkout flow. For example, if your customer types jim@fmail.com, we'll catch that and suggest the more likely jim@gmail.com.

Another interesting thing we're doing to save your customers time is automatically filling out the city and state after they enter their zip code. Pretty slick, right?

Finally, your customers pay right in your storefront, and seconds after clicking "Complete Order", they're shown a confirmation, and given download buttons to redeem any attached digital items. They'll never have to wait for an email notificaiton to get their downloads.

Stripe Integration is Now Live

There's no other credit card gateway out there that we could have done all this with, besides Stripe. They're really at the top of their game. To enable Stripe in your store, head into your "Settings" area, and click the blue "Connect with Stripe" button.

As always, if you have any questions, please feel free to send us a message.

Tip: How To Easily Switch Between Stores

2013-03-20T14:00:00+00:00

A few months ago we released a cool feature called Multiple Managers which allowed a store owner to give access to their store to another email address. This comes in handy in so many ways, specifically when it comes to designers. Designers that work on multiple stores at the same time, like for instance Yann Novak who's built stores for Line and Room40, benefit greatly from the Multiple Managers feature. But what makes building more than one store at a time even easier is how Limited Run lets managers of multiple stores easily switch between those stores. By clicking the store's name in the top left hand corner of the dashboard, the store manager will be able to switch between any store they've been given access to. You don't have to sign out or in to the other store, just click the name and the dashboards will change automatically.

As you know you can sign directly into a specific store by going to SUBDOMAIN.limitedrun.com/admin or you can use the sign in link at the top right hand corner of the Limited Run homepage. But what's great about the Multiple Managers feature is it gives you access to another cool store switching feature called Launchpad. The Launchpad can be accessed when you're a manager on multiple stores, and you sign in through the Limited Run homepage. Or if you click "Launchpad" in the drop down menu talked about in the previous paragraph. The Launchpad not only allows you to choose which store you'd like to manage, but also gives you an easy way to create a new store, as well as change your sign in account info.

If you have any questions, click that blue thingy in the bottom right hand corner.

Tip: Testing a Download Without Checking Out

2013-03-12T14:00:00+00:00

Did you know you can test your own downloads without checking out? Well you can! And it’s really easy.

To try it out, go to your dashboard, click Modules at the top, then go into your Digital Items section. Once you’re there, you’ll see a “Ready” tag next to each uploaded item. If you click that “Ready” tag, you’ll see a dropdown menu of all the file types. If you used our Everything Else feature, you’ll see a Zip file. If you used our Lossless feature, you’ll see all the different formats your customers can download after purchase. If you click one of those files, it will immediately start downloading. This is a great way to find out what file you uploaded. Did you remember to upload the Remastered version of that album, or did you upload the original? Instead of deleting it to make sure, just download it and check it out. Or maybe you just want to hear the difference between all the formats so you can recommend the one you like the best. No matter what the reason is, this is how you do it.

If you have any questions, send us a message.

New Theme: Connected

2013-03-05T14:00:00+00:00

Today, we’re releasing a brand new theme called “Connected”. It was designed by Nick Moreton from across the pond (that’s slang for the UK). You might know him from other themes like Cursive and Droptop. Connected is a great theme for people with only a few products. It features a huge product image, as well as pinned navigation, Google Analytics Integration, and built in support for every Limited Run Module.

To install the Connected theme:

Go into your dashboard by signing in on the homepage.
Click “Storefront”.
Click “Theme”.
Scroll down to the “Connected” theme.
Click “Add”.
Scroll to the top and make that theme the default by clicking “Use This Theme”.

Faster Uploading to Your Neck of the Woods

2013-02-26T14:00:00+00:00

With customers spread out all over the world, possibly in rural areas that don’t always have the quickest, most stable internet connections, we decided to look at how we could make our digital item uploader the fastest and most reliable uploader around.

Previously, no matter if you were located in New York, London, Berlin, or Sydney, you would upload your digital items to a cluster of our servers located on the east coast of the United States.

We’re happy to say that this is no longer the case.

Now, right before you start uploading, we automatically detect which of our servers in the United States, Europe, or Australia are responding fastest to you. Then, we silently route your uploads to those fastest responding, and most likely closest, servers. After your uploads complete, we find your files all over the world and instantly collect them together in the same location and send them through our processing pipeline.

As an added bonus, when you upload to our United States region, we’ll automatically route your files to either upload servers on the west coast or the east coast, depending on which is closer to you.

We hope that this brand new upload infrastructure we’ve released will go completely unnoticed to you and that your uploads are simply faster and smoother than they’ve ever been.

Happy uploading!

Ticket Sales, Now With Integrated Digital Downloads

2013-02-19T14:00:00+00:00

Hot on the heels of our recent Ticket Selling Module announcement, we’re really happy to release a new feature that ties Ticket Sales into our best-in-the-business digital platform.

If you’ve ever sold a product on Limited Run, then you already know how easy it is to attach digital items to a product’s variations. Each variation on a product can optionally have its own digital item attached, and today, we’ve extended this same, incredibly flexible and easy to use digital system, to ticket sales.

To get started, just click “Edit” next to any existing show you’ve created, or start off with a new show from the “Tickets” area of your dashboard. At the bottom of the show editor, you’ll see a new “Digital Item” column in the “Ticket Types” section. From here, you can optionally select an existing digital item, or create a new one inline. That’s it!

When your fans buy tickets with attached digital items, they’ll not only go through the specially designed ticket buying experience we’ve created, but they’ll also be provided the digital items that went along with those tickets, instantly after paying for them - just like with regular products.

To get started with the Ticket Selling Module, just follow these steps:

Go into your dashboard by signing in on the homepage.
Go to your store’s “Modules” > “Manage Modules” area.
Install the “Ticket Selling” Module.
Click “Tickets” in your dashboard’s top navigation.
Click the “New Show” button.

If you have any questions about selling tickets, check out our new Ticket & Show Management Help Area or, as always, feel free to send us a message.

Introducing The Ticket Selling Module

2013-02-07T14:00:00+00:00

Finally! The teasing about our biggest feature since Limited Run launched is over. Behold, the Ticket Selling Module!

We’ve worked long and hard on this module, and to be honest, it’s so big, it could actually be a platform all on it’s own. We even toyed with the idea of doing something like Card Included, and making it separate from Limited Run all together. In the end though, we added it to Limited Run, and we hope everyone loves how it integrates. Let’s look at all the features this module brings:

Making Life Easier For You

Running a show can require multiple people. Especially at the Will Call counter. The faster you get everyone in, the better chance you have of starting on time. No band wants to start playing when there’s a line of people in the street waiting to come in. So we wanted to make a Will Call list that can be used by multiple people at the same time. This meant, we not only needed it work well with every device, like for instance a laptop, iPad, and smartphone, but we also needed it to auto update after a fan is checked in. Which is exactly what we did.

This means that multiple people can be checking fans in on multiple devices, at the same time, and everyone is seeing an up-to-date list. Sharing access also needed to be easy, so we made it work much like our Multiple Managers feature. You just add your helper’s email address to the shared access list, and we’ll send them an email with a secure URL that gives them access. The difference is that your helper doesn’t need to sign up for an account, they just have to click the link. This makes it a lot easier to run shows with different people.

The next thing we wanted to address, to make the Will Call check in process go faster, was how you find and mark off a name. With the old school paper Will Call list (which we of course also have if that’s your thing), checking off a name is ridiculously simple. You see the name, you cross it off. But that only works well with one person. If you have 2 people, you need to either share one list, or each person needs to look at names that might have already checked in. Not cool. So with our Interactive Will Call List, you needed to be able to find and check off names, fast and easy. This is why we made it so you can start to type any part of the fan’s name or address, and we’ll autofilter and find the closest name to what you’re typing, as you’re typing it.

Once there’s only one name visible in the list, just press enter on your keyboard. Or if you see the name, and you’re using a tablet or smartphone, just tap the name, and it immediately checks them in.

Another great thing about the old school paper list is you don’t need an internet connection. Duh. So we needed a way to solve an intermittent connection. This meant we needed a way to store information locally, and sync it between devices once the connection was restored. Which is exactly what we did. If you lose your connection while using the Interactive Will Call List, you can still check fans in. Then once your connection comes back, we automatically sync your list with anyone else checking people in. Essentially, it will work like a paper list until the connection is restored.

