Keeping up with the online Joneses

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, April 15, 1996 by Cris Beam

As subscriptions generated online become a bigger source of new business, fulfillment houses are finding themselves scrambling to provide new services of their own.

"The number of orders has increased greatly in the past six months," says Baird Davis, senior vice president of circulation for New York City-based Ziff-Davis, which includes subscription forms for all 22 of its print titles on its ZD Net site. Over the past year, the Web site has generated between 20,000 and 40,000 orders. (New subscribers can either pay online or click the "bill me" option.) "It's a building kind of thing--we're getting a lot more visitors to the site, people are becoming more comfortable ordering electronically, and they are more comfortable paying with credit cards."

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Service bureau solutions

Although publishers still rely on traditional fulfillment and distribution channels--which for subscribers can mean a four- to six-week wait for the first issue--service bureaus are using online orders to their advantage when it comes to order processing. Louisville, Colorado-based Neodata can knock five days off the fulfillment cycle by downloading information directly off the Internet, says Nancy Talmey, senior vice president of publishing. At present, 20 of Neodata's 400 magazines are testing this new service, available since December.

The question is whether new subscribers really expect faster service when they order online. "We did an experiment where we got magazines to subscribers in three days," says Talmey, "and pay-up didn't improve." As with readers who subscribe via more traditional means, some "expect their subscriptions to show up at their doors the next week, and some don't mind the delay at all," notes Cydney Harris, manager of Business Week Online, which includes sub offers on its America Online site and on The Electronic Newsstand. (Business Week's seven-month-old Web site will soon carry a form, too.)

Business Week handles its fulfillment in-house. But for now, the volume of online orders being generated (between 500 and 1,000 over the past year) doesn't warrant an automated system for downloading names, says Eileen Peacock, new-business manager for Business Week Online. "We've been able to handle this as we would any alternative subscription source, where we pluck the names off AOL and rekey them," she explains. "If this becomes a big enough source, we'll automate that, but not right now."

Des Moines, Iowa-based Communications Data Services, on the other hand, handles 4,000 electronic inquiries a month. CDS market manager Eileen Luther says the service bureau has been downloading subscription inquiries from clients' e-mails and then rekeying the information. But now the company is working to automate this process by setting up a Web site that readers won't see but to which they will be automatically linked when they decide to subscribe. "The publishing industry is jumping on the online bandwagon," says Luther. "They feel the service bureaus should be able to accommodate them."

JCI Data Processing, in Cinnaminson, New Jersey, has had a fully automated fulfillment setup for online orders since last September. (It, too, makes use of a "hidden" Web site.) Because most of JCI's 450 magazines have controlled circulations, the company offers interactive qualification forms, including prompts that notify subscribers if they enter incorrect information.

President Linda Johnson says the impetus for these changes comes from publishers: "We're pressured to reduce costs, and to do that we have to reduce labor, and to do that we have to take advantage of technology. Once [the Web site] is up, it can really run free of human intervention."