Our e-commerce strategy: London Review of Books

Q: What is your e-commerce strategy?

A: Running the LRB Store for the London Review of Books has been a challenge, but also an incredible opportunity for both myself and the magazine. The LRB store was launched in 2018 after we noticed a huge growth in the sales of branded merchandise. We started small with just a few items on a Shopify page and now have expanded to offering over 80 items, ranging from LRB branded merchandise to specially curated gift items. The LRB also has a charming bricks-and-mortar bookshop in Bloomsbury with its own e-commerce website.

My strategy when it comes to e-commerce is to engage the LRB audience with new and exciting products as well as creating new iterations of our cult ranges. Our bread-and-butter products are totes, diaries and binders, but we sell a wide range of merchandise from puzzles and books, to ceramics and Christmas decorations. We regular offer limited editions of our totes bag. This year, I launched four limited edition runs of them (and one colour sold out in just 28 days!). Some of these limited editions created quite a buzz online with social media influencers, which help our products go viral and increase sales.

Finding new products to bring to the market can be challenging. I try to find products that will appeal to our audience and align with our brand, as well as being unique and locally-made. As a SME, I am always looking for products that have low minimum order quantities, so I can test the market without much risk. Part of the ethos of the store is to support other small businesses and source locally made items.

I also use the depth of content from the magazine to produce new products. One example is our LRB Collections: these are small books produced around a theme using existing essays from the LRB. It is a lovely way to repackage content for our existing readers and introduce new readers to the best of the magazine.

Being able to reach the magazine audience through our existing channels like the print magazine, online ads, email, social and our physical bookshop has allowed me to easily access a large audience across the growing LRB brand. Our key buyers are LRB subscribers and readers, but we do also have huge following in the Korean market and with anglophiles around the globe who have been using LRB tote bags to display their cultural status since 2017. Unfortunately, this has also created a black market for LRB products that I keep a keen, and sometimes annoyingly amused, eye on.

One of my biggest challenges has been shipping. The rising cost of shipping and the varying import and duty fees have been difficult for us and for our customers. Last year, we moved our fulfilment house in the UK and opened a fulfilment house in the USA that services our North America customers. The new UK fulfilment house allowed us to streamline our internal processes, fulfil orders more quickly, offer our customers a variety of shipping options and manage our stock levels with complete transparency.

North America is one of our fastest growing markets, so opening a USA warehouse allowed us to service the USA quickly, cutting down on shipping costs and shipping time, with the bonus of transparent tracking for our customers. The feedback from our North American customers has been hugely positive, and sales have exceeded my forecast. An additional challenge that has come out of this are the new import fees into the USA that have been introduced in the last six months. Many of our products are made in the UK or Europe, so getting them to our USA warehouse has been costly. Therefore, a key challenge for 2026 I will be sourcing new US suppliers.

I manage the LRB Store using the e-commerce platform Shopify, which allows me to easily and quickly adapt and test new products and ideas. Shopify offers multichannel sales across online marketplaces and offers products to customers in their own currencies and languages; I find this has created a significant uplift in sales. I regularly reassess our marketplaces to tailor different products for our customers’ needs and regional buying behaviours. Shopify also offers integrated shipping, tax automations, inventory control and more, all of which has worked to support us in growing as a business.

Q: How do you expect this to change in the future?

A: Looking forward, I expect to see increased integration between the three LRB e-commerce sites: the London Review Bookshop, LRB Store and the magazine subscription site, offering a single customer view, unique subscriber discounts and offers. I am looking to invest more time into the USA as our brand presence in North America continues to grow. I am excited to see how we can use the merchandise store to both grow our brand and create new revenue in 2026 and beyond.

Three top tips

1. The classic... keep testing products, copy, communication methods, pricing to engage your audience.

2. Invest in good product imagery and editorial imagery to tell your story.

3. Understand your ecommerce platform inside and out and keep on top of its developments.