Another big problem we wanted to solve with Will Call lists is guests. Allowing bands to invite guests to their show, could require a couple of phone calls or emails between the band and the show runner. Then it requires transferring those names to the Will Call list. This is at best an annoyance, sometimes it even results in the forgetting or misspelling of names. Which inevitably pisses everyone off. So we tried to make this whole Guest List problem go away. To do that, we created a way for the person running the show to add an email address for the band, and the amount of guests they’re allowed to invite. Then we send the band an email with a secure URL in it. The band clicks that URL, and it takes them to a screen that allows them to type the guest’s name in, and add how many are in their party. Those names are then synced with the Will Call List, and you’re done!

Lastly, we wanted to address how ticket sales end. With a regular product, the sale ends when inventory runs out. Whether it’s an hour or a week, you can’t sell more than you put in inventory, so everything takes care of itself. While that’s also true with tickets, at some point prior to the show, you want to stop selling tickets online whether or not it sold out. We make this easy by letting you pick how long before the show starts you’d like the sale to end. You can pick from 2 hours, 6 hours, 12 hours, 1 day, 2 days, or 3 days.

Making Life Easier For The Fans

Now that we’ve made life easier for the people running the show, it was time to make life easier for the fan. To do that, we wanted to solve a few problems we’ve encountered while attending shows over the past 20 years. The first one is, “Where the hell is the venue!?” DIY shows can be found in back alleys, bars, VFWs, even parking lots. This means every weekend you play guessing games with your friends. So we decided to do two things. One is that since show runners can create and save Venues and their locations, we can then show the fan a map, when they’re buying tickets.

The second thing we did was include a Google Maps link inside the order email the fan receives after purchasing their tickets. From there, the fan can just enter in the location they’ll be traveling from, and Google spits out the directions.

The next problem we wanted to solve was remembering that the show was taking place on a certain day, at a certain time. We of course send the fan a confirmation email after their purchase that lists all that, but fans can sometimes buy tickets a month or more in advance. By the time the show is going to happen, they’ve completely forgotten the details. So we decided to send the fan a reminder email, 24 hours before the show is going to happen, with all of the relevant info again. Just in case.

Another thing we wanted to do to make life easier for the fan was integrate with SoundCloud, just like we do on product pages. This way, fans don’t need to scour the internet searching for songs from bands they haven’t heard before. Keeping the fan on the ticket and product pages is a great way to increase engagement. And of course, just like on product pages, your fans can checkout while still listening to the SoundCloud player.

Speaking of checkouts, not only are tickets as easy for your fans to purchase as digital items, but they get their own dedicated shows area in your storefront. They won’t be mixed up with your store’s regular inventory, they’ll be all together and automatically sorted by date.

The last problem we wanted to tackle is how to keep fans informed about upcoming shows. To do this, we enlisted the help of the iCalendar Standard. Every shows section has an iCalendar feed, which works just like an RSS feed, if you’re familiar with that. Anyone can take that feed and drop it into the calendar on their computer, whether it’s in Outlook, Apple Calendar, Google, or even the calendar on your phone. When a show is announced, it will appear right in your calendar. You don’t need to buy tickets to the show for this to happen, you just need to subscribe to the iCalendar feed.

Making Life Easier For Everyone

Selling tickets online has always been tough for small venues. The service fees they need to negotiate with the big players in tickets like Ticketmaster and Ticketfly are usually outrageous. Fans can sometimes pay up to a $10 fee per ticket. Some choose to go with new independent ticket platforms that don’t negotiate, and just have a set service fee for all tickets regardless of price. While these fees can be as little as a few dollars a ticket, in our eyes, even this is too much. So we’ve decided to only add 25 cents per ticket to the cart as a fee. We also decided that shows aren’t going to count as products, and if you have no products, you don’t pay a monthly fee. So essentially, if you’re only selling tickets on Limited Run, you don’t have to pay anything at all.

There’s a whole bunch of little features that we didn’t talk about in this post, because it’s already really long. To find out what those features are, I guess you’ll just have to install the module and start selling some tickets! To get started, just follow these steps:

Go into your dashboard by signing in on the homepage.
Go to your store’s “Modules” > “Manage Modules” area.
Install the “Ticket Selling” Module.
Click “Tickets” in your dashboard’s top navigation.
Click the “New Show” button.

As always, if you have any questions, please send us a message.

Update, February 19th:
We’re happy to announce that Ticket Sales have been fully integrated with our digital platform!

New Pay on a Schedule Feature

2013-01-31T14:00:00+00:00

Guess what? It’s Thursday. You know what that means? It’s update time!

As everyone knows, we currently have a very convenient payment method called “Pay as You Earn”. This allows you to pay down your balance with money earned by selling products in your store. However, some people have asked us if they could pay monthly with a credit card, rather than from their PayPal account. We thought this was a great idea. Not only does it allow you to pay with whatever credit card you want, it allows you to only deal with a single bill each month, which works great for record keeping. So that’s what we did. You can now turn off “Pay as You Earn” by adding a credit card, and once a month on your “Open for Business” date, your balance will be paid off with your saved card, and we’ll email you an invoice. Also, since we added a way for you to pay us with a credit card, the sign in and dashboard areas now use HTTPS encryption.

To switch to “Pay on a Schedule”, follow these steps:

Go into your dashboard by signing in on the homepage.
Go to your store’s “Settings” area.
Go 3 spots down, to the “Current Usage” section.
Click “Change Payment Method”.
Click “Pay on a Schedule”.
Enter your credit card details.
Click “Charge & Save” and wait for the screen to update.

Next week we’re announcing the biggest feature since we launched in February of 2012. Stay tuned!

Dashboard Speed & Search Improvements

2013-01-24T14:00:00+00:00

We have three more really big updates to announce, each one bigger than the next. Let’s start with the first of the three. Over the past few weeks, we’ve been releasing a number of speed and search enhancements to the Sales and Products areas of your store’s admin dashboard, and we’d like to tell you about a few of them today.

Product Navigating & Searching Speed

For the first enhancement, look no further than your Products area. We’ve improved the loading of your products section, especially when paging back and forth across a very long list of products. Additionally, where searches across all of your products could have taken a while in the past, they now return instantly. Go on and give it try! We’ll wait.

Negative Search Terms

You’re back already? That was quick! Well, another of these updates includes support for negative search terms. Let’s say you put the word “Preorder” in the titles of all of your preorder products. When someone purchases that product, the order’s line item has a snapshot of the product and variation name at the time of purchase, so it will include the word “Preorder”. With negative search terms, you can now search in your sales area for unshipped orders matching “-preorder” and all orders for “preorder” products will be excluded from the search results. This should be a big help if you’ve found that your preorder sales have been crowding up your list of waiting-to-be-shipped orders.

When you’re ready to ship that preorder item, head over to the products area of your dashboard, remove “preorder” from the product’s title, and click the number in the “sold” column to search your sales area for every order that included that product.

Product Search Suggestions

One last enhancement we’d like to tell you about is the new “Search Suggestions” feature in the products area. Now, as you start typing a search term, we’ll instantly return matching products. Simply use your keyboard’s arrows or click on the product you want and the products area will update with that single matching product.

This update is perfect when you have a large number of products and want to easily jump around to see product stats and make edits. You already know what you’re looking for and now you don’t need to wait to find it.

We hope you find these recent search and speed improvements to your store’s dashboard helpful while managing your store. Enjoy!

Favicons, Favicons, Favicons!

2013-01-17T14:00:00+00:00

Keeping with our recent stretch of Thursday announcements, we’re happy to tell you about the immediate availability of favicon support in themes!

Standard Themes

If you haven’t duplicated your theme to change HTML or CSS, follow these steps to set up your favicon:

Go into your dashboard by signing in on the homepage.
Go to your Storefront > Theme area.
Click the “Options” button on your current theme.
Scroll down to the “Favicon Image URL” option.
Click the “Upload Image” button and choose your favicon file (.ico or .png).
After your favicon finishes uploading, click “Save” at the top.
Click Storefront > View Storefront and gaze at your beautiful new faviconned storefront!

While your best bet for creating a favicon is to use either an .ico or .png file at 16px by 16px, some devices can support higher resolution favicons these days.

