The Complete Aussie Guide to Camping did not sell in our newsagency. We received eight copies at the end of November and returned all eight this week, three weeks earlier than requested by the distributor. By the time we are credited for the unsold stock our cash will have been taken for two months for this title. The distributor has access to our cash and maybe the publisher. This is an excellent example of how small business newsagents are used as banks. When we try and mitigate our losses, some distributors step in and deny us the right to reduce supply or cut titles altogether.
We need an arrangement where fringe titles such as this camping guide are paid only on a scanned sales basis. This means newsagents are not used as banks, do not have to fund theft and have more time and resources to act as retailers.
Our key asset for magazine publishers is our retail network. If only we controlled this as an asset and priced access accordingly.
For a scanned sales basis payment to work in this industry you would need all of the dinosaurs to pull together and start using electronic sales.
There are still way too many living in the last century for this system to ever even be considered.
We cannot afford to wait for the dinosaurs to catch up, we need to leave them behind. We need to have a system that rewards those that have made the investments in technology and incentivises the dinosaurs to modernise.
For those that meet set criteria and have compliant POS systems, allow billing and return figures based on scanned sales and dispose of the costly returns system as we know it. Sweep our account weekly for sales say 2 weeks ago so that we have a time frame to reconcile and report any discrepancies. Send back only those returns that require “recycling”, such as partworks and some of the other full copy titles, but allow the rest to be disposed of by the newsagent.
The distributors send us invoice data electronically, they get daily sales data and they get scanned returns information electronically – all the pieces they need to make this happen. Maybe then we can start to have a profitable magazine industry and drag those that are holding the rest of us back into the new age of electronic trading.
Key to this is trust; distributors need to be able to trust newsagents to trade honestly and with integrity, and the same applies in reverse. There should be no problems if the “incentives” are properly designed and implemented. Pipe dream? Perhaps.
Glen I am with you. For too long we have worried about how we bring all newsagents along. This will not happen. Some make business decisions to be efficient. others make business decisions to be inefficient.
Mark
The dinosaurs are the ones that sat back and allowed deregulation to happen back in the late 90’s, which in turn has lead to the s#@t fight we are in now for mags.
I know this because my father was one of them, stuck in his paper based world refusing to except xchangeit and computer systems. But those days are gone and anyone still there needs to be left there while the rest of us move on, don’t get me wrong dad slaved away 16 hour days but he wasn’t using all the available resourses to make his life easier.
Spot on boys !!! If we wait for the old traditionalists to come on board, we will all pay the price.
Can’t agree more. Let the traditionalists fall behind, let them fail. There is no reason for the rest of the industry to be weighed down by their weakest players.
There might be some significant fallout – but market forces will, naturally, deal with such scenarios.