Q: What is your e-commerce strategy?
A: At Immediate, we’re home to some of the UK’s best loved media brands which cater to our audiences’ passions and interests. From an e-commerce perspective, we share our subject-matter expertise with our audiences by independently reviewing and recommending products on everything from gardening kit to cookware. We also curate offers on products we know our audiences will love.
We use data to improve the customer experience and conversion journey for audiences. Externally, we work with hundreds of retail partners to secure the best commissions possible. We maintain our trusted position by ensuring all product reviews are carried out independently by experts and real users. We also work closely with retailers and e-commerce partners on specific paid-for conversion-driven campaigns. Brands can license accreditation badges to highlight products scoring highly in product testing.
Q: How do you expect this to change in the future?
A: Traditionally, publisher e-commerce activity has been driven by print (directing readers to visit a website to claim an offer) and by SEO (high purchase intent content ranking highly in Google’s search results). With a rapidly changing search landscape influenced by AI, and more searchers (especially younger generations) starting their product research on social media, the e-commerce model for publishers is evolving.
When buying a product, we all want to get the best bang for our buck. In that sense, audiences will always seek advice on how to spend their hard-earned money and look to save where possible. However, how and where they consume this advice is already changing.
Social creators have emulated recommendations from friends and family, while anonymous Reddit users are leveraging the non-promotional nature of the site to trawl for authentic, real life product recommendations. Both indicate an increased focus on ‘human’ content. Today’s savvy shoppers have grown wary of overtly commercial content which serves business needs before helping users.
Behind the scenes, a common gripe for media publishers working on a last-click affiliate attribution model is losing out on sales they helped generate to cashback and voucher code sites. Users often visit these sites before making their purchase to find the best discount or to earn money back on their shopping. This highlights the flaws with last-click attribution.
In a double-hit for media publishers, some cashback sites may also be able to demonstrate that their cookies are ‘strictly necessary’, exempting them from certain consent requirements.
The last-click CPA model (publishers earning a percentage of the sale generated) is still the key driver of affiliate marketing, but other models are becoming more popular, such as CPC (cost per click) or cost per engagement. Looking ahead, discussions around attribution models which fairly reward the publisher which generated the demand for a sale, not just the publisher which drove the conversion, will continue to be important.
Three top tips
1. Focus on trusted, personal expertise: Media brands which have been publishing for decades offer something really powerful in a world flooded with low-quality digital content. They offer a deep sense of heritage, trust and brand recognition which can only be built over time.
Going toe to toe with creators, publishers can build on this brand trust with recognisable, relatable brand ambassadors or experts who truly connect with audiences on a more human level. Inject personality into e-commerce content by showing audiences the individual recommending the products, and why they’re qualified to do so.
2. Leverage new channels: Show up where your audiences are and create content in the formats which they are engaging with. This increasingly means social video and testing and learning on platforms such as TikTok Shop. Being able to measure engagement and conversion accurately across all these new channels is also key.
3. Create added value for audiences: To drive direct engagement with content, offer more personalised, curated shopping research experiences which cannot be replicated elsewhere. This is the best way to defend against Google’s AI Overviews delivering zero-click search results. This is also a long way of saying that a high word count ‘listicle’ article (eg. 10 of the best...) isn’t going to cut the mustard in isolation. Repackage lengthy onsite articles with really useful, interactive tools (like budget calculators, comparison tools, video and other widgets), and feature real, human insights from your experts and audience community. While AI overviews might represent a threat to publishers, smart publishers can also leverage the power of AI to deliver these interactive features more quickly than before.
Beth and the other contributors will take part in an ‘E-commerce Special – Q&A’ webinar on Tuesday, 27th January. Click here for more information and to register.
This article was included in the E-commerce Special, published by InPublishing in December 2025. Click here to see the other articles in this special feature.
