Easier than visiting WHSmith in your lunch hour! (emagazineshop.com)

Member Name: loulou6

Product:	emagazineshop.com
Date:	23/06/01 (216 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: bargains can be found, a nice and 'clean' site

Disadvantages: can't rifle though the hairdressing ones though :+(

After taxing my little brain for far too long in April this year to find a good present for my boyfriend, I put a question to my online pals at the ‘OpCom’ forum, it didn’t take long before nikkisly suggested that I get him a subscription to the BBC’s History Magazine at £2.95 a month. Remembering that I had seen a banner at the Ipoints (a brilliant reward programme) site I wandered over for a squizzle.

The site has simple colours, a simple layout and not too many intrusive banner ads (only ones for Ipoints and BOL). The search facility is ok, but the best way to find the extensive range of magazines around the site is by the tabs down the left hand site, these are: -

• Him
• Her
• Work
• Play
• Friends & Family
• Sports
• Enthusiast

You can work out where, say, ‘The Net’ would be (Play), and you would be right in thinking that the BBC History magazine would come under the Enthusiast heading. The selections under each heading are really vast, under the Her section alone there are 15 sub-categories, including Business & Finance, Motoring and of course the all-important Fashion & Style for Women. Clicking on this sub-category brings up 35 magazines!!!! From Womans Journal to Hair Flair and Vogue to Woman’s Health Research.

Most mags have a 75-word description, an Editors Review and sometimes even a Readers Review. This should help you make your mind up, but don’t forget to read the opinions in DooYoo first! Underneath this information is the price list for all over the world. So if you want to buy a pressie for your Great Auntie Hilda in Canada, you can see how much it will cost you by Airmail or Surface Mail. (Tip, don’t use surface mail to Canada – even Airmail can take 2 – 3 weeks! – I’m sure they use Yaks over there to deliver my letters!)

Prices are quite competitive,
but if you visit http://just4fun.ipfox.com and type in ‘emagazine.com’ it usually brings up they usually have a discount code for you to type in (ala Amazon). At the moment (23 June 2001) however, the only discount code is on the magazine site itself for £10.00 off your subscription. So in many cases, you’ll get a ⅓ off your subscription, but you can even get a 6 month sub for ‘The Net’ and only pay £1.90! This offer only lasts until 25 June at 9am, so hurry!

There are 3 schemes, ‘Click’n’Mix’, ‘Single Issue’ and ‘Risk Free’ (these are only available to UK customers though).

• Click ‘n’ Mix is for when you don’t just want the same magazine every month for a year, you choose up to 6 titles from the list of 35 magazines, and you won’t get more than four issues of the same title. This would be a brilliant chance to see what the new magazines are like without risking your hard-earned money. Oh, and you get a 5% discount as well.

• Single Issue, sorry, if you can’t work that out for yourself, then call yourself a carrot and sit in the vegetable rack.

• Risk Free is quite a good idea, if you fancied the ‘Doctor Who’ magazine (wait for it Karen!) they send you a recent issue, if you didn’t enjoy it, they will refund the fee (as long as you cancel within 2 weeks of receiving the ‘free’ issue. You will also receive a full years subscription, so in effect you will receive 13 copies!

• Corporate Discount is for bulk subscription orders for businesses or offices. E.g. if you have a hairdressing salon, you might want to buy 5 or 6 hairdressing magazines per month for your clients to rifle through and show you the ‘Beckham cut’ they’ve always wanted. You would need to contact emagazineshop to ask for the Corporate Discount Membership Packages. <
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Security on the site is brilliant, they use the Thawte Internet Certificate Authority to provide digital certificates, (apparently they provide 40% of the Internet’s SSL Web server market) and they also belong to the ‘Which? Web Trader’ code of practice, so it’s safe to get out that credit card. Just make sure you have Microsoft Internet Explorer 2.x or above when you visit (if you do have version 2 or below, where have you been for the last 5 years!).

Payment is relatively easy; they accept VISA, MasterCard, Switch and Solo cards for online payments. But if you are still worried about giving your details over the net (or your bank has taken away your credit card) they still accept good old fashioned money, cheques and money orders (didn’t these used to be called postal orders?). If you cancel during your year they will refund the remainder of the subscription less an admin charge equal to 10% of the full subscription price (£3.00 ish).

Delivery of the magazine is almost immediate, but because I ordered mid-month the magazine didn’t come out for 3 weeks, long after the boyfriends Birthday (ah well, it was the thought that counts). I managed to get 14 Ipoints for that pressie, so I got something out of his Birthday as well!

If you enjoy reading magazines but hate visiting WHSmith in the lunchtime rush, mosey on over to emagazineshop.com, you’ll be glad you did - I was.

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