Magazines.com

Full review
Magazines.com is an on- line resource for the purchase of subscriptions of your favorite periodicals. This web site is the oldest magazine- related web site still in existence on the world wide web. It was founded in 1996 and has been going strong ever since.

What Does This Service Offer?:

Magazines.com offers the following products and services:

Magazines- Most of what you will find in this web service falls under the magazine heading, like you would expect. Magazines are broken down among different subject categories with some featured magazines highlighted on the home page.

Gift Center- Here, you will find more magazines, but they are broken down into categories to help customers select a good gift for someone else.

Gift Certificates- If you want to buy a magazine as a gift but cannot decide what to buy, just purchase a gift certificate. These are available in increments from $1 to $1,000 and they are e-mailed to the recipient. The person receiving the gift must use the certificate in magazines.com only and cannot take back any excess money as cash. The leftover money remains in the account until it gets used for a magazine purchase.

Payment Methods/Shipping Charges:

Magazines.com accepts Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and Discover cards for payment. You can also make a payment by phone or through the mail, but doing so will slow down the processing of your order. Magazines.com will not begin processing until the payment is in its hands, so the recommended method of payment is by credit card or debit card (as long as the debit card has an imprint from one of the four major cards accepted) for prompt service.

Customer Service:

Questions about your account, the site, or your order can be made either by e-mail or by calling. E-mails should be sent to feedback@magazines.com or by filling out an on- line form, within the site. You can also call the company with your questions, at 800-929-2691. The offices are open between 8am and 10pm EST on weekdays and between 11am and 8pm on weekends.

Final Thoughts:

Magazines.com is the longest- lived magazine web service on the internet and one of the first of its kind that I ever had the pleasure of using. I get lots of magazines in the mail and I have the internet to thank for most of my subscriptions. Besides the numerous publications that I subscribe to and pay for, there are many magazines that I receive free of charge. I have sites like this one to thank for my overflowing and sometimes clogged mailbox.

This web site organizes the magazines by subject category, but you can also search by title or keywords if you prefer. Once you pull up a particular magazine, you will get a quick overview of the contents of the publication, the different subscription options, related categories, a listing of other magazines that are often purchased by readers of the same magazine, and a listing of the top ten magazines in that category, on the upper- right hand side of the page. The information on each magazine is brief, but it does an adequate job in letting you know what to expect if you make a purchase.

Magazines.com offers a 100 percent money back guarantee. If you are not satisfied for any reason in the first three months of your subscription, you can contact magazines.com for a full, unconditional refund. This guarantee is good for any magazine, no questions asked. But you have to cancel within three months to take advantage of this guarantee.

Prices at magazines.com are average, with some of them a little higher than other sites and some a little lower. When I first started using this web site, I can recall the prices being a little lower than the competition and lower than they are now. Today, it’s hit and miss, which is why you really need to shop around to make sure you get the best deal. But taken as a whole, you can count on magazines.com to at least equal the subscription cost at most other on- line retailers.

As I alluded to above, the internet is to thank (or blame) for the dozens of magazines that arrive at my home every month and magazines.com has played a key role in this trend. I have made purchases through this and other sites, and I have also received my share of freebies through magazines.com. The free offers are still there, but they are not quite as widely available as they used to be. In the early days, you could click on a link and grab a complimentary subscription with ease. There was nothing to pay- not even a shipping surcharge- and there was no survey to complete or other “catch” to take advantage of the offer. Today, the free offers are still in place, but now magazines.com restricts the free offers to business magazines AND you now have to fill out a survey in order to qualify for the free subscription. The “survey” is not a simple question and answer session on your favorite “this” or “that”. Rather, the surveys are more specific and they relate to business. Unless you’re a business owner or work in a business that is relevant to the free magazine offer, you will be unable to get the free subscription. The surveys will ask you such questions as “what is your managerial role in this company?”, or “how do you interact with this part of the business?” The idea here is to reserve the free business magazine subscriptions for those people who have an active role in that particular business. Thus, you can still get some free magazines in this web site, but it isn’t the free-for-all that it was in the past. Now, you have to qualify first.

You must establish an account before you can complete an order in this site. To do this, you must enter your e-mail address, full name and address, and create a password. Then, on the next page, you will be asked to enter your credit card data or click another prompt to make your payment by phone or by mail. It will take a few weeks to get your first issue, but this is commonplace for magazine subscriptions.

Magazines.com isn’t quite as great as it was in the past, back during the honeymoon phase of the world wide web. But it is still a pretty good web site for purchasing magazines, with competitive prices on nearly 1,500 publications and free business magazines to those who can pass the qualifier.