Custom HTML Themes

If you previously duplicated your theme (your “HTML / CSS” button is enabled), you may not have the favicon option. But don’t worry! With a few recent additions to our theming system, you can add a favicon option to your custom theme very easily. Just follow these steps:

Go into your dashboard by signing in on the homepage.
Go to your Storefront > Theme area.
Click your theme’s “HTML / CSS” button.
Scroll down and click “Edit” next to your “default.json” config file.
Scroll down to the bottom of the “settings” section and add the following setting:

...},

"favicon_image_url": {
"format": "image",
"content_type": true,
"label": "Favicon Image URL",
"help": "Enter an image URL or choose an image file to upload.",
"placeholder": "http://",
"position": 1000
}

Please Note: There must be a comma following your previous “setting-name”: {} block. Additionally, the “position” attribute above must not be the same as an existing “position” used in any other settings.

After you’ve done that, there’s just one more thing to add:

Click “Save” and then “Done”.
Click “Edit” next to your “default.html” layout file.
Scroll down to the right before your </head> tag and paste in the following code:

{{ config['favicon_image_url'] | favicon_tag }}

Lastly, click “Save”, “Done”, “Back to Themes”, and then you can simply follow the first set of instructions at the top of this post.

If you have any questions, please let us know. Otherwise, see you next week!

New Custom Theme Fields Module

2013-01-10T14:00:00+00:00

Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve released some great features and improvements like Multiple Managers and Email Notification Settings. We’re culminating in a huge feature announcement before the end of January, but for now, let’s talk about our newest addition, Custom Theme Fields!

With the new Custom Theme Fields Module, designers using HTML and CSS in their custom theme can quickly add fields to Products, Categories, News Items, History Items, and Roster Items. After you’ve added fields to one of these things, you can use them in your dashboard just like other fields and then easily access the values from your custom theme.

There are countless uses for Custom Fields, but here are just a few:

Add a preorder checkbox field to products and when checked, display a special banner on product pages, letting your fans know that item is a preorder.
Add artist and album name textfields to products so that you can easily style them differently on product pages, rather than showing a single product name.
Add a label logo image field to history items so you can display the logo of the label that released a record on its history item page.
Add a product summary textarea field so that you can display product summaries on your shop’s index page and full descriptions on product pages.
Add a video textarea field to roster items so that you can add a YouTube video embed code for each of your bands, that always displays in a certain part of your roster item’s page, separate from the description.

Those are just some of the things you can do with Custom Fields, and to help make them as flexible as possible, there are four types of custom fields you can create: checkbox, image, textfield, and textarea. The checkbox, textfield, and textarea fields are self explanatory, but the image field is a special helper field that provides an image upload button next to a textfield. Just click the upload button, choose your image, and an image URL will appear in the textfield.

After you’ve set up your fields and entered values on your Products, Categories, News Items, History Items, and Roster Items, you can access the values from your theme’s custom HTML like so:

{% if product.custom['preorder'] %}
  This is a preorder!
{% endif %}

Or output the value like:

{{ product.custom['album-name'] }} by {{ product.custom['artist-name'] }}

To get started, just follow these steps:

Go into your dashboard by signing in on the homepage.
Go to your store’s “Modules” > “Manage Modules” area.
Scroll to the bottom and install the “Custom Theme Fields” Module.
Go into a Product editor (or Category, News Item, History Item, or Roster Item editor).
Scroll down and click “Configure Custom Theme Fields”.
Decide what new fields you’d like available on all of your products, add them and click save.
The new fields will instantly appear. Add values and click save.
Update your theme’s HTML to use your new fields!

With Custom Theme Field, the possibilities are endless, so we can’t wait to see what you come up with! If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us.

New Email Notification Settings

2013-01-03T14:00:00+00:00

Last week, we announced a new feature called Multiple Managers, which helps a ton when you have more than one person working on your store. Well, we’ve just released a new feature that can work with Multiple Managers, or on its own. Email Notification Settings! Ever run a presale for an item you know will be ridiculously popular and don’t want to receive emails for the next few hours? Or maybe you don’t want to get emails for free digital orders anymore? What about if you have two people managing your store, one handles customer support and the other handles orders? Well now with Email Notification Settings you can adjust how you want to receive emails for each person managing your store separately. Pretty sweet, right?

To adjust your setting:

Go into your dashboard by signing in on the homepage.
Go to your store’s “Settings” area.
Next to where it says “User Account”, click “Change Notification Settings”.
Select the notification options you want.
Click “Save”.
Take a deep breath, and exhale.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact us.

New Multiple Managers Feature

2012-12-27T14:00:00+00:00

Multiple Managers is a great feature a lot of people have been asking for. Sometimes it’s annoying to have a single sign in email address and password for multiple store managers. But with this feature, you can invite others to help manage your store, while letting them have their own sign in details.

To add new store managers:

Go into your dashboard by signing in on the homepage.
Go to your store’s “Settings” area.
Next to where it says “Store Managers”, click “Add Another”.
Enter the email address of the person you’d like to invite in the “Invite Someone” box, and click “Send Invitation”.
Note that this person’s email address is now in the “Pending Invitations” section.
Once this person accepts your invitation, their email address will be located in the “Confirmed Managers” section.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact us.

Discount Code Updates

2012-12-03T14:00:00+00:00

After Black Friday, a bunch of store owners had some great ideas for our discount code system. We picked out two of the best, and added them. Here’s a quick overview of the new features:

Free Shipping Add-On

With this option, you can add free shipping to any other discount. For instance, if you wanted to give out a free promotional copy of a physical item, you can give someone a discount code, that not only gives them the item for free, but also gives them the shipping for free.

Discount Links

This allows you to create a URL to anywhere in your store, and then automatically apply a discount to the cart. It makes it extremely easy to give out a discount to a specific person. Obviously, this works well with the Free Shipping Add-On feature above. If you wanted to give someone a promotional item, the Discount Link would make it easier for the person you’re giving it to.

To build a Discount Link, just click “Link” next to any discount in the “Discount Codes” section of your store’s admin area.

Introducing The PledgeMusic Splash Page

2012-09-25T14:00:00+00:00

A few weeks ago, we talked about PledgeMusic, a direct-to-fan service that we think is doing something amazing for the music industry. PledgeMusic helps artists and bands design a fundraising campaign to raise money for their next release. In that post, we also said that’d be working with them a lot in the future. Well today, we’re really excited to announce a brand new feature that we’re calling the PledgeMusic Splash Page.

With a few clicks, the PledgeMusic Splash Page lets you greet every fan that comes to your Limited Run store with a special splash page, promoting your current PledgeMusic project. After you install the Module and tell us where your artist page at PledgeMusic is, we’ll automatically generate a splash page for your store, complete with your project’s details and a badge that shows off its current status.

Your fans can then click through to PledgeMusic to learn more about your project or they can continue into your store.

We’re really excited to be working with PledgeMusic and would like to say thanks to everyone over there for helping to make this feature possible!

Download Cards - The Best Just Got Better

2012-09-17T14:00:00+00:00

Earlier this year, the creators of Limited Run announced a brand new, self-serve, download card service, called Card Included. As you know, Card Included made download cards incredibly easy and affordable. Within minutes you could design a card, upload your music, and download a ready-to-print PDF of all your cards. It didn’t matter if you needed 25 or 2500, Card Included was there, ready to go.

Today, we’re happy to announce that we’ve stepped it up again, with five huge improvements.

Lossless Audio Uploads & Multi-Format Downloads

You now have the option of uploading your lossless audio files, rather than a single zip. When you upload lossless, we’ll automatically convert it to a bunch of great formats and let your fans pick which they want to download.

Any Website as Your Download Page

You can now make any website be the page your fans see when downloading. After they download, the site will be there waiting for them. Have the page be the news section of your website. Or your store. Maybe you have a pre-order you want to promote. Anything is possible.

Expanded Social Links on Custom Pages

Although we’ve added the embedded website feature, you can still choose to make a custom download page instead. And if you’re using a custom page, you’ll be happy to know that we’ve added a slew of new links you can add like: YouTube, Blogger, WordPress, Last.fm and more.

Shorter Download URLs

We’ve significantly reduced the size of our download URLs. Where your fans used to have type 15 character codes, they now only have to type 5 characters.

Reorders

Need another run of cards? No problem! Just click the link in your confirmation email, and enter the number of cards you need. That’s it!

We’re extremely proud of these recent changes. Card Included used to be the only self-serve download card service, now it’s also the only lossless audio download card service. It just keeps getting better. And the price is still just 1 penny per 20 MBs!

