Another answer to "Where can I buy this?" — Online shop links are now on zine pages

Hello from the Zindies team!

"Where can I buy this zine?" It may be the question we hear most from people who land on a zine's page.

A zine's page on Zindies lists the shops that carry it. We built it that way hoping you'd walk into a shop and pick a copy off the shelf. But some readers live far away. And some creators sell through BOOTH, STORES, or a shop page on their own site.

So we added online shop links to zines. On the zine's page, they appear below the shops as a row called "Buy online".

How to add them

Links to your shop pages are set from the zine's edit form.

• Pick a type (online store / website) and enter the URL
• The display name is optional. Leave it blank and the host name (booth.pm and so on) is shown instead
• Up to four links per zine

One thing to watch: enter the URL of that zine's product page, not the shop's top page. That way a reader gets straight to the copy they were looking for.

Why they don't sit next to the shops

Online shop links are not lined up with the shop cards. They sit below, in a smaller row.

On Zindies, the tie between a zine and a shop is a relationship: a shop chose to put that zine on its shelf. An online shop link is a pointer to a page somewhere else. Give them the same weight and, from the shop's side, it starts to look like "we stock it, and now we're competing with a web shop." So the shelf stays in the lead, and the online links are added quietly underneath.

For the same reason, online shop links appear only on the zine's public page. They are not included in the "new arrivals" email sent to shops, in a shop's list of stocked zines, or in the catalog PDFs shops print.

For readers

When a zine catches your eye, start with the shops that carry it. A zine you meet in front of a shelf is bound to look a little different. If you can't get to a shop, because it's far away or life gets in the way, the "Buy online" row further down the zine's page is there for you.