The Release Wave shop is open. There's merch for sale, starting with a hat, and the shop is linked from the footer of the site.
I've wanted this for a while. The site is about releases, and a shop is a natural way to put something physical next to them. Turning it on was the easy part. What I cared about more was what happens when someone wants their money back.
The items are print-on-demand, so there's a second party involved once an order goes through. A refund on my side used to mean a second job: go cancel the print order, hope I got there in time, and make sure the two records agreed. That's exactly the sort of chore I forget, and then I'm stuck sorting out a mess.
Now a refund marks the order as refunded and cancels the print order automatically, as long as it hasn't gone to print yet. If it already has, I get an email telling me what to do. I also made sure a later message from the print side can't flip an order back to the wrong status.
I checked the shop pages while logged out, on desktop and on a phone, before calling it live. I also wrote down a short refund checklist for myself, so the next one isn't a puzzle.
What's next
I'm working on short video reels built from a release's "for fans of" tags. The first frame is a full collage of all the tags, so it works as a cover image on its own. It's close, but I still need to render it with a real track instead of placeholders.