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E-commerce for publisher: checkout

This article was originally published with InPublishing for their E-commerce special. Our piece specifically focuses on checkout. 

Q:What is best practice now?

A: Freedom and flexibility, in short! There’s a myriad of options on the market - from the super niche to the more generalist ecomm platforms. We see success in tools that adapt as your business grows, rather than picking the ones that box you in. The checkout isn’t just the final step in a sale journey, it’s where products, subscriptions, loyalty schemes, offers, search and data all connect.

Good checkout design starts with a strong, vibrant ecosystem of tried and tested, reliable integrations: payment providers, shipping tools, analytics, marketing and CRM platforms, subscription tech amongst many others. Choosing well connecting software means you can plug in whatever you need without needing to rebuild from scratch as your business evolves.

Security, speed and reliability are non-negotiables. What really defines a good checkout is it not existing in total isolation as many industry-bespoke checkouts do. It needs to talk to everything else and allow automated access to data and insights across the whole purchase journey. If you’re still copying and pasting data between systems, or juggling spreadsheets to see all the factors that lead up to and influence checkout, your ecommerce set-up is not yet best practice. A good system lets information flow freely across tools, so you and your team can concentrate on what’s important - customers, not admin!

Personalisation is also super important to consider. Your audience already expects a shopping experience that feels like it’s built for them personally - all the big online retailers have trained them already. By being able to link customer profiles with behavioural data and content engagement, you’re able to give your customers an experience at checkout that recognises their history, preferences and interests. The trick is to use data thoughtfully, creating real value for customers through dynamic recommendations, tailored offers and personalised messages to returning or regular customers.

And finally, there’s the all-important human side. The commerce may be ‘e’ but your customer is not. A good checkout feels effortless. It has a clean layout, minimal steps, clear pricing and no surprises. Abandoned baskets are often the result of journey friction rather than poor product sets so avoid too many clicks, limited payment options or convoluted, confusing forms to complete. Remove the barriers and build confidence.

If you’re looking at ecommerce options now, think of the big picture. Pick one that’s part of an established marketplace with proven partners and open integrations. A publishing specific solution may be tempting because they promise all kinds of tailored features but they can restrict long-term growth. 

Embrace the platforms with large and comprehensive selection of apps so that your teams can grow your ecommerce experiences for customers over time. Take time to consider whether the platform allows you to add plugins that seamlessly work with your site rather than require developers to configure them so that your marketing teams and ecommerce teams can experiment and grow revenue.

Instead go for a scalable, flexible platform then tailor the experience to your business by plugging in the publishing focused tools as and when you need them. This approach keeps your checkout experience first class now, while also future proofing your business.

Q: How do you see it changing in the future?

A: The next wave of innovation will make checkouts smarter, faster and even more personal. AI is already reshaping ecommerce experiences through conversational interfaces where readers can renew, buy or manage and order directly from a chat window or voice assistant. 

Over time I predict that even the idea of going to the checkout will fade away. Transactions will happen wherever the customer is - in a message, app, or even inside an article they’re reading. Checkout will become less of a page or part of a website and more of a capability of a great ecommerce-optimised digital experience.

Payment continuity is also worth a mention. Most good platforms can handle expired cards and renewals automatically using secure tokens and live payment updates, which will be music to any subscription-led publisher’s ears. 

We’re seeing success come in this modular approach to building an ecommerce experience and because of the rate of change and development, see tonnes of merit in following the big dogs rather than creating your own through publishing-specific tools that will struggle to keep up with the pace and demand for proper integration. 

Q: What are your three top tips for publishers when it comes to ‘checkout’?

1.  Don’t go with a small, publishing-specific ecommerce checkout. They will be your problem as you grow. These systems should be about driving growth, not preventing it. 

2. Make sure you and your provider do an audit of your existing landscape of software to see whether your other tools will integrate with your chosen ecommerce. If they don’t then you know what to do!

3. In ecommerce it is time to go with a large marketplace enabled platform that will have integrations with the things you already use and solutions for future needs.

