Are you a music producer or DJ looking for how to sell beats on Shopify?
You are in luck!
This article covers everything you need to know and do from start to finish. Without further ado, let’s dive in.
What is Shopify?
Shopify is a fully-hosted eCommerce platform that allows you to build and manage an online store without any core coding. The platform runs on a web browser—meaning you can access it from anywhere in the world as far as you can connect to the internet.
You also don’t have to download any software or pay for hosting since it’s a ‘fully-hosted’ platform. Shopify comes with tons of features and resources—depending on your plan (more on that later).
But with any Shopify plan, you can sell an unlimited amount of products (digital and physical) and track your sales.
Can You Sell Beats on Shopify
Absolutely Yes! As a Dj or beat maker, Shopify allows you to sell your beats to your customers easily. The best part is that you can manage all the activities (store, payment, products, etc) from your stores’ backend without external support.
How to Sell Beats on Shopify in 8 Steps
Of course, you can sell anything on Shopify — including beats. So, if you are a beat maker or a music producer and need to make money on Shopify selling beats, here are the 8 simple steps to get started.
- Sign Up with Shopify
- Create Vital Pages for your Store
- Pick a Theme and Customize your Online Store (theme store)
- Add your Products to your Store
- Install the Digital Download or SendOwl App
- Choose Payment Gateways
- Add a Custom Domain
- Launch your Online Store
1. Sign Up with Shopify
As a newcomer, the first step is the sign up for Shopify’s free trial. Just like every other premium platform, Shopify’s free trial helps you decide if the right platform for you. If it isn’t, you can always withdraw your card details and exit for a better alternative.
Head over to Shopify’s official website and fill in your email address. Hit the “start free trial” button. Shopify might ask you to pick a unique store name.
If you are blank, you can skip that stage and think of something later. But when you do, your store name will be a part of your temporary domain name (which you can change, but for a small price).
Furthermore, you will need to fill in more details like name, contact, address, and country. You may also be asked questions about your product; do well to answer them accurately. But if you are not yet ready to create your store, you can select “I’m just playing around”.
If you are not playing around, haha, go on to click “I’m done.”
2. Create Vital Pages for your Store
Next, you will have to create certain important pages for your store. These pages are just inevitable and they help your customers know what you are offering them. And again, it helps customers know more about your business.
You should also look into creating the following pages:
Contact Page: Not all customers want just to purchase your products and hit the door. There is still a truckload of reasons they might want to check out your contact page. One solid reason why a “Contact Us” page is important is that it is like a doorway that connects you with your customers.
FAQ Page: I’m sure you wouldn’t want your email filled with even the easiest questions a toddler could answer (oops, that must have been too hyperbolic). So, if you have a well-detailed FAQ page, you have won on the part of pushing away simple questions. So customers will only contact you for solid reasons instead of random questions.
About Page: As it sounds, it’s a page you tell your customers exactly what your business is about. You can also state your business vision and mission. If you want to be fanciful, you could instead say, “Our Story,” “What we do”, or “Know Us” — my friend, just get creative!
Policy Pages: Policy pages include terms of service, return policy, privacy policy, shipping policy, etc. The pages you will need would depend on your business model. For instance, you don’t need a refund policy page to sell beats online since you won’t be accepting returns.
You can create most of these pages under Online Store > Pages. If you don’t know how to create a policy page, there are already-designed templates you can import so you don’t have to build yours from scratch.
3. Pick a Theme and Customize your Online Store
How your store appears is determined by what template or theme you use. Of course, who wouldn’t want to have an attractive and responsive store that lets customers have a smooth experience?
Shopify provides a ton of interesting themes that make your site attractive and responsive to any device.
To select a theme, head over to Shopify’s theme store. There, you will find tons of themes that are free and paid. Paid themes usually range from about $0 – $350.
Remember to be careful to choose the theme that you like and also one that fits your business. This is because if you choose a paid theme and end up not liking it, you may need to pay for another one.
Since you want to sell beats on your Shopify store, just any nice theme should work fine. You might even find a free theme you will like.
After installing your theme, you can further customize it to suit your needs. To do that, head over to “themes”, on your admin page, click on “customize” and toggle a few theme settings until you like what you see. Remember, you can always change your theme settings or the entire theme later on.
When it comes to customizing your theme, here are the basic settings you will definitely be able to play with:
- Design your Homepage
- Upload logos
- Font choices
- Color schemes
- Upload slides to a homepage carousel
- Add related item functionality to product pages
- Choose how many items appear on each line of the collection pages
Most themes are unique and come with a lot of functionalities that allow you to quickly set up your store without any technical skills. So, once you play around with your theme, you will understand how it works best and know what settings fit your style best.
So go ahead; play around with shades of colors, change your typography, and rearrange graphical structures. Remember, simplicity is sexy, too — don’t get stuck with customizing your store. I swear, it’s a never-ending task. You can always come back later to tweak your store when you have an idea.
4. Add Products to your Store
The next step is adding your beats to your store. To do that, while on your admin panel, go to “Products,” then hit the green “Add a product” button in the middle of the page. In the product title, you are expected to give a name to your product, which in this case, is your beat.
For example, if the beat you want to add is the instrumental of Drake’s song called God’s Plan, you just need to title it as that; God’s Plan Instrumental by Drake.
The product description should be a block of text which describes the product (your beat) better. Don’t write a story, a paragraph or two will do.
Remember that selling beats don’t require you to make shipping, take care of inventory, and other related stuff like that. You can skip that part.
After adding the product title and description, you need to add the product image. Of course, beats are audio and don’t need visuals to describe them. But to fulfill all righteousness, it is best you add a self-designed cover image that describes your beat.
In the Shipping part, uncheck “This is a physical product“, and save.
