I saw a magazine up-sell offer fail at a busy airport outlet today to the bemusement of the person making the offer. The customer brought to the counter two weekly titles from publisher A and a third weekly title from publisher B. The pitch I heard was switch the one title from publisher B for another title from Publisher A and the shopper would get the three for around the same price as the two titles from publisher A.
The shopper was frustrated at having her choice challenged and purchased only the title from publisher B.
By the time the shop assistant served me he was still grumbling about the rejection of the offer. I think that he misses the point that the offer disrespects the choice made by the shopper. It’s like hey, I know better than you or, content doesn’t matter, it’s all about price.
While I am no magazine publishing expert, it seems to me that the best way to drive sales of any magazine is to deliver a better product. A price based deal may achieve a sales bump but I doubt it would be sustained unless the product itself has changed.
Mark
It also highlights the issue I have with upsell. We always advise not to upsell. Once the customer made the choice, it is presumptive to try and change that and all you achieve is creating doubt.
Cross-selling, however, is something else…
Dennis, it works for lottery products but not much else with consistency in a newsagency.
I had a customer yesterday, that was going to purchase a magazine at a Sydney airport newsagency, for his flight.
He was told he had to spend $20min to use his savings account for the purchase, he declined. – Is this another upsell strategy?
Upselling works if it can be presented in a very simple, consistant manner. As Mark says, this is possible for lottery products.
Customer makes a lottery purchase and you offer them an additional pre-determined lottery product.
It can also work in an area such as ink where a customer purchases a single ink cartridge and you offer them a better value twin/combo pack. Because of the vast range of ink available the only way to keep this consistant would be to use prompts at the POS.
Giftware/cards/packaging is the other area I can think upselling works – but because of the varied nature of these departments the offer will not be consistant. This is more suited to specialty gift stores where staff are more likely to be trained in how to properly upsell such a mixture of product. This kind of upselling is more ‘organic’ then a pre-determined offer.
Michael
That is my pet hate shopping at Newsagents and they have a minimum on eftpos. I would rather go into a newsagency and they say, sorry $10 is the min, but can charge you an extra $0.50 to cover the transaction. Or even say if you get money out the transaction is free. Why do newsagents have a min?
$1 coin for a paper vs credit and sign (taking much more time and incurring bank fees). It’s not just Newsagents that do this, it’s probably a small business situation.
I used to have a $10 min, but now don’t. I charge 20c per trans, which I don’t actually charge because I get repeat customers thinking they’ve found a rort! My partner puts the charge on for credit though, you should see the people trying to get into my queue to save 20c!
bob i find we have to have a min which is only $10 we don’t really care if it is only $7 or $8 as long as it is close enough you can normally tell if someone is prepared to spend more . The reason for the min is because of the amount of times we have been asked to put a stamp on eftpos
In some of my stores we have no minimum an dothers have a $5 minimum. With cahs out, no minimim.
Bob.
Depends on the transaction fees that their bank is charging.
Some banks are charging the business up to $1.00 per transaction!
Larger businesses can dictate to the banks to score a better deal on their eftpos. Smaller ones like ourselves have to have a minimum purchase to cover the eftpos charge. For our regulars we waive this minumum.
We implemented this charge after seeing that public transport travellers bought a $1 pkt of chewing gum & wanted cash out for their bus. Net loss for the transaction $0.40.
Hope that clears things up.
As for upselling, I get a bit cringey doing it. If there’s a real benefit to the customer, and it’s mutual, then I’ll do it.
Otherwise, it’s a waste of time, energy, and goodwill.
The one I’d do the most, is probably offering the UK versions of TL & T5, which usually has a positive response.
Oh, and TL did go up 5c today!