We Now Support 16 New Currencies!

2012-08-28T14:00:00+00:00

You’ve asked for it and we’ve delivered! We now support a total of 21 currencies:

U.S. Dollar (USD)
Australian Dollar (AUD)
British Pound (GBP)
Canadian Dollar (CAD)
Czech Koruna (CZK)
Danish Krone (DKK)
Euro (EUR)
Hong Kong Dollar (HKD)
Hungarian Forint (HUF)
Israeli New Sheqel (ILS)
Japanese Yen (JPY)
Mexican Peso (MXN)
Norwegian Krone (NOK)
New Zealand Dollar (NZD)
Philippine Peso (PHP)
Polish Zloty (PLN)
Singapore Dollar (SGD)
Swedish Krona (SEK)
Swiss Franc (CHF)
Taiwan New Dollar (TWD)
Thai Baht (THB)

If you’ve been waiting until we supported your currency to sign up, just head over to our front page and get a store in three easy steps.

If you already have a store and would like to change your currency, you can do so from the settings area of your dashboard (more details here).

PledgeMusic - Why It's Really Awesome

2012-08-07T14:00:00+00:00

We wanted to write something about a direct-to-fan service we’re going to be working with a lot in the future. That service is called PledgeMusic. If you haven’t heard of it before, here’s an overview.

PledgeMusic helps artists and bands design a specifically tailored fundraising campaign to raise money for their next release. Whether you’re looking to record and distribute your next album, or you’ve already recorded it and you just want to gauge your fans receptiveness to unique formats like vinyl, PledgeMusic makes it extremely easy.

Using PledgeMusic also gives you a way to set up different tier levels, so that each fan has a way to contribute as little, or as much as they like. For instance, take a look at Ginger Wildheart’s newest Project. Here he’s not just doing an album for one of his bands, but two albums for his band Mutation, and another one for his band Hey! Hello!. But fans of each band can contribute separately. So if you like pop, you’ll be able to contribute to the Project, and only receive music for Hey! Hello!. But if you’re into “guitar riffs”, which Ginger discusses a lot in his very funny preview video, then you can contribute and receive just the two albums from Mutation.

What’s really interesting about this approach is by piggy backing these two bands together, Ginger is getting each band cross pollinated by the other. Marketing costs are lower with this method as well. We have never seen someone do this before, but Ginger is an expert. His Triple Album Project debuted at #27 on the UK Top 40, and ranked as high as #9, when he used PledgeMusic. So it’s no wonder he’s trying and experimenting with new angles on the platform.

PledgeMusic does a few things differently than other platforms out there. And these features definitely made the choice easy when we decided we wanted to work with a direct-to-fan fundraising platform. Obviously them being only about music was important. Even though anyone can use our service to sell their digital and physical products, we’ve always developed with selling music in mind. But there’s something else they do that made us do a double take. Normally on other fundraising platforms, when the Project is over, meaning the date of the end of the Project is reached, fans can no longer contribute. This makes for major headaches for the Project Creator, because if they don’t also have a place to let fans preorder the album outside of funraising, then they’re essentially stuck selling nothing until their album is officially released. This idea of switching the fan flow to your store during the preorder process completely fragments the sale of your record. Just like when labels and bands use our service for their preorders, we always like to see them using one store the entire time. PledgeMusic has this same idea in mind, because even when your date is reached, and your Project goal is met, fans can still contribute and preorder the album. The date is just the Project’s state change signifier. It lets the fans know the project has moved onto to the next step, not that the Project is over. Only when the Project is in the Released state, does preordering stop. This is exactly how a typical preorder works. And it’s also the perfect spot to switch sales to your online store.

Over the next month or so we’re going to be working very closely with PledgeMusic to make your transition from the Released state of your album on PledgeMusic, to what most people would call, the Available state in your online store easier. We’ve got a couple of very cool ideas in mind, so we’ll keep everyone informed as they develop.

Revamped Page Creation

2012-08-04T14:00:00+00:00

We’ve just released a revamped page creator. In addition to being really sleek, it’s now even easier to create pages both with, and without, knowing HTML.

When working on a regular page, if you often find yourself embedding video from YouTube or Vimeo, you’ll be happy to hear that now there’s a dedicated button for doing just that. No more digging into the page’s HTML just to drop in those clips. But embedding video isn’t the only thing that’s new, now you’ll find a host of great shortcuts to make formatting and editing your page’s content a breeze. And if you really need to get down to work, there’s also a new option for full screening.

For all the developers out there, custom HTML page creation has also been updated. Now it’s using the same powerful editor that’s in the Themes area. No more switching back and forth to a rich text editor, when all you want to do is write HTML.

Lastly, if you’re using the News Module, don’t worry we haven’t forgotten about you. We’ve added the same great rich text editor to the News area as well.

Updated: We've Deleted Our Facebook Page

2012-07-30T14:00:00+00:00

We’d like to let everyone know how much we’ve appreciated their support. It’s meant a lot to us. When we posted about leaving Facebook on Monday, we only intended our small group of customers and followers to know what was happening, and why. We had no clue it was going to explode like it did. But now, we’re just a very small company, that wants nothing more than to go back to work. We don’t want to be known for this, and we’re going to keep turning down requests for interviews. Facebook is in contact with us, and they’re going to look into the issues we had. This is all we can say. Once again, thank you so much for your kind words, and the courage it took for you to speak your minds. We’ve barely slept in the past few days, but your comments, tweets, and emails, have really helped us push through all this shit. We apologize that we can’t reply to you all, so please accept this small token of thanks from our youth:

Our Checkout Process, Kicks Your Checkout Process's Ass

2012-07-19T14:00:00+00:00

Update, April 2nd, 2013: To see our new credit card checkout process, see our new post.

Often when a fan buys an album with another service, they’re funneled into a long checkout process with multiple pages, that usually ends with them completing their purchase at PayPal. Not only this, but when a fan wants to redeem a digital album, they need to fumble around with emails and links. You may have noticed that we’re doing things a little differently. We show an overlay and try to give the fan the feeling that they’re not leaving the store. We believe this is a better experience. So in light of this incredibly obvious and simplistic idea, we’ve decided to take the speed and convenience of our checkout even further!

We’re very pleased to announce that we’ve changed the entire cart process, so fans never have to leave the last page they were on. From checking out, to paying, to downloading the album. This means no more waiting for emails, cursing spam filters, or clicking links. A problem that plagues 3rd party services other platforms use. This new approach keeps fans interacting with your store, as well as provides a cleaner and more streamlined experience.

Helping fans avoid waiting for email, was only one reason to make this change. The other reason was SoundCloud. We knew that if we kept fans at the store, they could stream music with SoundCloud the entire time. And if you combine streaming, with SoundCloud’s great social features like commenting and liking, our checkout is not only the fastest checkout on the planet, but the most fun!

Watch the short video at the top to see it in action.

Limited Run Has Officially Launched!

2012-07-11T14:00:00+00:00

If you haven’t heard yet, not only are we not in beta anymore, but we’ve added even more incredible features! Let’s talk about a few of them:

Digital Street Date

A feature that we’re extremely happy to bring everyone is what we’re calling “Digital Street Date”. This lets you preorder an album, but delay the download of that album until a date you specify. And to make it even easier for you, on the date you specify, we’ll email your customers to let them know it’s available!

Live Inventory Tracking

Huh?! That’s right! When you’re in the products section of your dashboard, the Sold, Held, and Remaining columns now automatically update themselves. It shows you exactly when your customers are at PayPal and when they’ve completed their payment. It’s an incredible feature for newly released, fast selling products.

Themes

We’ve enlisted Nick Moreton, a talented UK resident and all around great guy, to help fill out our theme gallery over the next few months. We’re very happy to have him helping out on that front and you can already check out three of his new themes in the gallery, so go have a look!

Daily Sales Reports

With our new daily sales reports section, you can quickly skim through your sales totals on a day-by-day basis. We even have a graph so you can jump back through your store’s history, a couple of weeks at a time.

Customer Management

See, search, and sort through everyone that’s ever checked out from your store. At a glance you can see exactly how many orders each person placed, how much they’ve spent, when they first ordered, and when they last ordered. When you’re ready to announce something new, just click export and get a list of your customers ready for MailChimp or FanBridge. You can even see customers that downloaded a free album you gave away.

