Spotify and Shopify Team Up - How Will This Influence Both Sides
Perhaps Spotify and Shopify - sounding similar names - have eventually worked together, which may be an inevitable partnership.
Spotify on last Wednesday (Oct 20th, 2021) announced that it has established a new partnership with e-commerce platform provider Shopify. This will let artists connect their Spotify profile with the Shopify store on their services, allowing them to sell their merchandise directly to fans with the help of the Spotify app.
Any artist in the world can link to their Shopify store if they have one in their Spotify profile. But now, Spotify users will see a list of Shopify's featured products on the service. During the initial test period, Spotify listeners can see Shopify merchandise from five countries: the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom.
What Is Shopify
Shopify is an easy-to-use platform for online retailers. It provides businesses with the ability to create a multi-channel experience and helps present the brand.
What Is Shopify
Founded in Canada in 2006, Shopify has grown and developed into one of the most popular e-commerce platforms. Shopify is a fully hosted solution that lets you open your own online store to get up and run smoothly.
With this subscription-based platform, you can create a website and use their shopping cart solution to sell, ship, and manage your products.
It comes with a series of tools to help you analyze all aspects of the online store. With these tools, users can design customized online experiences for customers and maximize the return on investment (ROI) of marketing expenses. The technology also helps comprehensively reduce costs by automating customer relationship management, inventory management, and transactions.
Shopify's App Store is packed with an amazing 3500 apps. Because Shopify is relatively a light-out-of-the-box e-commerce platform, you may need to add some integrated functions and apps, such as delivery software, payment gateway, or e-mail marketing software.
But with so many Shopify plugins to choose from, you're sure to find the extensions you need. You can even find some great free Shopify apps that can improve the appearance and functionality of your store without spending a penny.
DSers will help you find best dropshipping suppliers, manage multiple store in one app, increase margins smartly, and etc. Particularly, it offers a permanent free plan for beginners.
How Does Shopify Work
Shopify works on a monthly subscription using a SaaS (Software as a Service) model, which is a cloud-based solution, meaning you don't have to worry about upgrading or maintaining software or web servers. This gives small business owners the flexibility to access and operate their business anywhere over an Internet connection.
With Shopify, online business owners can customize the look and feel of an online store using the Shopify store builder and themes. Users can have a Shopify store in as little as 15 minutes. With it, e-commerce businesses can create their websites and sell products using the built-in shopping cart solution.
Sophia Loren
On the security side, with Shopify, the payment information and business data are secure, as Shopify Payments complies with PCI (Payment Card Industry) standards and supports 3D secure checkout. Shopify Payments helps eliminate the hassle of setting up third-party payment providers or merchant accounts because once you create a Shopify store, it's automatically set up to accept all major payment methods.
Make the Most Of Shopify
Here are some tips on how to make the most of your Shopify and promote your e-commerce business.
▪ Shopify Shipping: Shopify Shipping module allows you to integrate with major shipping companies to calculate real-time shipping rates. You can purchase and print shipping labels directly from the dashboard. With Shopify Shipping, you can even display the calculated price in the customer's shopping cart.
▪ Dropshipping Apps: Shopify allows you to integrate with a few dropshipping apps, including a top-ranked option called DSers. It is the official AliExpress dropshipping tool, which empowers dropshippers to place unlimited orders to AliExpress without being blocked.
| Get Started Now to Grow Your Online Business with the Best AliExpress Dropshipping Tool - DSers! |
▪ Mobile Management: Shopify provides mobile applications for Android and iOS, allowing you to manage your store anywhere.
▪ Integration with Amazon and eBay: Connect your Shopify account with the two largest Internet marketplaces and process orders from all your sales channels in Shopify. To learn more, check out our post on Amazon and eBay's dropshipping integration with Shopify.
What Is Spotify
Spotify is a digital music streaming service that gives you access to millions of songs, podcasts, and videos from artists around the world, like Apple Music and Amazon Music.
No matter where you belong in the world, Spotify will bring songs from artists all over the world. Isn't that amazing? Get access to this service from smartphones and desktops anytime, anywhere and you can download the Spotify app on your smartphone and enjoy the service for free, and its premium version brings more amazing features.
How to Use Spotify
Sign up for a Spotify account and open it in the music community around the world. You can create an account with your email address or your Facebook account. You may want to create an account through Facebook because this option gives you the opportunity to find your friends on Spotify and check their playlists.
- Create a circle of friends - Connecting with your friends on the app will be a wonderful experience. When you chat with them, you can share your favorite tracks and know what kind of songs your friends are listening to.
- Search for songs - You can search for songs by typing the title of the song, or you can start by adding artist names. You can also search for movie names and find their songs. Once you start listening to a song, you can add all your favorite songs and create a playlist that will remain active on your account and access it.
- Explore collections - You can easily access your friends, celebrities, and artists' best song collections. Creating your own radio station based on your music preferences is another interesting element.
