ValueMags.com -- Prices Good/Site BAD
Written: Aug 23 '01
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The Bottom Line
ValueMags makes up for it's horrible user experience by having excellent pricing. It's a good choice if they've got the magazine title you're looking for.
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Recently had the chance to do some random surfing here at epinions and ended up at ValueMags.com. The recent influx of new sites added in the Online Stores and Services category has caused the Online Insider to really pound the pavement in order to stay on top of the category!
I've always been a real fan of magazines. I currently subscribe to at least 20 (some of which are controlled subscriptions to industry mags that I get at work), so I'm always glad to see another magazine site online. I clicked the link from epinions and was prepared to really dive into ValueMags. I did -- and this is the first time that a site's design and inventory shortcomings are completely overwhelmed by it's excellent pricing. I came in really negative and left thinking that this site is a good idea for some magazine purchases.
As I said, my first impression was not a good one. I was left completely underwhelmed by the site. First of all, this site's design is horrible. There was simply no effort at all. The logo is text, and the cover images are simply scanned images of recent magazines. Not a good start. The site navigation consists only of a left hand hierarchy menu. You can choose the type of magazine you're looking for (i.e. sports or women's magazines). You can also click on the highlighted magazine offers in the middle of the page.
If you try the search box at the top of the page you will come to a list of titles that match your query. My search for sports came back with an unformatted list that contained only titles and pricing. No images or details about the magazine were listed -- they were a click away under a details page. As a rule of thumb, content about items makes people want to buy. Valuemags.com doesn't show me anything except text about items that I'm looking for, so it doesn't do anything to incent me to subscribe to these titles.
The selection at this site stinks. They currently carry over 1,300 titles. Although more than a conventional bookstore, this is no where near what I've come to expect online. In fact, two other stores, Magazineoutlet.com and Emags.com both have over 14,000 titles -- almost 90% more! If I look under the sports category at Valuemags, I can find 50 titles -- however, Sports Illustrated is not listed. When I do the same category listing at MagazineOutlet, 89 titles come up! These titles are listed by subcategory and price, with cover images and information on the same page. After looking at this, you can see that I am really leaning toward MagazineOutlet.
But my last test really swung me to the ValueMags.com side!
Lastly, I compared a random sample of magazine titles for price in the two stores. The following lists the title of the magazine (TITLE), the price at Valuemags.com (VM), the price at MagazineOutlet.com (MO) and the percentage difference between the two sites (% Diff).
Title VM MO % Diff
Rosie 12 18 44% less
TVGuide 46.28 46.28 0%
Martha Stewart 27 27 0%
Rolling Stone 15.97 19.43 28% less
On a pure price basis, ValueMags beats MagazineOutlet hands down! So on a limited basis, I'd recommend this site to you for buying your magazines online...but think how much better this site could be if it looked like MagazineOutlet!
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
bhweb22
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Member: Brian H
Location: Northeast
Reviews written: 297
Trusted by: 110 members
About Me:
I'm an Internet GEEK.
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