One Click Order Export and Packing

Now with one click in your sales area, you can export all the orders you have waiting to be shipped to CSV or print packing slips and shipping labels.

Customer Notes During Checkout

You can now let your customers attach a note to their order prior to checking out, right from the cart. Customer notes will be added to your packing checklist too, making it extremely easy to keep track of all the ins and outs of a specific order.

There are a million more little things we’ve released this week, so check your store’s dashboard for a full update. And as always, if you have any questions just send us a message.

Everything to Create a Product, Now in One Place

2012-05-21T14:00:00+00:00

We’ve just released a number of changes that allow you to create shipping profiles, digital items, categories, and even send music directly to SoundCloud, all without leaving the comfort of the product editor. This will speed up managing your products by completely removing the need to jump back and forth between different areas of your dashboard. Not only that, but by reducing the learning curve, we’ve made it easier for new users to get on-board.

Check out the screenshots below.

A.G. Paper Toys on BBC's "Be Your Own Boss"

2012-05-16T14:00:00+00:00

Alexander Gwynne is a 19 year old designer and artist who runs A.G. Papertoys, and is one of 500 participants in a BBC show called Be Your Own Boss. The show is centered around a contest to see who can sell the most products. Alexander is doing something different than most of the participants though, he’s selling digital paper toys that you can print and fold up.

All the money raised from sales goes to charity, so check out some of Alexander’s toys in his store!

Discount Codes!

2012-05-14T14:00:00+00:00

We’ve just added a discount codes module to our arsenal of features! There are 3 different types of discounts that can be applied automatically, or with a code, when a certain value is reached. One is a fixed discount amount. The next is a percentage discount. And the last will drop shipping charges.

Check out the discount code management screen below.

The discount codes module can be installed from your store’s dashboard by going to the “Modules” > “Manage Modules” area.

To read all the technical mumbo jumbo, take a look at our highly in-depth FAQ in the help section.

The New Sales & Shipping Area

2012-05-09T14:00:00+00:00

Last week we rolled out a tremendous update to the sales and shipping section. It’s one of the many things we wanted to do before launching publicly. Below we’ve outlined all the cool new ways you can manage your sales and shipping. Let’s take a look.

The first thing we wanted to do was make printing orders easy. So to achieve that, we did the following: One is we created a checklist that you can use while packing your orders. This checklist tells you everything you need to know. The name, address, email, contents of the package as well as a box to check off when you’re done. We even have an option to flip the checkbox to the other side if you’re left handed. Next, we created a label printing option. This includes the return address, and the shipping address for each order waiting to be shipped. Lastly, we made a packing slip feature that not only lets you print out a simple standard packing slip, but also a custom one with your logo on it if you want. The great thing about these 3 features is they’re all in one system that allows you to set up the ones you want, then save those settings for future use. You can have everything you need to pack and ship your orders, with just a single click.

The second thing we wanted to do is give you a way to expand and collapse each order so you can see exactly what’s being shipped and where it’s going. With the quick click buttons at the top left, you can do this for all the orders at once, or just click a specific order on the list and only that one will expand. Next, we wanted to make that expanded order view the hub for all the different actions you can do to that single order. For instance, if you wanted to copy the address to your clipboard, we have a little copy icon to the right of the name. We also gave you a way to change an address prior to printing. Changing addresses was one of the most requested features we’ve ever had, so we’re really happy to release that. Then we gave you a way to mark that specific order as shipped. While we do have the feature that lets you mark multiple orders as shipped, this works well when you’re Unshipped area is swamped with preorders. Next, we gave you a way to make notes inside of an order. We also have an email link that pre-populates the subject field with the order number (slick, I know). And lastly, we gave you a way to print a single order with your default printing preferences. Check out all the screenshots above to see the exact location of all these great features.

We think these new additions, plus our CSV exporter and our multiple marked as shipped feature, give you everything you need to manage your sales and shipping in one easy to use area.

If you have any questions, please feel free to send us a message. Thanks!

Card Included - A Brand New Download Card Service

2012-04-24T14:00:00+00:00

Nick and Tom Mango, the creators of Limited Run, just launched a new service called Card Included. Card Included is a self-serve download card service that allows you to easily build and print download cards to use at shows, performances, in vinyl, or just for bands and labels to carry around with them. They’re a lot lighter than CDs, that’s for sure!

The great thing about Card Included is you get your own custom download page that not only looks incredible, but gives you a way to promote yourself by optionally linking back to your Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and even your homepage.

Check out this page with those handsome guys from 65 Days of Static.

And look at how simple this card creator is. It’s the easiest way to create and purchase download cards.

Take a closer look by visiting Card Included.

The History & Gallery Modules

2012-03-29T14:00:00+00:00

We’ve just released another two modules. The first will let you easily create a discography for your label or band. We’re calling it the History module and it can be used by stores outside of the music industry as well. If you sell artwork, comics, toys, etc, this will let you build a history of your releases in it’s own section for people to browse. It will also give you spots to link out to your store, or even outside your store if you want to promote a great review or article.

The second is a module that hosts and displays pictures. We’re calling it Gallery. You can upload JPGs, PNGs, and GIFs, then drag and drop to arrange the order in which you want them presented in your store.

Also don’t forget that since we have full custom html, any module that works with your storefront can be customized. This means that even if you’ve built your store from scratch, modules like History or Gallery can still be utilized.

The photographs from the above gallery example are owned and were taken by Vanessa Josephson.

Modules for Catalog Numbers, Pressing Info & Track Listings

2012-03-24T14:00:00+00:00

We just released three new modules that will make your product listing life easier.

Catalog Numbers

We’ve added a small module that gives you a dedicated field for catalog numbers when creating a product. This number will be displayed automatically on your product page and can also be used for searching inside your dashboard.

Pressing Information

When selling vinyl, pressing information is extremely important. We’ve created a module that gives you a dedicated field for this when creating a product. The info entered will then be displayed automatically on your product page.

Track Listings

And lastly, we created a module that will automatically display the tracks, of a lossless album you’ve uploaded, right on your product page.

The News Module

2012-03-23T14:00:00+00:00

We just released a new module that allows anyone to easily create a news section (blog) in their store. It supports drafts as well as photo uploads and hosting. We also have a simple, easy to use rich text editor that lets you format as you write or edit the post’s HTML directly.

If you have any questions, feel free to drop us a message.

LR Interviews: Tym of Daytrader

2012-03-19T14:00:00+00:00

Hey everyone. Thomas Nassiff here with the next installment of the LR Interview series. This time we have an interview with Tym from the Long Island band Daytrader.

LR: From the release of the 3-song demo to the 5-song EP on Run For Cover, Daytrader obviously made a good amount of noise within the punk and independent community. I know it’s a general question, but for the sake of those unfamiliar with the band and the projects you guys worked on before Daytrader – can we maybe get an overview of the earlier part of the band’s career surrounding that EP release?

TYM: I think we tried to start this band something like seven years ago. For some reason or another we could never find the time or the right lineup. Eventually Gary started jamming with Pat and we had the chemistry to make some songs and a demo happen. Gary had been extremely busy with Crime in Stereo and I was busy with my career, but the response to our first songs was way better than we expected and it just kind of worked out with some things in my life and the demise of CIS that it made sense to make Daytrader our number one priority and really make a go of it. We recorded some songs for an EP with Vince Ratti and went on tour for most of the rest of the year.

I think releasing the EP on Run For Cover was obviously a big boost for you guys when that happened, but to me what makes Daytrader stand out and a big reason for your guys’ success with the EP is how much you guys tour. If I’m not mistaken, you did somewhere around 200 tour dates in 2011, right? That’s pretty crazy – can you take us through the mindset of being on the road that much, being away from home and how that has helped your band get noticed?

I think we talked about trying to do 200 dates in a year. We ended up touring most of the time from before the EP’s release until the end of the summer – at that point it became abundantly clear that we should just buckle down and take the time to write a real record. It was a little draining to do all these DIY tours on a 5-song EP, playing the same small handful of songs every night and all that. We headed home and locked ourselves in a windowless basement in Whitestone, Queens, for six months, writing.

In October, you guys announced a new LP that would be coming out on Rise Records, and Daytrader became part of a pretty enormous-sized tidal wave of punk bands that Rise started signing. For you guys specifically, why was Rise such an intriguing label to work with?