- Explore podcasts - Not only listen to songs but also podcasts. Whether you want to play cooking podcasts or listen to stand-up comedians, this digital streaming service is available at your fingertips.
What is A Spotify Code
Spotify Code is unique to the Spotify music streaming platform. It works like a QR code, but it looks completely different. If you want someone to hear a song playing on your Spotify app, you can display the Spotify Code on the screen.
The other person simply scans the code using the camera feature in the Spotify app, then they get what you are playing immediately. The Spotify Code is like a sound wave and is below the cover photo as well as above the title of the song / album / playlist / podcast.
The Spotify Code is available to both free and premium subscribers. To generate code for the content you want to share, you need to click the three dots next to the heart icon on any content you want to share. Each track, artist, album, and the playlist can have its own Spotify Code, so there's no limit to what you can share.
Why the Partnership Happened
By working together, the two platforms hope to make navigating artists' online stores as easy as browsing their music catalogs. The all-in-one e-commerce platform will allow artists to manage their brands across multiple touchpoints. The meeting of the two powerhouses of audio streaming and e-commerce will create their own ecosystem for creators.
Of course, merch is one of the biggest sources of income for most artists. Spotify already has some merch integration features - available through Merchbar, but Shopify's scales further favor artists.
Shopify is fast becoming the biggest brand in e-commerce hosting, and many artists may already be using it. For example, Merchbar does product hosting by integrating with stores already hosted on Shopify (among other sites).
Directly integrated with Shopify, Spotify simplifies the process to sell online. But the move is a bigger deal for Shopify. As of March, there were an estimated 8 million artists on Spotify.
The company says it has 165 million subscribers and expects to have more than 400 million monthly active users by the end of 2021. This represents a huge potential new revenue pool for Shopify, which makes money not only from subscription fees for shopkeepers but also from transaction and payment fees.
With the partnership, artists on Spotify have a chance to earn more and spend more time focusing on the music itself.
- Using Spotify channels, artists can introduce the merchandise to the places where listeners and fans are already investing the most in their music.
- By linking their Spotify for Artists account with their Shopify online store, artists can sync their catalog and showcase their selections directly on their Spotify profile, making it easy for fans to browse and buy.
- With Shopify, artists and entrepreneurs can access an all-in-one business platform to manage their brands across multiple touchpoints.
- For artists with large followings and pre-existing businesses, Shopify can handle heavy traffic, key sales moments, and highly anticipated product markdowns.
How Will the Partnership Influence Both Sides
The Spotify deal is just the latest in a series of new partnerships for Shopify in the past few months as the Ottawa company seeks to cash in on the e-commerce boom.
Bright Side
To set up their virtual product table, Spotify artists must have a Shopify account. Shopify's pricing plans range from $29/month for the basic e-commerce plan to $299/month for the advanced plan with enhanced reporting. Shopify offers a 90-day free trial for all first registered Spotify artists.
Shopify offers inventory management for Spotify artists. For example, out-of-stock items are automatically removed from the profile of the artists, while new products can be added to Spotify immediately. For artists who just start to create merchandise, Shopify offers POD (Print on Demand) services and the ability to connect with fulfillment partners.
To list items on Spotify using Shopify, in the Spotify for Artists dashboard on the desktop, go to the Profile tab, and then click Merch to start using. There, artist can select three items from the Shopify store to demonstrate on the profile. (Each Spotify artist account can only link to one Shopify store.)
Not-so-bright Side
But that integration has been a piece of an ordinary news, and Spotify hasn't been much involved in the process. Basically, artists can place a limited number of links to their projects on their Spotify profiles, which, while being clicked, will take fans away from the relevant pages on Merchbar's website.
This is a good news for part of the artists, managers and record labels who already use Shopify for redirecting fan to buy merchandise outside Spotify and Merchbar, because Merchbar is certainly not some fans’ thing.
On Spotify, the artists can still list three items, while on the mobile phones, the three merchandise are buried at the bottom of the profile page. So it's unlikely that anyone will ever see them. But on the bright side, artists featured by Spotify will get a free 90-day trial of Shopify. So that's not a bad thing for an artist to have a try.
Shopify also says its larger app ecosystem can help artists offer new services, such as product discovery tools. Shopify adds that Shopify's infrastructure can manage large volumes of traffic for artists with large followings who may sometimes lead to a surge of traffic - for example, when they drop new merchandise.
Artists will still be able to sell things within Spotify through Merchbar, although this will no longer be the default option in countries that offer Shopify integration (in fact, artists seem to have to actively insert it into their profile if they want to continue selling through Merchbar).
Final Word
The partnership seems to have been a triumph for everyone involved. Spotify is becoming more artist-friendly. Shopify can reach a wider customer base. Artists have an additional and potentially easier way to make money.
There is also a potential uptick in orders from suppliers of goods that work with bands and music artists. So those suppliers who offer POD and dropshipping services may make a profit through the partnership.
Hot Articles
Company
Why Choose DSers
Blog
Help Center
