Unique Magazines

TheDevTeam has been working alongside Unique Magazines for several years as part of their core development team, to build and strengthen their online magazine distribution business.

Unique Magazines is a distributer of UK magazines to a worldwide market. It currently stocks thousands of magazines, available for same day dispatch. They offer both magazine subscriptions and single copies of specific issues, enabling the end customer to flexibly choose which issues they are interested in receiving.

As any company who maintains their own bespoke software will know, technology continues to progress at an astonishing pace, and constant development is required to keep on top with technology changes, security, minor bug fixing and future feature development. It is important to not become complaisant, otherwise you could find that your bespoke software becomes dated, new bugs creep in and user work arounds start to become the norm where a simple development would have eased the burden before problems set in.

When this starts to happen, the development of basic features can start to balloon in cost if not managed correctly, as unintended features can clash with the dated backend software and things can start to feel out of control or ‘broken’.

To stay on top as one of the leading subscription and single copy services within the UK, Unique magazines realised the importance of continual development to grow their business. They decided that TheDevTeam, with experienced software developers in the magazine industry and a track record of growing a variety of different online businesses, would be a great match to get their software back on track to meet their desired growth targets. TheDevTeam uses Agile development processes in order to offer flexible development and change of directions with minimal impacts.

Before we got stuck into developing all the excellent new features which subscribers to magazines would love to see, we knew that to capitalise on any growth going forward, any problems with the user experience had to be addressed first; after all, you would not want to lose sales through bugs or clunky navigation – especially when launching any new developments, anything putting customers off need to be addressed first to ensure returns on investment are maximized.

Today after several years of collaboration the results speak for themselves with increased sales and reduced costs. Consistent attention to incremental improvements aligned with a few major project upgrades, and the benefits have been impressive. Everything from improvement in Google ranking and email communication with customers, through to integration with the Royal Mail API shipping V3 Pro Shipping system to streamline the fulfilment process.

Features which TheDevTeam have designed and implemented

TheDevTeam have implemented the following software features to improve magazine distribution and features for subscribers:

• Improved checkout and renewal process to minimise checkout abandonment.
• Flexible subscription models, allowing subscribers more options for their budget.
• Creation of a customer credit system, enabling customers to cancel and purchase another magazine or subscription with ease.
• Various SEO work, including improving the site to pass Core Web Vitals, and important SEO metric with Google.
• Implement Royal Mail Pro Shipping API into the existing Unique Magazines distribution system, to improve fulfilment efficiencies such as grouping magazines together for the same person with multiple subscriptions, and overseas customers to automatically print the customs form alongside the address labels.
• Implement IOSS, a system which charges and collects VAT for customers in Europe up front, rather than leaving customs to apply these charges upon receipt of the packages with handling fees on top. For a magazine subscription service, having fees for every issue sent to your door would simply be crazy!
• Implementation of our own in-house Eclipse Email system, enabling highly targeted emails to be sent to customers based upon their intreset. This reduces unsubscribes, the total number of emails sent out, as well as increasing conversions - all by emailing smaller subsets of customers interested in the content you are writing.
• Automation of various in-house repetitive tasks, freeing up people who can then become more productive in other areas such as customer service, marketing and distribution. This increased productivity not only improves customer service, it also increases profit margins and sales growth.

Doing so has enabled them to handle a substantial increase in sales without the extra load on staff for the fulfilment of each order. And next? Now we are working on a whole set of top-secret innovative features that will be rolled out during 2022.

If you would like any of the above implemented for your business, just send us a message and we will be happy to have a chat.

Written by David Radley, Project Manager and Lead Developer for Unique Magazines