subject: Magazines Start Online Stores, Blur Lines [print this page] A new trend is seeing magazines choosing to start an online store. Theyre becoming some of their advertisers top competitors by selling everything from designer clothes to jewelry, makeup and accessories the very item featured on their pages.
Leslie Hahn, president of Online Store Confidential, says this recent move by many magazines is no shocker.
Ecommerce stores can lead to great success, Leslie said. If done right, they can elevate your business and bring in an entirely new revenue stream.
Online shopping is huge. With just the click of a mouse, you can browse, find, buy and ship just about any item you want straight to your front door. Its this ease-of-use that makes online shopping such a hot commodity and such a money maker. Thats why just about EVERYONE wants to start an online store.
The biggest shopping season of the year is quickly approaching, and magazines all over the country are wanting to take advantage and try their hand at ecommerce. How to keep objectivity in the magazine, while still promoting your products, though?
With magazines selling items in an online store, whats to stop them from promoting those items in their magazine just to up sales?
Lets take an example. Say Seventeen magazine decides to start an online store. In that store, they sell purses and scarves, but sales arent going so great. In next months issue, the editors are doing a feature on the best scarves for fall. Whats to stop them from recommending Seventeens online store scarves, instead of what really is the best scarf out there? Will the drive for sales blur the lines between objective writing and advertising? Will the magazine begin recommending inferior products just to drive online store traffic? Will the pages just become one big promotional tool for ecommerce?
How to keep these two areas of business separate is a huge issue. Where do you draw the line between the two sides of the business, and still remain true and honest to the customers and readers? You dont want readers to feel tricked.
The want to start an online store is an obvious one; its a great source of money, and in this digital age, print products can use all the help they can get. Lets just hope this venture into ecommerce allows us to still get unbiased, objective magazines, and not just a 40-page advertisement for web stores!
What do you think about magazines foraying into ecommerce? How to keep it objective: big deal or not at all? Will it affect the published product as we know it?
by: Mitch
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