Don’t blame the eMagazineman (emagazineshop.com)

Member Name: chinnyli

Product:	emagazineshop.com
Date:	14/01/02 (284 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Huge selection of magazines, Postage included, Discounts on most titles

Disadvantages: They don’t post magazines out themselves, Don’t have everything, Not everything is discounted!

It's not often I notice online adverts, but when I saw one for £5 off any magazine subscription at eMagazineshop.com, I thought it might be worth checking out if they had anything interesting.

---- Range ----

eMagazineshop split up their magazines into categories for Him, Her, Work, Play, Friends & Family, Sport, and Enthusiast, although some of course will fall into more than one category, and are then split into further sub categories. They offer a pretty comprehensive range of magazines. For example, a quick glance through some of their categories came up with discounts of up to 18% on Cosmopolitan, 25% on She, and 20% on Good Homes in the 'Her' category. For 'Him', they had discounts of up to 26% on FHM, and 12% on GQ.

For 'work' they include titles such as The Spectator (37% off) and Fortune (56%). They also offer more specialist titles such as Broadcast (29% off), Mediaweek (21%), and Creative Review (26%).

In 'Play', you can find Q at a 24% discount, Sleazenation 22%, NME, and Japanese/English magazine London Zok, though no discounts were offered on them.

When you click on any magazine to find out more details, they often add an extra link to 'magazines like this', which finds other similarly themed titles for you.

If you can't be bothered to search through the categories, or you're not quite sure what category it would fit into, you can use a search box to search directly for a title, and by this way I found Dazed & Confused with a 16% discount.

The range is by no means complete though, for instance one glaring omission to me was The Economist. While I didn't actively search for titles, I'm sure there are others missing.

In addition, there aren't discounts on every title, and where there are discounts they may not be as much as what the publisher offers direct. For instance, although eMagazineshop doesn't offer a discoun
t on NME, it is possible to get discounts of 15% directly from NME's website.

Vice versa, it sometimes offers better discounts than the publishers - Dazed & Confused doesn't offer a discount itself, but eMagazineshop offered their subscription at a discount of 16%, and were also able to offer shorter subscription periods of 6 months instead of a year.

For each title, they can give separate prices depending on which country you want it sent to.

They also sell eMagazineshop gift vouchers in values of between £5-60. These can only be sent by email though.

---- The orders ----

Using the discount code, I decided to order a six month subscription to Dazed & Confused, a title I'd been considering subscribing to for a while. It cost £15 for six months, so the discount brought this down to £10! Bargain! I thought.

Within a couple off weeks of me ordering Dazed & Confused, eMagazines sent me an email, offering me yet another major discount if I would buy another subscription, this time it was for £10 off, I couldn't resist! So searching through their site again, and using the 'magazines like this' link next to Dazed & Confused, I ordered a year's subscription to a fairly new lifestyle magazine called Ampersand for a measly total of £8 after discount.

As the email said that the discount could be used once per household, I forwarded it to a few other friends in case they might be interested. About a week later one of my friends ordered Dazed & Confused too using the discount code in the email I sent.

And then I waited.

A couple of weeks later, my friend had already received the first edition of his subscription. Woohoo, I thought, mine should be due soon, before thinking how come he received it first when I ordered it earlier?!

Anyhow, I waited, and waited some more, and after two weeks I got fed up - Royal Mail can be bad but not this bad! I called up eMagazin
eshop's customer service, got through straightaway (no phone queues or service selection, I was impressed) and explained my problem to the person that answered.

The woman was very understanding, but pointed out that as eMagazineshop don't actually distribute any of the magazines themselves (they pass the orders onto the publisher to send out), she would need to contact the publisher to find out what had happened. She took down the order number of my subscription, my phone number and email address, and said she would get back to me later that day.

Well, she didn't contact me that same day, but did email me the following day to send an apology from the publisher. Apparently they'd forgotten to include me onto their mailing list that month!

She then gave me two options: I could either have the subscription start properly from the following month, or backdated to include the issue I'd just missed, and they would send it out immediately. Well as the cover stories that month were on Spiritualized and White Stripes (bands don'tcha know, although Spiritualized seems to be more of a one-man entity now), I decided to backdate the subscription.

At last, I thought, finally I will get my hands on this magazine.

I waited a couple more days, which became a week. Hmmm, shouldn't take this long to post the magazine out?

Another phone call, I asked for the woman I'd spoken to before, and told her I still hadn't received the magazine, had the publishers posted it out yet, or maybe they had the wrong address? She emailed me later that day, and said that they had sent it, but as I still hadn't received it they would post out another copy, but it wouldn't be for a couple of days as they'd run out of that edition, and had to wait for another batch. She also told me that if I still hadn't received the magazine a week later, I should contact her again. Fine I thought, well so far I far
I was pretty impressed by how promptly she was dealing with all my queries, both on the phone and email, though I was still worried I would never receive the magazine!