Rise has been interested in helping us make music since we first posted our 3-song demo online. At the time we were not a full time band, and just wanted to put out a record with our friend Jeff [Casazza, Run For Cover Records owner], which was great. As time went on, Rise signed some great rock bands and we became more serious about making music something we did year-round and it was obvious they would be great partners in helping us to do that in our own way. Gary and I actually met Sean [Heydorn, Rise Records label manager]) on a Crime In Stereo tour that I was doing merch for years ago, so we had been friends for a while.It’s been great.

Has being on Rise changed maybe the pressure or expectations around the recording of the LP? How did you think your fan base reacted to the signing?

I don’t think it’s really changed much for the LP. They’ve definitely made our lives easier by helping us make our album the way we want, taking the time we need, working with the right people for both the audio and visual parts of the record, all that. We didn’t really catch any flak for the signing. I think once Hot Water Music signs to a label you’re pretty much in the clear. We let people know that [there are great people at] Rise, who just wanted to help us make the album our way. I don’t think we seem like the kind of people to blow smoke up your ass, so I guess it was taken at face value. Who knows though, people might think we suck now. That’s okay. On the February / March tour we just did, we definitely saw a small influx of people coming out to our shows that had heard about us from Rise one way or another. It’s really cool that the Rise fanbase is open to different types of music and generally seems to be getting into rock and/or punk music as a result of these recent signings.

You guys picked a very interesting producer – Mike Sapone – to work with, in my opinion. How I view Daytrader is that there is a pop accessibility in the songs that makes them easy to listen to, and I can imagine Sapone honing that to a new level. What made you guys want to work with him and how is he helping you make the best record you can?

He definitely has produced some of our favorite records and has been an integral part of the seminal Long Island bands. There were more typical producers to work with for the scene of bands we play with, but we wanted to do something different with our first album, and the Long Island connection just made sense for us. A lot of records that have been coming out in the last few years sound really safe to me and that was definitely not something we were looking to do. Which is not to say that they sound bad, but for better or for worse, we wanted to go in a different direction. As for how it turned out, he helped us make a better record than we thought we could make. Never would have guessed when we put out Last Days of Rome that our LP would sound the way it does.

You mentioned to me a while ago in a casual chat that the direction of the new record was going to be more rock-oriented in a way. Can you describe maybe the differences you’re seeing in Daytrader’s writing and recording for the full-length?

With the 7” and EP we just kind of wrote whatever songs we had and recorded them. Our new songs are much more thought out, and we’ve really been trying to push the boundaries of what Daytrader sounds like, without writing something “rock” or something “experimental” just to do it. Everything was really natural for us. There are some songs and parts on this record that at first you might think are totally bizzarro to be on a Daytrader record, but it all makes sense. We are extremely excited about how it came out, it was a real journey to write and record this LP. I don’t think any of us have ever put this much into a piece of music before.

When can we be expecting the record to drop? And what else does Daytrader have planned for 2012?

We’re shooting for a May release. We just got back from a tour with Man Overboard, Seahaven and Handguns, and we’re going on a short stint with Pentimento in April. Much more touring is being planned for the rest of the year. We’re very excited to go to UK/Europe for the first time.

Thanks very much to Tym for the interview!

Digital Versatility

2012-03-14T14:00:00+00:00

Our goal when developing the new digital download system was to make it the most versatile available. This means we not only had to let you upload any type of file you wanted, but also convert lossless audio into many other formats automatically, let you change ID3 tags without having to upload again, and finally our most challenging feature, make setting up a digital product ridiculously fast. Let’s look at each of these features a little more closely.

Lossless Audio

Uploading a lossless album or single track, and letting us convert it, is a great way to give your customers a wide range of formats to choose from when they redeem their download. We’ll provide your customers with 5 different choices: ALAC, FLAC, MP3-320, MP3-VBR, and AAC-256. And just like all our upload forms, you can select as many files as you want, and we’ll upload as many as 6 at a time for you. We also give you a separate spot to upload all your artwork, track information, tour dates, etc.

Everything Else

Here’s where you can get specific with your digital item. Maybe you have a book, digital magazine or an icon set you’ve just designed that you want to sell, Everything Else is the place for you. You can even upload MP3s if you don’t want to use our Lossless conversion feature. Once again, select as many files as you want and we’ll upload them 6 at a time. And since we only have one upload spot, you can choose an entire album of MP3s, plus artwork, thank yous, tour dates, etc, and upload them in one shot.

Versatility and Control

And lastly, if you’d like to only let your customers download certain types of music files, then you can use our Everything Else digital section and upload a ZIP of your album. For instance, let’s say you wanted to sell the FLAC version of your album, as well as an MP3 version of your album. And you wanted to charge more for the FLAC version. It’s simple, here’s how you do it:

Upload a ZIP of the album in MP3 format to one digital item.
Upload a ZIP of the album in FLAC format to a second digital item.
Attach the digital items to separate variations in the product form.
When your customer goes to select the variation they’d like, they get to choose from the two file types you uploaded.

So, that’s our new digital download system. If you upload lossless audio, we’ll automatically convert it, let you update ID3 tags, and let your customers pick what they want to download. Or, upload anything else and set your digital items to be sold exactly the way you want them to be sold. We think you’re going to love it.

How We Integrate With SoundCloud

2012-03-06T14:00:00+00:00

Streaming albums is an important part of music sales nowadays, and no one does streaming better than SoundCloud. So when we decided to figure out how to let everyone in the world stream and embed their player throughout the internet easily, it was no surprise to many when we went with SoundCloud as our official streaming player, as opposed to designing our own. And not only are they clean and easy to use, but last time I checked, SoundCloud had nearly 10 million users. This means that most people that are going to use Limited Run, have an account with SoundCloud already. Needless to say, it didn’t make any sense for us to force you to get used to a whole new streaming system. But what we did think we could do was figure out a way for you to only have to upload once, and both your store and your SoundCloud account could get updated at the same time. And that’s exactly what we did. Now let’s take a look at how we did it.

1. In our module section you can choose to install the SoundCloud Integration feature. This will immediately send you over to SoundCloud so you can connect your account.

2. Once you’re connected, you can now go into your Digital Items module and choose to upload lossless audio. Make sure to check the boxes below the SoundCloud icon on the tracks you’d like to stream.

3. In the background we’re now converting your lossless audio to a slew of different formats, as well as sending it to SoundCloud and creating a set.

4. Then, when you’re creating your product we give you a little drop down menu that allows you to select the set you’d like to stream. Whether you created it with us, or if it was already in your SoundCloud account.

5. Now just list your product and a SoundCloud player gets automatically dropped into your product page.

It doesn’t get any simpler than that.

How Simple Shipping Works

2012-02-27T14:00:00+00:00

We’ve gotten a bunch of questions asking how the shipping system works, so we thought we’d post something explaining it because it’s changed a little bit since Limited Pressing.

1. You can create a shipping profile, which will allow a store owner to easily add a specific group of polocies to specific products (click thumbnail).

2. Fine tune your profile to fit a product exactly (click thumbnail).

3. Finally, when you create a product, add the profile that fits the variation (click thumbnail).

As you can see, this new shipping system allows a store owner to put a different profile on each variation. This makes it extremely easy to have a single product that encompasses all variations of that product, no matter the weight or difficulty of packing.

Introducing the all new Limited Run!

2012-02-15T14:00:00+00:00

We’ve spent the last 10 months rebuilding the entire platform and are extremely excited to start inviting people to try it out. Along with developing some incredible features, we’ve also christened it with a new name, Limited Run! We wanted a name that embodied what we truly love, which are people who make and sell unique products. Whether it’s music, toys, or even t-shirts, we think the people selling them will feel right at home with us.

Read more about some of new features below or grab an invite now.

Here’s just a few of the features we have on the new platform:

Brand New Digital System

Our new digital system is the best in the business. Upload anything you can dream of and link it to a physical product, or just sell it on it’s own. If you upload lossless audio, we’ll automatically convert it to a bunch of great formats. With the old platform you had to buy downloads prior to selling them. Now, with Limited Run, we’ve developed a way for you to pay only for the digital you sell, and only after you sell it. We’ve also removed the upload cap so you can sell those gigantic FLAC files we all know you llloovvvveeee.

Themes and Custom HTML

With Limited Run, you’ll be able to pick from one of our great themes or create your own totally custom design. Whether you just want a store or an entire website, our theming and custom page system will let you accomplish whatever look you’re trying to achieve.

