Optus is the stand out brand in the mobile recharge business in our newsagencies. In one of our stores it accounts for more than 40% of all recharge product sold – twenty five vouchers last week.
I am tracking this because this is the business we lost for a time when Bill Express and related businesses collapsed last year. Optus recharge is an important traffic generator.
Some newsagencies I see are still winning lost customers back, others have passed previous numbers. Optus is the key. It is a brand consumers know and trust.
in my store it is the reverse i hardly ever sell an optus but telstra sales are the same as back in the Bill Express days ,i suppose it has more to do with the service that the phone company has and up here optus is just not worth having
I don’t think things will ever be as good for recharge as it was before the bill express stuff up. Optus has cut our commissions to the bone and are actively promoting recharges in other areas, as has all suppliers. They as well as newsagents were burnt bad and they seem to have lost their dependance on our channel for getting their product out there. This is shown by huge discounts offered through coles and woolies to recharge and also our channel being unable to reestablish itune vouchers. The suppliers have found other retailers and I think we have missed the boat as far as our commissions go. We might sell the same amount of recharges but we will never make the same profits.
Our mobile credits have rebounded to before but we are down about $1000 per month on calling cards even though we didn’t lose any time because we already had ezipass at the time. Customers just don’t trust newsagents to have recharge anymore and once they have that perception it is hard to shift back.
We have increased our phonecard take by 100% on Jan 07 and are on track for about 20% on Jan 08. We just advertise all day in all our spare spots that we sell phone recharge. We lost a lot of custom during the no Optus/no Vodaphone phase even though we had the cards. We refuse however to let that customer go.
Good reason for this.. Optus recharge doesn’t attract discounts anywhere. I’ve also noticed newsexpress seems to put up a lot more Optus POS material then other carriers. Vodafones discounting through Woolies Ltd probably hurts business through other retailers, and well the remaining carriers all have a small prepaid footprint or in the case of Telstra, most customers will go to a Telstra shop.
I have seen coles and Woolworths offer 10% off all recharge including optus, if they make the same commissions as us they would be running at a loss wouldn’t they?
Nahcoob,
newsXpress has no relationship with Optus and does not treat the brand any differently. That said, this post is nothing to do with newsXpress – it’s about what I have seen in my newsagencies – neither of which have Optus collateral displayed.
Mark