Monkrat is a digital download shopping cart for all those artistic types wot need to sell music tracks, videos, shareware programs, ebooks and the like. It’s super quick and easy to set up (no geek needed at all) and works exactly like a standard shopping cart, except that the confirmation email provides a download link and for security purposes the file is stored on their service rather than your own servers. It’s a nice idea and done well, but the £199.00 a year minimum fee may be a little too much for smaller sites which sell only a few items a decade.
[Update: Ahh, such is the power of the Ferret that the good folk at Monkrat have reduced prices for small business users following our review. Emma from their PR company tells me that a Starter Pack has been introduced for just £49.00 a year, while the Standard Package is now £99.00 for 250 MB of product storage. This makes it a much better deal all round peeps. Nice one!]
How does the system take credit card payments and how do I get paid? Your plugin is designed to use PayPal for taking payments this will allow both PayPal payments and all major credit cards. All payments taken will be deposited into your PayPal account (required) we recommend a Pay Pal Pro Account for a more professional look and feel, however it will work fine with Pay Pal Standard. What contract lengths do you offer? All contracts are 12 months in length. If you cancel within 14 days of signup there will be no cancellation fees, after this a payment of 30% of the yearly amount of the plan you have chosen will be due.
I’m sorry but this is not all that it appears. Firstly, the “100% revenue” described on their site that you get isn’t correct. Paypal take a cut (quite a big cut on single tracks), add to that the starter fee of �49 and you’re out of pocket for quite some time! You CANNOT use standard paypal as is described above, because after you take 3 paypal credit or debit card payments you HAVE to change to a premier account at paypal. After which I found everything I did got charged at paypal rates! (even trading on other sites! and using paypal elsewhere) The money is paid into your paypal account (standard account) which you then have to transfer and which again costs money. Just be careful and go into this with your eyes open. Yes is straightforward to set up, but there is a price tag.
Mm..thanks for the feedback Cameron. Very interesting and relevant. I tend to forget just how demanding Paypal can be with things like this…