Condé Nast Wants To Sell Thousands of Products

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While Condé Nast is announcing ad sale staff layoffs, Condé Nast International is hiring up in another department: e-commerce. Internet Retailing has a fascinating transcript of an interview from this week's Internet Retailing Conference with Franck Zayan, Condé Nast's newish president of e-commerce, who says that Condé will begin to sell products to readers by next year.

This won't be a small initative. "Ideally anything presented in magazines should be able to be purchased. We're talking about hundreds, thousands of products," hesays. "If we bring commerce to Condé Nast it means commerce should resemble Condé Nast. We're not talking about fashion only. It's beauty, high tech, travel – a very wide range of products."

The entire transaction process from reading about a product through checkout will be owned by Condé Nast Commerce, and the company is hiring developers, engineers, and more staffers to build out this vision. The fact that Condé is starting late in e-commerce is actually an advantage, according to Zayan, because they can learn from previous failed attempts.

Zayan says that Condé editors will be on board with e-commerce from day one. "Bringing commerce closer to everything you see in the Condé Nast magazines makes perfect sense because that's what customers expect. They're really asking for it, they want it."
· How Condé Nast is planning its move into commerce [Internet Retailing]
· Condé Nast Is Laying Off Almost 80 Employees [Racked]
· How Much Editorial Love Do Fashion Magazines Give Their Advertisers? [Racked]
· Condé Nast Takes $500 Million Loss on Fashion Media Sale [Racked]