Magazine City Review -

We were dying to find out if Brad and Angelina were still together, so we thought a magazine subscription service could snag us the lowest rates on Us Weekly or People. We’ve learned that these sites tend to provide lower rates than what you’d find on the newsstand and we love how many titles are available for purchase! Star Reviews checked out Magazine City and upon arrival at their website, we thought the site design was somewhat eye appealing. The user interface, however, looked a tad dull and we wondered if we’d find what we needed here. We really disliked how the categories were arranged and found ourselves running out of patience in our quest for our magazine. See what else we found below.

What’s New?

• International delivery: Going abroad for a bit, but don’t want to miss a single issue of Better Homes & Gardens? Select magazine subscriptions can be shipped to anywhere in the world.
• Hot Specials - See which titles you can snag with special savings everyday.

Star Review’s Favorite Feature:

Special Packages - Say you love golf and would like to order several titles at once, but don’t want to pay for each subscription. Magazine City will let you order a special package including The Golfer, Golf Digest and Golf Tips with over 50% in savings. Another package, ‘Stylish and Elegant’ includes Vogue and Glamour.

Magazine City ’s Features:

• Gift Suggestions/Gift cards
• Business bulk orders
• Keyword and category search
• 1,600+ titles available
• Business advertising opportunities
• Check categories of interest, and get free magazines with no fees
• Recommended reading
• International subscriptions
• Order for multiple time periods
• Consumer comments

Navigating the Magazine City website:

Magazine City was a hassle to navigate. We like simple, up-front search mechanisms and this site did not come through for us in this department. First of all, the magazine categories themselves took forever to browse through, forcing us to click on several links before we actually found some titles. However, once we did get some images of covers under ‘Celebrity & Gossip,’ we were happily surprised. There were color images, magazine descriptions and related recommendations listed on the right sidebar of the page. We also liked the Search box, which produced titles we were interested in. We just felt the site could have been arranged a bit more professionally.

Selection:

Overall, we really liked what this magazine subscription service had to offer us. We found a ton of titles in all sorts of categories like ‘Arts & Entertainment’ and ‘Ethnic,’ to ‘Science & Nature’ and ‘Video Games.’ Talk about versatility. We just wish all of these great titles could have been arranged a bit more succinctly.

Subscription Rates:

Magazine City claims that all shipping fees are included, which may explain their hefty fees in comparison to other Internet magazine discount sites. There’s a “modest” one dollar processing fee and no price guarantee, but Magazine City has convenient packages with cohesive titles. If you’re looking for business opportunities, advertising, or magazine subscriptions for the office, this discount magazine website may be able to assist you. We didn’t love that their subscription rates were at the higher end of the scale, but their special packages definitely make up for this, as we think they’re a pretty good deal.

Sample Price Comparison

Customer Support:

We were pretty disappointed with their customer support. When clicking on ‘email us,’ the page linked to absolutely nowhere. The telephone support number provided is nearly impossible to get through on, with an extremely long wait-time. After browsing through several pages and clicking on ‘About Us & FAQs’, we found a section “Reserved for Magazine City customers ONLY” that provided customer service information like an email request, the same 1-800 phone number and a postal address.

Without placing an order, no email request will be answered. This was definitely a downside, as all visitors to the site should be able to contact a rep if they need to. We also disliked how when clicking on ‘Customer Service’ at the bottom of the page, it was a dead link. The only way to find contact information is to click on ‘About Us,’ which will throw many customers off.

Upside: Great package deals with several categories. International delivery.

Downside: Unable to receive a total until you make your purchase. Sloppy and inefficient customer support options. Pricy.  

Summary:

The Magazine City website was a bit lackluster, which immediately decreased our desire to continue browsing through it. This magazine subscription service had a pretty comprehensive title selection, boasting over 1600 titles! However, we felt that the rest of the service negated its credibility. Not only was the search function a little difficult to master, we felt customer support was a disappointment. Finding the information you need in order to contact the company shouldn’t put you through several loops. Overall, we felt this magazine subscription service was mediocre.