If you have a passion for music and an online music store, you can earn extra money by selling music online without any upfront costs. With the popularity of music industry, songwriters, composers, singers and music producers often seek for the best solution to sell their art. Fortunately, it can be sold online in the form of digital form like MP3, MP4, MKV, AVI, AAC, AMR and so on.

In this article, we’ll show how to start an online music store with Dokan. After reading this article, you will learn how to sell music online successfully.

Online Music Store

Online music store relates to a website or online service that allows you to browse through and buy music from many genres and artists. Most online music stores allow the customer to listen sample songs, and buy both single songs or full albums. Some are based on subscription services, and others offer one-time purchases. Audio streaming services are also be available for a small subscription fee.

History of Online Music Store

The first online music store, the Internet Underground Music Archive was started in 1993, allowing users to download various songs. In 1998, Ritmoteca.com was launched, allowing visitors to search through over 300,000 songs using a catalog with a jukebox style interface. Visitors could then buy any song for $.99 or a full album for $9.99. Since then, many online music store websites have been launched, some of them are focusing on only music and others offering other media and entertainment products. Some of the most well-known include Rhapsody, eMusic, Amazon, and the iTunes store. Unlike file sharing through the use of peer-to-peer networks and some other methods, obtaining a copyrighted song from an online music store is entirely legal.

How to Create Online Music Store

The step-by-step procedure of creating an online music store is very simple and ease. Here’s the steps:

Step 1: Buy a Domain Name and Web Hosting

These two are the most important and fundamental things that you need to get started with. Unlike a brick and mortar store, every online store requires a name which is known as domain name and a digital form of storage which is known as web hosting. This is where you will keep everything including all files of your website.

To establish a trustworthy online store, you should also require an SSL certificate for your website. Customers often tend to avoid websites lacking of SSL certificates.

Step 2: Install WordPress on Your Web Hosting

The easiest way to install WordPress is to just pick a host that does it free or automatically for you. Nowadays, many WordPress-specific hosts will let you choose to have pre-installed WordPress.

Here are a few recommended hosts that offer pre-install WordPress for you:

• Bluehost – affordable and comes with pre-installed WordPress.
• SiteGround – has tons of WordPress service marketplace-specific features that make your life easier.

For further installation details Read.

Step 3: Install WooCommerce

If you are WordPress regular user, you can easily install WooCommerce to your WordPress site.

Just logon to your WordPress site, then go to plugins menu and in the search box type WooCommerce, once found click on Install now and then activate.

Step 4: Install Dokan

WooCommerce plugin creates only single store for your website. To build a marketplace you require multi-vendor plugin.

Dokan multi-vendor plugin will give you the option to make a complete multi-vendor online marketplace of your own. 

To activate Dokan you have to follow a similar installation and activation process just like WooCommerce plugin. 

Here is the simple video of step by step guide to install Dokan.

Step 5: Install an Appropriate Theme for Dokan

There are thousands of free themes available in the market, but it is better to install a paid one. The reason to install paid themes is, they are usually rich in features and look more professional than the free ones. Moreover, you will get continuous support for any technical issues.

However, during the beginning stage you can try out the free themes to avoid budget over-run. Later on, when your website will get traffic to your store then you can replace the free theme with a paid one. Dokan is compatible with all of the WooCommerce themes.

You can use Dokan theme for your online music store marketplace. Or you can choose other Dokan Multivendor compatible themes. There are 30+ Dokan Compatible themes available in the market.

How Vendors will Upload their Music in Dokan?

Say, your website is up and running, now it’s time your vendors to upload a few numbers of music. To add music to the store, your vendor have to register to your store and update their account. Here is the Sign Up option as like the below screenshot.

After clicking on the Register button, your vendor will get like the following success message including an optional basic settings. Which can be set up later by your vendor.

If the vendor clicks on Not right now button, then he will be redirected to their store’s Dashboard. He can still set up all the basic settings for their store from here:

Your vendor can add a relevant banner image to make the store attractive:

Vendors can update their payment settings by selecting the different Payment option:

There are also an option of Social Profile to get more potential customer traction:

After the completion of basic settings select the Product option from the sidebar menu to add music to sell:

Next, click on to Add new product button:

After clicking on it your vendor will get a number of options. Your vendor should upload a relevant Cover image and add suitable Description, Product name, Price, Category, Product tags for the product. Tags are very important for a product to be found easily by the customers in the store.

After completing all necessary fields, your vendor has to click on Create Product. Then your vendor will get the following screen:

The product will not be published until the admin approve it. By the way, vendor must check Downloadable option since they are dealing with digital products. As, music is a downloadable product, your vendor has to put tick on the shipping option. 

Finally, vendor have to click on Choose file to upload music on your store. Note that there is an Pending Review option to moderate vendors’ products to prevent scams. Once the vendors uploads their music, a success message will appear on the screen like the following:

As an Admin, you can go to the Dokan selling option to approve the pending music.

How the Product Will Look Like To the Customers?

If any visitor or any potential customer visit your vendors site they will see the product(music) will look like this:

A customer can put a comment or write a review about the product.

Search Engine Optimization

The success of your store depends on Search Engine Optimization or SEO. The built-in SEO functionality of Dokan will help your online music store get more exposure. It is very useful when you are sharing your store on social media like Facebook or Twitter.

Regarding payment options, you don’t need to worry, because Dokan supports PayPal, Stripe and many more payment gateway.

Writing Unique Contents on Songs or Albums

This will create a great interest on some visitors’ mind and who knows – they might become customers from slender visitors. Writing unique contents will also differ your music store from the others.

Keep Some Important Pages

A standard music store usually should have pages like Home, Songs and Videos, About, Blog, Gallery, Shop, Contact. Make sure that your web store has these important pages so that your visitors can navigate to their destination with ease.

Use Google Analytics to Track and Utilize Data

Don’t forget to use Google Analytics to monitor your visitors behavior. With this handy tool, you will be able to know how many traffics have visited to your site over time, where they have come from, how long they have stayed on your site and many more!

Use Feedback Form to Respond Your Visitors

Collect your visitor’s feedback on a regular basis with weForms and respond to their queries. This is very important to improve customer relationship. This relationship works as the foundation of every business’s success.

Final Words

Simple and easy to set up, taking advantage of music eCommerce with Dokan’s online music store takes only a matter of minutes. Your online music store marketplace will blend seamlessly with your new or existing website and display beautifully both on computers and mobile devices.

When you sell music with Dokan, you will be able to custom tailor the look and functions of your online store the way that you want, making shopping enjoyable for your customers and store management easy for you.

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