While I appreciate newsagents being promoted as the go to place to purchase The Age Good Cafe Guide, Fairfax should fix supply line gaps which see many newsagents without the title.
It is supply gaps like this which will encourage further distancing from the newsagency shingle and traditional suppliers.
We’re a distribution newsagent with 15 subagents. We take these promotions quite seriously and make sure our subbies are supplied on the same ratio we are.
Our general comments about promotion items are:
To input subagent orders into the subagent grid is a tiresome, cumbersome and tedious process.
The usual margins (5%) for subagent sales make it non economic in terms of time, effort and risk on return accuracy.
Many of the promotions are ineffective in selling more newspapers.
The space they take up on our premises, especially waiting for returns to be collected by “the rep” is a major imposition.
The sales rate from subagents is erratic. but generally returns are very high, often mishandled and very often late. Some subagents (e.g. super markets, service stations) don’t even open their bundles
The 2 week promotions are particularly annoying because you can’t input into Tower that far in advance.
None the less we keep trying.
No all newsagents manage their network like you do Ricky. I’d like an alternative supply channel.
We are distribution only with 60 sub-agents and get about 800 Age’s on a Saturday.
We got 20 Cafe Guide’s.
Our direct supply sub-agents received more Cafe Guide’s than Age’s, and will probably return most if not all of them.
Mark, the reason your store didn’t receive any is because they were sitting in Coles and Safeway’s receiving bay waiting to be returned on Monday.
These promotion suck, however if we get 25% we are a bit happier to do the work. When we get 10% or even 0% we are not so keen for all the same reasons mentioned by Ricky.
We only get 5 copies. But the bar guide we get 40 copies. Don’t know what the age is thinking.
Hi all good read in the aus page 26 on us papers NOT ALL DOOM AND GLOOM
A lot of these promotions are a total waste of time and effort. Too often we get no where near enough of the promotional product to satisfy demand. When we do they don’t increase the number of papers supplied, how does this increase paper sales?? We are a subagent for papers and I’m pretty sure that our supplying agent gives us a fair share of product for these promotions but the papers just don’t do these promotions well at all and we are left holding the baby with disgruntled customers.
They have just lost 2 top editors –
free kick to news!