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Hey kids

Just throwing this out there, wondering if anyone wants to lend a hand

I'm gonna be starting an online store (and maybe eventually retail too) for selling CDs, DVDs, Blu Ray, etc.. all geared toward rock & heavy metal. I'll also be carrying books and may get into video games later on.

Anyway I'm looking for some ideas for a catchy name for my online store. The name has to work as a domain name for a website, so it can't be like "My Awesome Metal Shop" .. a lot of the catchy, short descriptive names have all been taken long ago. I'd love it if I could just be metalshop.com .. oh well.

I was thinking of names like Cyber Dog or Angry Dog (yeah, I like dogs) so short, fun names could work.

Just wondering if anyone has any good ideas

How about Necrocalypse- ressurecting your heavy metal favorites since 2010!

Chrome Canine.

Heavy Dog (Big Dog already taken).

I'll be back 4 moar.

To keep the dog theme:

"Hound Releases"?

I want to stay away from totally metal sounding names, since metal won't be the only thing I sell. So thats when I thought of angry dog. it would have to be angry-dog.net sine that's all that's available. The tagline could be something like "music with an attitude". Heavy dog could work too. Doesn't have to have a dog theme, I just thought those 2 names sounded a little catchy, but I don't want people thinking I'm a pet store

Anyway I'll be selling normal rock stuff right next to black metal and mixed in with hair bands and grunge. Even though I want the place to be known as where to go to get all the obscure and hard to find metal from 20+ years ago if that's you're thing.

plus if it's successful I may branch out into regular top 40 stuff, country, jazz, whatever. I just want to focus on rock and metal to start with because it's what I know so it'll be easier to support, and if I list everything under the sun it'll be a data entry night-terror. Distributors have spreadsheets that can be imported into ecommerce software, but it's all plain text so I still gotta go back and edit every single product, add photos, do the SEO stuff... yuck! Gonna take a year to build :(

http://e107.org/news.php

Try looking at this, I used it last year during my IT course and it was alright. Although when I found it today to show you I found out that they have recently had hacking issues, which seem to be mostly resolved now. Basically it's software that creates a website for you integrating with MySQL to keep track of it. The point of it really is that it gives you an alright starting point to work from.

It pretty much starts off as a forum site as well.

I'm liking the Necrocalypse as it's catchy and goes with your name.
As for name ideas, I don't really have any..
Dog Music? Canine Classics? Chrome Music? Chrome Tone? Metallic Sound? Cyber Bark?
Yeah pretty bad

I'm gonna be using an ecommerce company that has all the software and stuff built and ready to go, called BigCommerce.com .. They have all kinds of templates that are easy to customize for the noobs, so I'm gonna be starting with one of their templates and then redesigning it. I wanted to use a company like that for security and also so that I won't have to worry about the back end. I'm a web designer but not a programmer.

My brother and I frequently poke fun at websites that have random animal names. We've joked about making Blogosaurus, CD-Zebra and Hobby-Platypus. I think it makes you look a little less professional personally, but I'm also a bit picky when it comes to web design.

The GWARHammer

I agree about the less professional sound, but I think that also goes with your target market or the products you offer. Selling fun things (like music or games) can get away with that, IMO. If I was selling furniture or plumbing services or something like that, I'd want to come off as professional, but I think a heavy metal shop could get away with a more fun sounding name. Also goes with how people will perceive your company and when it comes to such a niche market, i think you can get away with a more laid back approach as long as your website is professionally done and you build your business around a thriving community.

But then, Yahoo, Amazon, Google, Hulu ... they're all big boys with fun or at least unconventional names.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Gwarhammer.. hehe .. actually, at 1 point I was gonna make a WFB army called the gwarhammers that had character models converted to look like the folks in the band, with the leader riding a wyvern named Gor Gor

this just popped in my head.. how about metal-ward.com ? ya know, like mental ward, but without the N?

I could buy the domain without the hyphen for the low price of $5000....

yeh or metalists instead of mentalists. Metaly Handicapped. Scrapmetal. Metallurgy.

Been chatting with the GF about it, and we came up with Bleeding Ear

I could do bleeding-ear.com, or bleedingearmusic.com .. I ether need the hyphen in the name since some dumb domain buyer from china has regular bleedingear.com :( or I can add music to the end of the name, I think I prefer bleeding-ear, but I'm worried people will forget to add the -, so bleedingearmusic would be easier to remember.. hmmm...

Just out of curiosity, what are you going to do to distinguish yourself from Amazon?

e: That is, why would I prefer to shop with you rather than with they?

Because I'm more metal than them!

Plan is to just be a place that caters to the rock & metal crowd. I'll be carrying everything I can for different bands.. like, not just CDs but shirts, concert videos, guitar/music books for different bands, that sort of thing. I know I won't be able to compete with amazon on price in many cases (for the popular stuff anyway) so I just wanna build the place as a haven for metal folks to find what they need.

However, I will most likely be cross-selling on ebay, amazon, etc after I get everything set up.

Why not bleedingearstudio/bleedingearstudios/bleedingear_studio/bleedingears_tudios/bleedingear-studio/bleeding-ear-studio?

Necros wrote:this just popped in my head.. how about metal-ward.com ? ya know, like mental ward, but without the N?

I could buy the domain without the hyphen for the low price of $5000....

I like metal-ward. But here's a name I came up with (dont' know if it's any good though) "Hammer-Head".

Ore Music Studeos. Ore, as in metal Ore

MetalBottom, For all your Rock bottom metalic addictions.

