Selling magazines online nowadays has been made easy because of the many available channels for you to do so.
Online shopping and e-commerce have grown exponentially in the last few years. People buy everything from clothes to food. Magazines, both digital and print, shouldn’t be any different.
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Magazine publishers can take advantage of the possibilities offered, and sell magazines online from simple convenience to up-selling opportunities through digital+print package deals.
To give you some places to start, here are some places online where you can sell your magazines.
Your own website + Shopify
You can sell your magazine from your own website. This is particularly useful if your website already receives significant traffic. If not, of course, there are ways to increase traffic to your website through Google AdWords, search engine optimization, content marketing and social media.
All you need to sell your subscriptions from your website is an e-commerce integration, perhaps some functionalities to display sample pages and a delivery method for digital magazines. By selling your magazine on your website, you have full control over all aspects such as design, promotion, user experience and more.
Shopify is one of those e-commerce integrations we were talking about. As they put it themselves, “Shopify has everything you need to open an online store”. Managing a Shopify store is made easy with a simple interface that allows you to display and manage products, customize the look and feel of your store, keep track of all purchases, analyze order history and 24/7 support.
Design-wise, Shopify has an online store builder that makes designing your store easy even if you’re not a professional web developer or programmer. You can quickly set up your store with their templates, or you can also build one on your own to have a fully customized store. If you do have the necessary design and IT skills, then Shopify also gives store owners 100% control over the HTML and CSS coding of your storefront.
The main goal of Shopify is to make setting up your online store as easy as possible through a step-by-step process. It doesn’t just cover the technical e-commerce side of it, but it also covers inventory management and content marketing. If you wanted to extend its functionalities further, there are numerous integrations available that give you access to areas not covered by Spotify such as social media, shopping, inventory management, accounting, analytics and reports and more.
Shopify is just one of the options you have when choosing your e-commerce integration; there’s plenty of other ones you can use, which vary in price and offer.
Amazon
As a publication-based business, you should definitely look at Amazon. Although Amazon has long evolved into the global marketplace behemoth that it is, it still hasn’t abandoned publications. While its offerings for book publishers is well known, magazines are one of the products Amazon caters to.
Firstly, selling your magazine online through Amazon exposes it to a lot of potential readers. Amazon has become synonymous with e-commerce and many print and digital magazines are sold there. Amazon is also well known for being able to recommend products to users based on their behaviour, and this helps your magazine to be discovered by readers who are looking for publications in your genre.
And then, of course, there’s Kindle, which has revolutionized digital publishing as a whole. Many digital magazines that are sold on Amazon have also taken advantage of being available to Kindle owners.
Google Play and Apple App Store
Another way to sell magazines online is through yourown newsstand app available on Google Play and App Store. This is a more mobile-focused approach towards getting new subscribers.
Both these app stores make digital publications available to mobile phone owners. Having an app allows you to have another channel that’s geared towards those who want to consume your digital magazine on the go.
Having apps also gives you a lot of interesting functionalities such as in-app purchases (if you want to incorporate e-commerce into your magazine), live content feeds for increased frequency of new engaging content and analytics for valuable reader and subscriber insights.
Building a digital magazine app today doesn’t really require strong programming or IT knowledge. There are specialized app builders or digital publishing platforms that can build the app to your specifications. You just have to find the right app building solution that has the functionalities you need to build the app your envision.
Conclusion
You don’t have to stick to one channel to sell your magazines. Many of the biggest magazine publishers use a combination of those above to sell their magazines. Just find the best match for you and start selling those magazines!