Free Options Galore

Something that we thought was really important with the new platform was figuring out a way for bands and artists to get setup with an entire site for free. So here’s what we’ve done. We’ve created a free store that allows up to 5 products. We’ve also developed some great free modules like a blog and show listings, that anyone can install. And finally, something we’re extremely proud of, if you want to give away your digital files for free, we won’t charge you to do it. No buying credits, or selling a minimum amount first. Just come in, create a store, and start giving away your music, books, etc. Is it going to cost us a fortune? Yes, but as long as none of those Lady Gaga types sign up, we should be in the clear.

SoundCloud Integration

Since SoundCloud is the best way to stream your music, we decided to make it easy for you to integrate them into your store. When you connect with SoundCloud, we’ll automatically upload your music, manage your sets, and embed music players. It’s the easiest way to use one of the best services on the Internet.

Revamped Payment System

We were using PayPal subscriptions on Limited Pressing. They suck. We know it. You know it. Why do they suck? Well for one reason, you need a credit card attached to your PayPal. And second, if you’re in a band, or you have a small t-shirt company with your friend, someone needs to pay for the store themselves, and then get reimbursed from the group. We decided to toss out PayPal subscriptions and use a system that allows fees to accrue in a balance, and then you pay off that balance after you sell items from your store. And unlike other companies who use this method of payment, your customer never sees us in the transaction. You get paid from your customer, and then using something called chained payments, you automatically send the fees to us, and your customer is none the wiser.

We have a million more incredible features that we’ll be showcasing on our blog, so check back often so we can dazzle you with our tremendously artful descriptions.

Love,
LR

LR Interviews: Rise Records

2011-10-27T14:00:00+00:00

Hello, friends. Happy Fest weekend! Here is an interview with Craig Ericson of Rise Records to celebrate. Love, Thomas.

Rise is having a busy last couple of weeks. You guys put out the Man Overboard self-titled on September 27 and Transit’s record on October 4. This Is Hell is only a week later, on October 11. One release per week is pretty insane! Give us an inside look at what’s been going on with you guys for the last month or so.

Yeah, we’ve been really busy with all of the new releases. But, we can handle it. Our distro is top notch and the Rise team is really efficient and we work smart.

I think these days, a lot of record labels are sort of proceeding with caution. A lot are downsizing and maybe choosing what to release a little more carefully, especially some of the bigger independent labels. Take us through your guys’ outlook when it comes to output, as you’ve been increasing roster size and, like noted above, putting out quite a few records. Rise is - ahem - rising? during a period where lots of labels are doing just the opposite.

We’ve always gone against the grain. We know that word of mouth sells records and spending money on advertising doesn’t necessarily sell records. We’ve worked hard over the years to build a brand that the all-ages music scene can rely on. Whether it’s metalcore or pop-punk, kids can trust that Rise will release great albums from multiple genres.

September and October are particularly busy months for your “WTF” signings from a while back. Sticking to Man Overboard and Transit in particular since they just released albums, how have those signings played out for you and how do you think those bands are promoting the Rise Records name in the scene and amongst new listeners, who previously might not have listened to bands on Rise too much?

I think it’s a win-win. Rise has always had a diverse roster but none of the rock type bands got big and went unnoticed for the most part. I think it’s a little different with Man Overboard and Transit because they had some buzz before I signed them. I didn’t discover those 2 bands.

Another upcoming album is A Loss For Words’ No Sanctuary coming out on October 25, which is a dual release with Velocity Records. Can you first give us some thoughts on the new AL4W record, and then maybe explain for everyone how the whole Velocity imprint works?

I’m really pleased with how the new album turned out. It has all the elements to make it an amazing album. It’s super catchy, honest, earnest and sincere. I can’t express how much I like this band and this album.

Velocity is the Dave Shapiro’s record label. We joined forces last year and Velocity is an official imprint of Rise Records. Basically, Dave finds the bands and we work them as a Rise band. It’s been a great partnership.

Rise just announced the signing of Cheap Girls. How did that signing come about, and what should we expect from them moving forward? Give us some thoughts on their past work and what made them an attractive signing.

I’ve been a fan for a couple of years now and their manager reached out to us. We were very interested and worked out a deal. I really like Ian’s voice and their overall vibe. I think they’ll make a great addition to the roster.

Probably the biggest shocker that Rise pulled out was landing Hot Water Music and getting the rights to put out their upcoming 2012 full-length. I know you said this was a “dream” signing for you (assuming this is Craig), so can you talk about that signing and the excitement for it, and about how maybe this thing has come full circle for you so long after starting the label?

I don’t really know what else to say. It truly is my dream signing. They are my favorite band and the album “Forever And Counting” brought me back to music after a few year hiatus. They are great human beings as well and I couldn’t be more thrilled. I can now die a happy man.

When you guys announced the Cheap Girls signing, you released that info on your Facebook with a little bit of a disclaimer: “Core Rise fans….have some respect and cherish diversity. We can’t sign all screamo bands, okay?? This is what you’ll be listening to when you’re a little older so consider it a gift to you, from Rise. Trash talk and trolling will get you banned, you’ve been warned.” Let’s talk a little bit about the opposite side of the signing of these bands - the perspective of the dubbed “core Rise fan” who listens to metalcore music. What is the message you want to send to these fans, and what have been the most common responses from these fans to the latest additions to your roster?

My message was clear. Have respect for other types of music. Kids that exclusively listen to metalcore can sometimes just automatically hate everything that doesn’t sound like metalcore. I don’t want to stereotype people, but a lot them talk shit. I don’t really like shit talkers, especially if it’s on the Rise site about a Rise band. Common sense, right??

Continuing about metalcore music, a lot of people this is a genre with a pretty short shelf life. Do you see Rise continuing to sign and produce metalcore records, or is this the beginning of a movement to a more punk/pop-punk outlook?

We will continue to sign metalcore bands. We will continue to sign rock bands. We will continue to sign Pop-punk bands. We will continue to metal/thrash bands. We will continue to sign hardcore bands. Get my message??

Punk and pop-punk are genres that have been out of the mainstream for quite a while now. Rise is a pretty big label as far as independents go, with a lot of resources to make things happen. With some of these bands - especially Man Overboard, which happens to have a more “marketable” sound, and might have been on the radio in the earlier parts of the 2000s - do you see them ever getting the chance to be widely known like that again?

I hope so. Though, we don’t do any radio. Not sure it will ever be like it once was. I think it will still be underground with a few artists that go big every once in a blue moon.

Thanks a lot to Craig!

LR Interviews: Sam Vermette, Creator of Shows for iPhone

2011-10-19T14:00:00+00:00

The following interview is with Sam Vermette, the creator of one of our favorite iPhone apps here at Limited Pressing: Shows. Learn more about Shows or download it by visiting the website or iTunes.

Tell us a little about yourself. Where are you from and what do you do?

I’m a 25-year-old, self-taught iOS and web developer living in Montreal. I’ve always been passionate about how people interact with things, so software development appealed to me like the most accessible way to scratch that itch. You just come up with an idea and get to build it out of thin air. It’s nothing short of amazing.

I’ve always been a big preacher of Apple design and that’s kind of how I learned to make things look simple and clean. Studying industrial design at University of Montreal also helped, as I was taught how to better approach design problems and solutions. Looking back, I’m glad I spent those 4 years studying design. With so many apps in the App Store, it has become clear that design is what make apps stand out (it goes without saying that I’m among those who claim ideas by themselves are worthless, execution is what matters).

Tell us about Shows. How does it work?

Shows is your live music companion. It automatically stays in sync with your iPod library and makes it really easy to import artists from your Rdio and Last.fm accounts. From there you usually have all the artists you’re interested in seeing in concert, but you can also add more manually.

By default, Shows will show you concerts in your local area. You can easily offset your location so you know what’s going on at your next travel destination. You can also increase the area radius so that Shows displays concerts from further away. For instance, say you’re in NYC, you can increase the distance slider to view shows from more cities like Boston, Miami, etc.

Location offsetting and area radius are in fact the only 2 settings in Shows. Settings are evil!

Last but not least, Shows sends you push notifications when artists you follow announce a new gig nearby (where nearby is defined by the user-defined location and radius).

Oh and I should probably mention that it’s all powered by Last.fm (although Shows has its own backend, which is the one interacting with Last.fm).

