PARTNERSHIP GROWTH

What I Learned 20 Years Ago Running Partnerships for an Ecommerce Startup

Twenty years ago, I found myself in the trenches of what felt like the Wild West of ecommerce. Our startup’s mission? Selling magazine subscriptions online, over 750 titles, from Practical Caravan to Vogue. This was the pioneer era of both ecommerce and affiliate marketing, when people still debated whether customers would really “buy things on the internet.”

Yet it was in those early days, working to build traction for our online magazine shop, that I learned some of the most enduring lessons about partnerships—lessons that are just as relevant for ecommerce founders today.

1) Don’t Sell, Strategise: Partnerships Are About Relevance, Not Just Reach

Most early affiliate marketers took a simple approach: email every website with a pulse, offer them a commission, and hope they’d slap up your banners or links. We went the opposite way.

Instead of asking, “Who has traffic?” we asked, “Who has the right audience?” For Top Gear magazine, we didn’t just look for generic car sites, we targeted PistonHeads.com, where we knew our ideal readers hung out. Every magazine title was treated as a unique market and our affiliate targeting strategy reflected that precision.

Lesson learned: Partnerships work when there’s genuine alignment between what you sell and what your partner’s audience wants. Relevance beats reach every time.

2) Prove Your Value to Earn Bigger Opportunities

Once we showed we could deliver results with targeted affiliates, we gained credibility. This opened doors to more ambitious deals—like building entire magazine shops within some of the internet’s biggest names at the time: RoyalMail.com, BT.com, LastMinute.com, and many more.

Each of these wasn’t just an affiliate relationship; they were strategic partnerships where we co-created revenue streams by embedding our offering into their platforms. That never would have happened without the data and results we generated through our initial affiliate work.

Lesson learned: Small, high-performing affiliate partnerships can be the proof point you need to pitch (and land) major commercial collaborations.

3) Create Value for Partners, Not Just for Yourself

Our “magazine shop” integrations weren’t about us pushing our products, they were about helping our partners engage their own audiences better. For example, a customer on BT.com could find a magazine relevant to their interests as an added-value service. The partner looked innovative, we made sales, and the customer got a smoother buying experience.

Lesson learned: Successful partnerships focus on creating value for the partner’s brand and customers—not just your own sales targets.

4) Partnerships Are a Doorway, Not a Destination

Through affiliates, we built a platform of consistent sales and data. Through that, we gained leverage for bigger deals. But we never stopped evolving. Each partnership taught us something new about our customers, our offer, and the market.

Lesson learned: Think of partnerships as a springboard to bigger opportunities, not the endgame. Be ready to adapt and build on each success.

Final Thoughts

Looking back, I’m grateful for the constraints of the early ecommerce landscape: we didn’t have advanced tracking tools, automation, or instant influencer platforms. That forced us to focus on fundamentals: knowing the audience, crafting the right pitch, and delivering real value.

Today’s technology makes execution easier, but the core lessons haven’t changed. If you want to build partnerships that transform your ecommerce brand, remember:

✅ Relevance over reach
✅ Results before bigger asks
✅ Mutual value creation
✅ Partnerships as the start of a journey, not the end.

I learned these lessons selling magazines two decades ago. They’ve stayed true through every ecommerce venture since… and they’ll stay true for you, too.