By now you've no doubt noticed the new merchant links appearing on the site: Amazon, eBay, and gemm.com. I'm sure everyone knows Amazon and eBay; not the most underground stores, to be sure, but they do have a huge selection of metal albums. Gemm.com is a marketplace-type site, that sellers from around the world can use to sell stuff online without having to maintain a webstore. They also have quite a few metal releases, including some very rare ones, though the prices do vary in affordability.

We've had a few requests from other stores wanting to be featured on the site, so I'll give a few notes about that here. The main thing is that you will need to have an affiliation program set up in order to have your store appear in our merchant links on the bands and releases pages. This would include tracking of sales coming from this site, a payment system, and hopefully some reporting features. Not everyone has the means to develop that, so there are companies specialized in the matter that can save you most of the work by integrating their software on your site. A big one I know of is Commission Junction; eBay uses them, along with a lot of other stores, though I'm not sure what their terms are. There are a lot more out there too, though remember that your software must allow payments to Canada (payments in USD is fine, even preferred since we pay our host in USD): some of them require an European bank account, for example, so that wouldn't work.

Feedback on this new feature has generally been positive, and stats indicate it is very popular, but in case anyone really can't stand those links I just added an option to the profile page to hide them when you're logged in.

You might notice a new section on some band pages entitled "buy their stuff" (just under the additional notes). This section will contain, as you might expect, links to sites selling merchandise related to the band in question. How is this different from the merch links users can already add? Well, these links will be to sites running affiliate programs that we are members of, i.e. we will be getting a cut on each sale referred from here. Is this selling out? We hope it is actually a useful feature for people wanting to buy albums and merchandise from their favorite bands, and an easily ignored one for the others. We will definitely keep the links discreet and far less obnoxious than banners, pop-ups and the like. The goal with this is mainly to get funds to pay hosting costs and especially to get a new powerful server for the still upcoming MA version 2 (yes, that is still seriously being worked on; no, I can't give you a release date). Thank you very much to everyone who donated money to us, but as we rather expected from the start, the donations slowed down to a tiny trickle after the first month and this is unfortunately not reliable enough to base monthly expenses on.

We will be adding other stores in the coming weeks and months, but for now we started with just one, namely fearshop.com. They sell mainly metal shirts (and a few CDs and DVDs), for a small variety of bands of different genres and popularity, from Iron Maiden to Nattefrost. They also have a bunch of horror movie t-shirts, if anyone's interested.

Enjoy.