A pro beat store seems like a brilliant investment surface level.

You're given website with our name as the URL, you're given a theme and you’re able to sell all of our beats easily without changing much if you are already set up on the platform. It’s easy and quick to do.

I’m here to tell you the other side of that story. What you exchange for this easy setup and maintenance is access to some fundamental steps to making a high converting beat store.

Ease of use/Branding

When potential customers view our website, details matter. The theme, the images, testimonials, placement and all of these other things are factors that will affect whether they will stay on the site or leave.

In other words:

Make your website hard to understand and the user will leave, make it easy and the user will stay.

One might ask where the problem is here, well a pro beat store website does not allow for full control of our site. Fonts are restricted, colours are restricted too. No background images that may be a little on the creative side.

This leaves us with little working room to actually brand ourselves and give a good impression to our potential customers.

The effect of this can be low retention, sales and people who end up leaving before they see what we have to offer.

Another problem is the fact we’re unable to optimise.

I won’t get into the real nerdy stuff but with a custom website we’re able to reduce loading times down to milliseconds given the correct adjustments. Google notes that as a page's load time goes from one second to five seconds, the probability of users turning away from the page to view other sites increases by 90%. - article

While that is a big loss I would also like to say I'm sure there are plenty of 'pro beat pages' out there that are capable of keeping up, but the accessibility of such speeds comes much more easily from the get go with a custom website. Please keep that in mind!

Marketing

One of the most common moves we’ll see on any website that’s looking to build an audience is a lead magnet.

You know those sites that have a popup with a free offer in exchange for your email? That’s a lead magnet.

Here’s an example:

Source: 10 Lead Magnets - Venture Harbour

They’re used to starting another stream of communication with our customers, building rapport and (or) offering value.

On pro beat store pages this is actually a feature! The downside to this feature is that it only works for email marketing and nothing else, and the ways we can employ this are limited too, on some beat store pages just a discount code may be restricted. That means no giveaways either.

SEO

Moving onto SEO.

Search Engine Optimisation or SEO is the practice in which we get websites to the front pages of certain search engines by adding extra data (metadata) to our websites.

In essence, it allows us to show up on searches for ‘producer in {enter location}’, ‘{enter name} type beats’, etc.

THIS IS NOT POSSIBLE WITH A PRO BEAT STORE.

Regardless of how hard we try, if we’re using a pro beat store it will only come up if someone specifically searches for it or clicks on a link. This is (again) due to the lack of customisation given to us by these sites.

SEO when done correctly can get us clients who previously would have never heard of us.

Communication

Let’s say someone wants to buy one of our beats. They’re on the fence though because they don’t know if the producer tag is removed on purchase.

In order to clear up confusion, most if not all producers have a FAQ page, pro beat stores have some templates but again they’re not fully customisable, giving a rigid and less appealing overall look to them, the same goes for contact information, overall we don’t get to present the information the way we would exactly want to.