When I founded Full Fat Things in 2010 I’d recently left The Economist. Whilst I was at The Economist I worked on a great website with a brilliant business model. They charged for content! Who would have thought it would be possible on the internet. They were doing it in the year 2001 when I joined and probably before. Archaic paywalls and payment providers existed then but the whole thing worked and customers happily purchased the print edition as well as the new shiny web edition. 

The Economist also loved display advertising and even all the way back then we managed to make it personalised to the audience based upon demographics etc. The paywall would site slightly further back on the site in good advertising years and would lock more content in slow advertising years. How simple, yet effective!

When I left The Economist to start Full Fat Things I was immediately surprised to see companies loving advertising only as a revenue model. We still have some customers doing this now as customers of Full Fat Things. I love all of our customers equally however I’ve always wanted our publishing customers to make more from the content they produce.

So it was a complete joy to go the FiPP conference in its centenary year in Madrid this month to hear the general state of the industry. 

Here is a brief commentary on the points that kept coming up…

Ad revenue is falling

Ad revenue is dropping globally for publishers quicker than before. Programmatic revenue is falling through the floor. Publishers continue to need to know more about their audience to be able to sell to them. This of course leads to…

First party data is EVERYTHING

First party data is EVERYTHING. Audiences should be thought about in terms of quality of connection and not quantity of number.  Therefore it is fine to allow our audiences to shrink if they are paying for a great connection. So lock up that content away from free eyes and seek that customer connection. Own that connection with the customer, learn about each other and make each other happy. It’s time to have a good old fashioned relationship with your customers. It is time to know more about your customers than Google and Facebook do.

Paywalls and regwalls should be in place to trigger first party data collection and then detailed collection of activities. I’m careful not to say analytics here as people just automatically think about Google Analytics but that is aggregated analytics. I think we need to know what individuals are doing and then segment up rather than segment traffic down from GA and hope that tracks onto users. 

The storm clouds of the AI wars are gathering

OpenAI and other AI providers are eating your data and we've seen Silicon Valley take everything they want without care with things like Youtube blatantly hosting copyrighted material before figuring out how to monetise it. Just handing over data and hoping they send clicks is not the way. The general advice was block AI and bots until you cut a deal with them to get paid. Their clicks are tiny and we don’t think that a new GEO strategy is going to get that click rate back up to Google levels. 

This is made more complex when you have programmatic ads on your properties by the fact that lots of bots in that world need to access your site. AI and Ads effectively make all of this hard. You can't just block all bots but you should also consider that AI providers will buy data from third parties and they also seed from Common Crawl to get their datasets. So if you think you can just block OpenAI, Perplexity and Claude crawlers then think again. 

On a personal note here because Google built a business around the greatest business model in the world with Adwords/Adsense I don’t think the ads business is going away but it will have trouble for a while whilst the AI giants fight like peacocks in the street. 

Membership models 

There was lots of talk about membership models, like the Guardian, needing a really strong brand that they can lean on to carry them through and that if your brand is not of that calibre then merely encouraging people to pay will not be enough.

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Playing for Reach and SEO is slowing quickly

With the prioritisation of reach and SEO being the focus for traffic which is supported by advertising, the quality of the experience once a reader has arrived at publisher websites has diminished. This is damaging brand equity every day and at some point it will be a very uphill struggle to get back from this. Look at this example of how little content you can see on a screen and. not even the full headline. I hate to pick on Reach in this example but it shows that an ads only model is not paying enough to allow for a quality experience. Be careful. 

Closing note..

There was one outlier at the event who had dumped their paywall and they claimed quite impressive growth percentages in advertising but I couldn’t help thinking that their growth was because of removing a paying paywall and I wonder whether their overall revenue had grown.

FiPP was great because of the very international publishing audience. It was great because these messages to publishers above were consistent across the conference from the whole world. 

For fifteen years we’ve helped publishers and for every one we’ve worked with we’ve encouraged learning about their customers through great data collection and we’ve promoted the idea that content should be paid for by registration walls and paywalls. We even have a publisher product that combines subscriptions, paywalls, a great CMS and fabulous publication system integration. 

So just on a personal note I loved having our longstanding message hammered home to everyone that now is the time to go full Jerry Maguire.

Stewart Robinson, Founder of Full Fat Things