Time Inc. pioneers publishing industry with online magazine membership service

“We had to launch our new MAGHOUND website, which would be a paradigm shift for the magazine industry. The MAGHOUND website launched on time and fulfilled its unique business requirements.”

- Abe Cytryn, Chief Technology Officer, Digital, Internet and Ecommerce Technologies at Time Inc.

Problem

Time Inc. is one of the largest content companies in the world and publishes 130 magazines. They wanted to enhance the way readers shopped for and purchased magazines with a new online service called MAGHOUND—a service that would allow subscribers to manage their accounts online, and enable them to replace, cancel, or add magazines to their account for one low monthly fee. The requirements for this new MAGHOUND site were unique and complex.

Ecommerce Solution

In order to carry out the MAGHOUND project, the IT team at Time Inc. decided they needed both a platform that could incorporate recurring billing, as well as the flexibility to easily integrate with their existing IT environment. Further, they also required a high level of support from the Elastic Path team.

With the platform model, the Time Inc. team took 40% of the features out of the box and extended the rest of the features on their own. Time Inc. developers worked with the reusable services within the Elastic Path platform to customize features such as their own CSR application and promotions.

The orders that flowed from the MAGHOUND site also needed to be funneled into the existing fulfillment chain to many magazine fulfillment houses in the US. The Time Inc. team created a Java process in which the order information was wrapped in a file that would be delivered to each of the fulfillment houses. This would ensure that the customer experience with MAGHOUND was as seamless as with other magazine order channels, such as subscription cards and individual magazine websites.

Results

After 8-9 months of development work, MAGHOUND was launched as the first site of its kind, introducing an new way of subscribing to magazines. This was a paradigm shift for the industry and its consumers. Time Inc. was able to deliver this innovation quickly.