@H5mag
Shopping Magazines: How It All Started
John shares his story about the development of the first shopping magazines in H5mag. He is proud to say that: "H5mag is now is the leading publishing platform for creating online shopping magazines. And is still getting better all the time."
Over two years ago a potential customer reached out to us to inquire about the possibilities of connecting an online store with H5mag in order to create an online shopping magazine for a women's clothing fashion brand.
The flexible nature of HTML5 technology allowed us to create a plugin that would retrieve product information from an online store, show the products inside the magazine, and finally redirect the customer to the shop's checkout page.
We had just added the ability to freely position images on an article, to make it possible to recreate layouts designed for print online.
The e-commerce platform had to be modified to allow it interact with the magazine, but not soon after that the first H5mag shopping magazine was published.
Stunning results
The shopping magazine looked amazing, with large high resolution photography, and no distractions the experience was quite different from normal online shops that display grids of items, all separate from each other surrounded with buttons and other distractions.
Another problem is that many online shops don't do so well on mobile devices with small screens. H5mag solves this with responsive artboards which allow you to create a fitting design for a variety of screen sizes.
Soon after the first shopping magazine was published we had several other customers, mostly in the home decoration business, who wanted to have their own shopping magazines.
This sudden demand was somewhat overwhelming as the user interface of the live editor was still a work in progress. We were constantly playing catch-up by adding features, and not to mention fixing bugs with time ticking away towards seeminly impossible deadlines. Getting those first magazines published required some long days at the office.
These days pizza dinners at the office are less frequent. H5mag now has solid support for various e-commerce platforms. Experience gained during the earlier days now helps us avoid many of the pitfalls associated with integrating a web shop inside a magazine.
I am proud to say that H5mag is now is the leading publishing platform for creating online shopping magazines. And is still getting better all the time.
Do you have an online store and are interested in publishing an online shopping magazine? Please contact us, and tell us about your ideas!