Grumpy-old-Neighbor-Studios. TURN DOWN THAT RACKET, YA DANG KIDS!

hehe I went ahead and set it up as http://www.bleeding-ear.com

Added a few products to test the cart software. I only have to add about 11,000 more :( Gonna be totally redesigning the layout of the site too, but I wanna make sure everything works first.

At least I can import all the product info from my distributer spreadsheets, that will save time but I'll still have to go in and edit every single one to add photos and stuff.

Ooh, I like it. That's a store I'd buy from.

I thought that 'Release the Sounds' could be pretty good.
It already exists but just as a pretty crappy holding page. Have a word with the owner.

Edit: Just finished reading the thread. Best of luck with the new venture.

So I got my site's design mostly done, just a few tweaks still to do here and there. I have about 10,000 products listed, I just imported the raw data for everything from my distributors, and then I have to go back into each product 1 by 1 and add extra into and pictures. I did about 700 or so so far. Gonna focus on the more popular stuff first, but it will take a good year or so to get everything updated. And I can focus on adding the new stuff and making it look good. About the only thing left to do is get a credit card merchant account so I can accept cards myself, but for now I have paypal going. I will keep paypal anyway though in case folks want to use that.

Anyway just wondering what you guys think of the design and stuff. Would you buy music from a site like this?

http://www.bleeding-ear.com/

It's not too bad at all. The only thing I could really put my finger on is that metal background image. It seems a bit out of place up there at the top, uniformly taking up a huge chunk of the screen and then just fading away. Could you make it only do that for the top of your content and leave the two sides black?

I was thinking that too. I'm feeling like the site is too dark .. which might be great for a death metal guy but I do want to eventually expand into other types of music. I might switch it over to more of a light tan color overall

How about the Necropolis, or Necrosales?

Metalmart? Actually that name is kinda rubbish. Bleeding ear is a lot better. great site!

Necros wrote:So I got my site's design mostly done, just a few tweaks still to do here and there. I have about 10,000 products listed, I just imported the raw data for everything from my distributors, and then I have to go back into each product 1 by 1 and add extra into and pictures. I did about 700 or so so far. Gonna focus on the more popular stuff first, but it will take a good year or so to get everything updated. And I can focus on adding the new stuff and making it look good. About the only thing left to do is get a credit card merchant account so I can accept cards myself, but for now I have paypal going. I will keep paypal anyway though in case folks want to use that.

Anyway just wondering what you guys think of the design and stuff. Would you buy music from a site like this?

http://www.bleeding-ear.com/

Holy gak you literally have everything (at least for Cd's), well except for images it needs more images, yes it looks like a good site. Just one question will the CD's you sell does some of that money go to the artist or is all to you because there's some

obscure artists on there and I would feel bad about making a purchase if they aren't making any money from it.

Very nice, you have a high contrast between background and content which is good.

No mystery meat navigation also good.

The page is a just a tad bright in my opinion, maybe a darker shade of tan.

Navigation seems to be working quite well, no bugs that i have seen

The only complaint I have navigation wise is personally I don't like that the add to cart button directing you away from you current page.

No over use of images which is in my opinion a good thing

thanks

As far as bands go, everything listed on my site is available through my distributors who get their stuff directly from the record labels. So yeah, I would hope the bands are getting paid

for images, it's going to take me about a year (really) to get everything updated. Basically, I started with a mega huge list of artists and albums, and I imported that into my ecommerce software and that created a list of products, but I still have to go into each and every product separately to add descriptions, images, track listing, etc. I can also embed youtube videos too which is cool I can update about 40-50 a night before my mouse hand wants to fall off. So it's just gonna take a while. Plus, there's also usually 50+ new items to add every week between new releases, reissues, etc.

For the design, I wanted to keep it clean and easy to find what you want. I'll still be doing a lot of tweaks here and there to make it more "metal". I should be getting my credit card merchant account set up this week so it will make ordering a lot smoother instead of having to use paypal.

I also plan to set up coming soon lists and have pre orders with discounts once I get that going. Only thing is my distributors don't say what's coming soon till like a week or 2 away (they learned from GW I guess) so I have to dig around the web to find release dates and new stuff ahead of time.

Necros wrote:thanks

As far as bands go, everything listed on my site is available through my distributors who get their stuff directly from the record labels. So yeah, I would hope the bands are getting paid

for images, it's going to take me about a year (really) to get everything updated. Basically, I started with a mega huge list of artists and albums, and I imported that into my ecommerce software and that created a list of products, but I still have to go into each and every product separately to add descriptions, images, track listing, etc. I can also embed youtube videos too which is cool I can update about 40-50 a night before my mouse hand wants to fall off. So it's just gonna take a while. Plus, there's also usually 50+ new items to add every week between new releases, reissues, etc.

For the design, I wanted to keep it clean and easy to find what you want. I'll still be doing a lot of tweaks here and there to make it more "metal". I should be getting my credit card merchant account set up this week so it will make ordering a lot smoother instead of having to use paypal.

I also plan to set up coming soon lists and have pre orders with discounts once I get that going. Only thing is my distributors don't say what's coming soon till like a week or 2 away (they learned from GW I guess) so I have to dig around the web to find release dates and new stuff ahead of time.

You should Make the words "Bleeding-Ear" in red otherwise it doesn't seem like it's so bloody plus red as colour is the most eye-catching (keep the smaller print white though). Also if you want it to look more "metal" give it a black or metallic

background. Add a link and info to the store site in your sig, to bring more awareness.

To bad you are not doing at wargaming store because I had the best name picked out:

The best little war house in Texas.