Our e-commerce strategy: Singletrack World

Q: What is your e-commerce strategy?

A: Our e-commerce strategy centres on our integrated online web shop, leveraging WooCommerce and custom software to create a seamless purchasing experience. This setup allows for fluid integration of subscription and single-issue purchase options across the entire website, not just shop pages.

This flexibility empowers our editorial teams to easily embed purchase options, widgets, and links within content. When a reader is captivated by a product review or inspired by a travel feature, the ability to subscribe or purchase is right there, reducing friction and capitalising on that moment of interest.

Our first goal is to encourage new users to register for a free account. This unlocks access to our community features — particularly our highly active forum — and creates multiple touchpoints for paid engagement through strategic use of widgets, house ads, and editorial promotions. By building this relationship gradually, we demonstrate value before asking for financial commitment.

Our mailing list has proven highly effective for new subscription acquisition. With approximately 7,000 opted-in subscribers and open rates consistently around 50%, our weekly newsletter demonstrates strong engagement. Click-through rates of 2-5% translate directly into conversions, making email our most reliable revenue driver.

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

A: The future of our e-commerce strategy focuses on two key areas: reducing friction and consolidating touchpoints.

Our immediate challenge is to reduce clicks to checkout to an absolute minimum. We’re also exploring one-click shopping on social media channels like Instagram and TikTok, where our visual content naturally showcases products and destinations. Social commerce represents a significant opportunity, particularly for impulse purchases driven by compelling imagery.

The more transformative development is our plan to develop a dedicated app that brings all our output and benefits together into a single hub. As a media brand with diverse products and access points — print magazine, daily website updates, member-only features, discount portal, magazine archives, and community forums — we currently exist across disparate platforms. An app represents an evolutionary step toward unified access, improving user experience while strengthening subscriber retention.

Within an app environment, one-click purchasing becomes much more realistic. We can store payment credentials securely, enable push notifications for new issues or special offers, and create a more intimate relationship with our audience. The app also opens possibilities for enhanced features like offline reading, personalised content recommendations, and gamification through our planned user points system.

Three top tips

1. Make it simple. Magazine purchases are typically impulse buys driven by emotion and immediate interest. Every unnecessary click is a point where customers will be lost. We’ve learned this the hard way through our analytics.

Subscriptions are considered purchases — readers weigh the value more carefully — so the extra stages of data gathering are less ‘painful’. But still, every step should be carefully considered along the path to checkout. Have we got it right? No. It’s a continuous process of development, adjustment, and experimentation. The key is to regularly audit your checkout flow, test alternatives, and always prioritise simplicity over collecting data that might be “nice to have”.

2. Use merchandise strategically as subscription leverage. Merchandise sales are better used as leverage for subscriptions rather than standalone revenue streams. Our data shows subscribers are significantly more likely to buy merchandise, but having options only available to subscribers actively encourages conversions.

This means margins on merchandise need to be considered alongside the lifetime value of a subscription. It may be better to make no profit — or even a small loss — on a merchandise item if that purchase came off the back of a subscription worth £196 in lifetime value. We’ve successfully used free cycling jerseys (£44 RRP, £14 cost) as subscription incentives because we understand the math.

Look into print-on-demand merchandise suppliers. This removes all the distribution and stocking hassle with zero upfront costs, allowing you to test products and designs without financial risk.

3. Prioritise building and nurturing an engaged mailing list. This is perhaps the most undervalued asset in publishing e-commerce. Our mailing list currently sits at around 7,000 opted-in readers, and with every newsletter we send out, we consistently generate purchases of merchandise and subscriptions. It’s a direct, reliable revenue channel that compounds over time.

The power becomes clear when you scale the numbers. I dream of what the results would be if our 7,000 were 70,000. That’s the multiplier effect of list building — every subscriber added increases the potential return on every future campaign.

The key is quality over quantity. Focus on opt-ins from genuinely engaged readers rather than purchased lists or aggressive pop-ups that inflate numbers but kill engagement. Our 50% open rate is only possible because we’ve cultivated a list of people who actually want to hear from us. We achieve this by offering real value — unique editorial content in our newsletters, not just sales pitches — and by segmenting our audience so different subscriber types receive tailored messaging.

Make list growth a priority across your entire operation. Every piece of content should include a subtle call to subscribe. Every social media post, every forum interaction, every customer touchpoint is an opportunity to grow your most valuable asset. The compounding returns make it one of the highest-leverage activities in publishing e-commerce.