Back to BeatStars World
As a long-time producer on Beatstars and someone who genuinely wants the platform to keep winning.
A major issue producers keep bringing up is checkout friction after the payment changes: the 12% marketplace fee, VAT/tax shock at checkout which diminished our EU Buyers as a whole, PayPal limitations, loss of Stripe, international card declines, and buyers abandoning carts. Going on 3 YEARS, we have told and begged Beatstars as a community to please bring more payment options after the significant drops in sales and you guys IGNORED US FOR 3 YEARS!
If the 12% marketplace fee is not changing, then Beatstars should at least focus on reducing the damage it causes to conversions IMMEDIATLY
Here are practical fixes that can help for sure...
Bring Stripe back for single-producer, non-collab sales. (Stripe Connect) Or make a Ledger wallet for collab sales to be split.
Keep PayPal or BeatStars Pay as a escrow wallet of some type for complicated collab/multi-producer carts if needed.
Crypto
Split Pay Options
Add more global processors/payment options like Adyen, Checkout.com, dLocal, Airwallex, Payoneer, Wise, or direct bank payout options. Add something, not everybody can use paypal.
Consider a capped fee or flat fee for higher-tier licenses and exclusives instead of 12% scaling forever. Makes no sense to charge a 12% scaling fee for different licenses for the same beat. Don't care about our concerns about that at all.
Give producers abandoned cart and payment failure data by country/payment method.
Beatstars should treat checkout and global payment access as a TOP PRIORITY, not just a support issue. Producers built this marketplace, and we need the platform to make it easier for buyers worldwide to actually purchase our work. People feed their families off this platform and the blatant neglect for our issues is upsetting.
Respectfully, The “ We are working on it. No roadmap” copy and paste response we have been receiving for 3 YEARS is getting old. After this much time feels like the producers MAIN problem is not actually prioritized. Producers are bringing traffic, uploading catalogs, paying subscriptions, promoting BeatStars, and losing sales when buyers can’t complete checkout or not buy at all because of the suprise taxes and fees added.
We are not asking for empty promises. We are asking for transparency, a clear commitment that our problems are actuallyis being treated as a serious business issue.
Thank you for taking the time to write this out, and for being direct about it. You deserve a proper reply rather than the one you may have had before, so we are going to give you the reasoning we have never really shared publicly, and then some news.
Payments have not been ignored. It has been one of the hardest problems on our plate, and we accept that from the outside, that looks identical to doing nothing.
The core constraint has been split payments. BeatStars splits and pays out to collaborators automatically at the point of sale, across almost every country we operate in. Very few global processors support that natively at the scale and geography we need. Every time we evaluated an alternative, the trade-off landed in the same place: we could add a processor that worked well for single producer sales, but we would lose or seriously degrade automatic splits for everyone else. We were not willing to break splits for the producers who depend on them. That is what kept us where we were, and we should have explained it years ago rather than leaving you to assume nobody was listening. The other issues we ran into were high processing fees, which we were also not willing to sit with.
Here is the part we can actually give you. We believe we have found a solution to that problem. It is in build now. Unfortunately, we cannot provide a definitive date at this time, but this is no longer a case of us evaluating options with nothing to show. There will be a proper update on it before long.
On VAT, we have to be straight with you rather than tell you what you want to hear. Tax collection is a legal compliance requirement, not a choice we made and not something we can remove. It genuinely hurts us, however, that one is not going away, and I would rather say so plainly than imply otherwise.
On your other points:
Abandoned cart and payment failure data broken down by country and payment method is a reasonable ask, which is also planned on our development roadmap. No dates can be provided at this time.
On the 12% fee and the scaling structure across licence tiers, I do not have news for you, and I am not going to invent any. That sits with a different set of commercial/business decisions, but something that we may review in the future.
We are really grateful you took the time to share this in-depth and heartfelt feedback with us, it does not go unnoticed. We also apologise that we have not been able to be as transparent as we would have liked.
Thanks again!