Thankfully, I did receive the issue a few days later, and you would not believe how happy I was! Though I never managed to get round to reading the articles on Spiritualized and White Stripes in the end...

A couple of weeks later, the next edition of the subscription arrived without a hitch, and the following months, excellent! Although just one small complaint I would make, is that I never received the magazines before they reached the shops first - I don't know if this is a problem with Dazed & Confused only, or if it affects other titles too. (From previous experience with other magazines, if you take out a subscription you normally receive the magazines before the shops get them.)

But was that the end of my problems? Hell no. I had the small problem of another title I'd ordered which also failed to turn up.

As Ampersand was a bi-monthly title, I waited two months before beginning to get worried, particularly as I also hadn't noticed the title being stocked anymore in any newsagent - I felt slightly suspicious it may have folded, although I'd had no word from eMagazineshop to say so.

Finally, losing patience I decided to give them a call. To my chagrin, I found that I could never get through - the phone was always picked up by a machine explaining that all operators were currently taking orders, (but then it was just before Christmas,) and that if I left a message someone would get back to me. B******s to that, I thought, noone will ever phone back! So I sent them an email querying what had happened to the subscription.

They weren't so prompt to reply this time, taking about a week and a half (what feels like aeons in internet time! But this may have been due to the run up to Christmas) to confirm my fears - they'd found
out from the publisher the magazine had folded! Why do I always end up with the exceptional problems when ordering stuff over the internet?!

And so I was offered two choices again - I could either have my subscription refunded, or I could swap it for a different subscription.

Now, as I'd used a £10 discount voucher, I knew I probably wouldn't be able to claim the whole subscription back, so decided to 'renew', or extend my subscription to Dazed & Confused for another six months. Which they did, and as I rightly guessed I lost part of the discount (there was a £3 difference between the subscriptions). But I didn't mind as I still feel I'm getting it for a bargain. I'll have to wait until March before I know if the renewal is OK though :)

---- Other mundane information ----

Like most online shopping sites, you'll have to register your details with them before you can buy anything. Once you do though, you'll be able to check your order history, and even if you order anything new or change your order over the phone, this will be reflected in your account online eventually.

Within your account, you also can change your username (by default its your email address), change your password, update your address details and decide whether or not to receive other information from publishers (ie junk mail! Although you will usually receive emails from eMagazineshop anyway), include your friends addresses in a separate address book if you want to buy them subscriptions, renew subscriptions, and change the address of where magazines should go.

Most interestingly, if you receive new discount codes or 'gift vouchers', then you can save them here for future use instead of having them sit forgotten in some random email inbox!

You can pay for subscriptions by Visa, Mastercard, Splashplastic, Switch, Solo and cheque, though if you pay by cheque, obviously they won't process th
e order until they've received your cheque.

After you pay for a subscription, you will see a confirmation page for the order, and an order number, which you should copy down for reference. They'll also send you a confirmation email.

On a different note, unfortunately eMagazineshop haven't been offering as enticing offers as the ones I was able to take advantage of when I first bought the subscriptions.
You have to spend a lot more now before getting any extra discounts, their most recent promotion being a £5 discount if you spend more than £40, or £10 on spending £60 or more, but they do change their offers frequently so its worth keeping an eye out for.

---- Even more mundane info (nicked from their info bit!) ----

eMagazine shop was launched in November 1997, managed and produced by Brown Bear Ltd, and was apparently the first online magazine subscription service. It receives 2.5 million hits a month, and works with over 175 different publishers to represent more than 1,000 magazine titles.

They intend to develop the site further in future to be able to track subscription orders, order back issues, offer merchandise, and pay by direct debit.

---- Conclusion ----

Generally, eMagazineshop is very good, offering a great range of magazines with fairly impressive discounts on the more popular titles, and often there shouldn't be any problems with orders (as I said, another friend that ordered Dazed & Confused didn't have any problems at all.)

However, as eMagazineshop simply pass on your orders to the publisher and have no knowledge or control over what is sent out, they won't know if there is a problem or mix up with orders, until a customer complains. But when there is a problem, they do deal with them pretty effectively, whether by email or over the phone. There's no guarantee over how quickly they will deal with it (quicker by phone though), but they do sort thi
ngs out eventually, in my case within a few weeks.

This does mean though, that if you order subscriptions for a friend as a present, that you will have to contact eMagazineshop if one of their magazines goes AWOL!


---- eMagazineshop contact details ----

Email: customer-support@emagazineshop.com.
Tel: 0870 241 4496

Brown Bear Ltd
Riverview House
Beavor Lane
Hammersmith
London
W6 9AR
United Kingdom

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