Why did you decide to develop Shows?

In 2009, I was sick of not knowing when specific artists were coming next to Montreal. All the apps out there were showing me *all* local upcoming concerts for artists I didn’t even like. They were terribly designed, slow and had too many useless features (most of them still do). So in the summer of 2009, I decided to make Shows. Version 1.0 was using Apple standard UI and had very rough edges, but it still gained a bit of traction. By the end of that year, I was ashamed by it and didn’t have any more time left to work on it, so I decided to take it off temporarily (I was still in school back then).

Then in October of last year, I had just graduated and decided to rebuild it from complete scratch. When it launched In January 2011, it gained tremendous momentum, so much that I had to momentarily take it down within the first 2 hours. As I kept working on other projects and learning more about design and good coding practices, I once again felt guilty about the version that was in the App Store. I got back from WWDC with a huge list of improvements to be done on the app, which led me to this week’s release of Shows 2.5.

What’s your favorite thing that Shows does?

Push Notifications are probably the feature that’s the most exciting to me. That feeling when you get a push notification about your favorite artists coming to town, it’s quite awesome.

What kind of feedback have you received from Shows users?

It seems unanimous that everyone loves the design effort that went into it; the simplicity, the lack of settings, the very straight-forward display of content. The sliding panels, although non-standard and maybe hard to grasp at first have also become a hit and are kind of Shows’ trademark. The 2.5 update has only been out for a couple of days but Favorites and Artist Sources (which allow you to import music from Rdio and Last.fm) seem pretty popular so far.

The complaint I’ve been hearing the most about Shows is the sometimes inaccurate data. Since Last.fm is all user-generated, erroneous data gets in (like dead artists playing at some place in Brazil) as well as dupes, or missing listings. I don’t have much control over this, and I’m guessing Last.fm has other better things to do than to moderate content (although they do). Some other sites allow artists to post concert listings themselves, therefore making their data set super accurate. It’s the case of Songkick, from whom I’ve been declined an API key because our apps are too similar (I don’t blame them, they have a business to run).

Do you have any plans to develop other music related iPhone applications?

Very much so! I love music and there are a couple other problematics I’d like to tackle with iOS apps. One particular thing that’s been bothering me is album releases — I always find out about them weeks later! That being said, I have a bunch of other ideas in the works, so it might take a while before this one ever sees the light of day.

LR Interviews: Less Than Jake

2011-09-13T14:00:00+00:00

Hi everyone. Thomas Nassiff here, with the second installment of the LP Interviews series. This month, we have an interview with Buddy Schaub of Less Than Jake for you guys. We talk about how LTJ is doing things that really no other bands are doing right now; about how they come up with and execute these unique plans and about the music industry in general. I hope you guys enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed talking to Buddy. Thanks to him and LTJ for taking part in this.

First off, can you introduce yourself and say what you do for Less Than Jake?

I’m Buddy and I play trombone and jump around like a monkey on stage. I also do most of the video projects for the band and am now in the beginnings of handling the ins and outs of our web store.

Most recently, LTJ released the Greetings From Less Than Jake EP, which was received well by critics and fans. Can you talk a little about the EP? How it’s different or similar to your past work? And whether we’ll see a 7” of it in the future?

Working on this record was a nice breath of fresh air for our band in that no one else was involved at all this time around. It’s been a long time since we’ve done a record with no outside involvement at all such as a producer or label schmooks tossing in their opinions here and there. We recorded everything at Roger’s studio (The Moat House) and got done with everything: writing, recording, mixing, and mastering in only a couple of months. I believe the plan is to put this out on vinyl in the very near future as well as get back to the drawing board and start working on another EP.

Less Than Jake also just wrapped up a couple months on the Vans Warped Tour. You guys were probably the most “veteran” band on the tour. What can you say about being one of the older and more established bands on a tour that always includes a lot of up-and-comers?

We’ve actually been running with the older crowd on the Warped Tour the last few times we’ve been on it and have definitely learned the ropes from bands such as NOFX on how to utilize your seniority on the tour. It was a lot like The Godfather movies this year with us playing the role of Don Corleone…

Less Than Jake has always made a point to offer products that are a little out of the norm to its fans, like the TV/EP and past products, such as the cereal box and things of that nature. On Warped Tour, you guys were selling LTJ rolling papers that, if purchased, would also get the customer a download of the EP. What goes into the formation ideas like this?

A lot of these great ideas pop out of Vinnie’s brain, but we do sit around and brainstorm some ideas before tours for new merch goodies. These days people expect to get the songs for free so it’s become really important to make the physical record be worth something to the fans whether it be a cool packaging concept, some sweet colored vinyl or a specialty item that comes with a download.

Let’s talk a little about the live shows you guys have released and the DVD you just put out. Products like these excite fans easily because they aren’t very common. What gave you guys the idea to put all of the shows together in a DVD format, and what is it that makes Less Than Jake so much more apt to try out things that no one else is really doing?

The DVD was kind of a no brainer in this situation. The real genius was the idea of playing all of our records at six shows around Florida and filming and recording the whole thing. It was great for us as a band because it really made us go back and do our homework; we very rarely play some of the songs on those records if at all, so it was really fun and a rejuvenating bonding for us. And on top of that playing them in small venues around our home state was really exciting for our super fans who were essentially the people that bought tickets early enough to get in. What maybe makes us a little different than some bands I think is the conviction we seem to have to actually bring an idea to fruition. Many bands have good ideas, “wouldn’t it be cool if we…” but we take that crucial next 69 steps it takes to actually make the idea a reality.

A while ago, Less Than Jake said that it wouldn’t put out another full-length record. That’s something that goes hand-in-hand with the costs of recording an album and the profits that album goes on to return to the band. Are you guys still planning on sticking by that plan? Will all new Less Than Jake tunes in the future be delivered via EPs?

I don’t know if we want to paint ourselves into a corner and say we’ll never do something again, but these days an EP is plenty for people to digest. It trims the fat so to speak. Putting out 5 quality songs is better than 10 mediocre songs. And with our schedules and Roger’s studio, going in to bust out 5 songs at a time keeps the frequency of music into the fan’s hands at a peak.

Continuing on the same track, the band also refused to make Greetings available on iTunes. If I remember correctly, I think a Facebook status once said that you “can’t afford to let iTunes take 30 percent.” What can you say about iTunes, acting as essentially the world’s largest record label, and the future of not only Less Than Jake’s releases on iTunes, but your thoughts on what the future for digital music looks like in general?

Well, this is true for almost all aspects of being in a band. The days of letting someone else do the work for your band are coming to a close. Everyone always wants a piece of the pie, but the pie keeps getting smaller and the ability to take charge of your band is getting easier by the second through technology.

While we’re on a broader plane, let’s talk a little about record labels. Less Than Jake has its own label, Sleep It Off, where you guys put out your own releases. Can you guys ever foresee a situation where you sign to a traditional label again? Is the traditional label format even worth it for bands anymore?

Going to a major label these days will 99 out of 100 times mean signing a 360 deal which means they take a piece of EVERYTHING. The only reason to do this as a band is if you are young, good looking, and are sure you’re going to be the biggest thing since sliced bread. We’re pretty sure we are no longer any of these things.
We can do pretty much anything an Indie label can do on our own, so I don’t foresee us breaking the new mold we’ve made for ourselves any time soon.

Now let’s narrow it down a little. Who runs your webstore? Do you do it yourselves or does someone distribute stuff for you?

We currently have our merch in a couple of different places. MerchDirect.com has a wide array of stuff from our band on sale at their site and they handle all of that with the designs that we provide. But just this past summer we set up an account with LimitedPressing, which we are currently handling all ourselves, the posting of items to the store, stocking and inventory of the merchandise and shipping the products themselves. From the moment someone orders something, the responsibility of it getting there relies on us. It’s all part of our plan to put all things LTJ back under one umbrella.

What are some plans for the future? You guys have some time off before FEST in late October, and I believe the Orlando Calling festival is in Orlando? What’s the band planning for the time off?

We are in the midst of some new members to the Less Than Jake family arriving at our doorstep via stork, and while we’re figuring out how that whole world works, we will also be writing and recording some new material, getting together more items for our web store, and planning for the big year we have ahead of us. Next year Less Than Jake turns 20!!!

Anything else you would like to add?

Your Mother!