The next step is where you will add the beats you want your customers to download after making their purchases.
5. Install the Digital Download or SendOwl App
Now you have made it to stage 5 where you will deliver your beats to those who have purchased them.
To give customers access to download their digital files after purchasing them, you need to install the free Digital Downloads app from the Shopify App Store. This app provides a download link for customers after they make a payment on your store.
After downloading and installing this app, you can watch the video below to see how to add your beats to your store or read the guide here:
If you are done with that part, the next thing to do is decide if you want your customers to have access to the download links via their emails or on the checkout page.
If you choose to send your download links via email, the download link will be sent to their email addresses. And if you decide to make it available on the checkout page, it means they will see the download link immediately after they finalize their payment.
You can also choose to activate both. Whatever works best for you!
If you are looking for an alternative to Shopify’s Digital Download App, SendOwl is a great alternative. It works exactly like the Digital Download App on Shopify but it offers more features and lets you do more tweaking.
However, everything seems to have a con, SendOwl isn’t free! Duh!
Deciding between both of these apps is easy. If you want access to extra customizations and have the money to pay for it, choosing SendOwl over Shopify’s Digital Download App would be worth it. If not, Shopify’s Digital Download App works just fine.
6. Choose Payment Gateways
Payments gateways (Settings > Payments) allow you to accept payment in different ways. You can use Shopify’s internal payment gateway and/or set up more payment gateways among the over 100+ payment methods supported by Shopify.
Using Shopify’s built-in payment method saves you from paying any transaction fee per sale. For all the other payment modes that Shopify supports (PayPal, Stripe, etc.), you will need to pay a transaction fee for each sale that you make.
Most stores that sell digital products online allow multiple payment methods. This is because most people won’t be comfortable releasing their credit card details. In other words, providing your customers with more than one payment gateway to make payments can be comforting.
For everything related to Payment settings, currency, transaction fees, etc., you can customize them in Settings > Payments.
7. Add a Custom Domain
This is stage 7, where you need to add a custom domain name. Remember you picked a store name beforehand. That was a store name, not a domain name. A domain name is what appears in the address bar or is what customers would type in their browser’s access bar when wanting to visit your store.
Having a custom domain name adds some level of professionalism to your store. Plus, it also makes it credible and unique. An example of a domain name is yourstorename.com.
To add a custom domain name, you have two options:
- Buy a domain name from Shopify
- Buy a domain name from a third-party
If you choose to buy a domain name from Shopify, your domain will be automatically connected to your store. But if you purchase your domain from a third party like GoDaddy or Hostgator, you will need to manually connect it to Shopify — which can be rocket science for beginners.
Give or take, purchasing a domain name usually costs between $9 – $14 per year. To get a domain, navigate to Online Store > Domains to add and manage your domains.
Oh, I didn’t mention earlier that you need to think of a unique domain name for your shop. While thinking of the perfect domain name for your store, it is ideal to think of something that represents your brand.
For example, merely looking at car45.com, you can tell that the site deals with cars.
But if you are blank, no problem. There are also lots of sites that have names that do not correlate with what they sell. For example, amazon.com.
8. Launch your Online Store
We are finally here! This last step is all about launching your store and making it go live. Since you are going to be selling beats on Shopify, you can skip other settings like shipping and taxes.
But keep in mind that in some countries, taxes are applied to digital products too. So, make sure you are on the right part before launching your store.
To make your store go live and give customers access to start purchasing your beats, you need to disable the password protection under Online Store > Preferences. After that, you can now start selling your beats.
Remember, whenever you have sparks of ideas, you can always go back to customizing your store and adjusting your settings.
How Much Does Shopify Cost Per Month?
Shopify offers various recurring subscription plans to accommodate various budgets. There are five monthly plans to explore:
- Shopify Lite — $9 per month
- Basic Shopify — $29 per month
- Shopify — $79 per month
- Advanced Shopify — $299 per month
- Shopify Plus — pricing varies depending on requirements (but fees are usually around $2000 per month). It’s also called the Shopify Enterprise plan.
Although there are no giant differences in the plans,, of course, the higher the plan, the more you get. These are the notable differences between the plans:
- Each plan has its limitation on the number of users that can access your account (2, 5, and 15 staff are allowed on the basic, Shopify, and advanced Shopify, respectively).
- Only users in the ‘Basic plan’ and higher plans are entitled to phone support.
- The ‘Shopify Lite’ ($9) doesn’t allow you to build a standalone online store. Instead, it enables you to sell your beats on an existing website or a Facebook shop by adding the ‘Shopify Buy’ button.
- The ‘Basic Shopify plan’ ($29) is suitable for users that want to create an online store on a low budget, with limited features, and it also attracts a transaction fee of 2% per sale.
- The ‘Shopify plan’ ($79) is the most popular among Shopify merchants. It has many great features for running a successful online store, and it attracts a lower transaction fee of 1% per sale.
- The ‘Advanced Shopify plan’ ($229) is most popular among established stores making solid sales. It has all the features merchants need to skyrocket their business to the moon while incurring only a 0.5% transaction fee per sale.
- The ‘Shopify Plus’ plan ($2000+) is targeted at big companies and corporations that are making a great number of monthly sales. It’s surely not designed for individuals (except if your store is doing huge numbers of sales per month). It attracts no transaction fee per sale.
With the above information, I should say it is ideal that you pick a plan that fits your goal and budget, especially. For instance, if you want to hire only 2 staff to oversee your store’s affairs, you will do well with the ‘Basic Shopify plan’ rather than the ‘Advanced plan’ which can seem too much.
Conclusion
If you’ve been wondering how to sell beats on Shopify, I believe this article will give you a head start.
Follow the steps one after the other. The sweet thing here is that you can get started for free without paying a dime. Start your Shopify free trial here.
Related:
