When choosing gifts for the newsagency I always for for quality first. Price is a secondary consideration. Cheap is rarely the best choice.
Too often I see retailers including, sometimes, newsagents buy a cheap copy of a higher priced better quality product and try and sell it at the price of the higher quality product.
Shoppers are smart. Fool them once and you rarely get a chance to do it again.
My experience is that buying products for the newsagency based on quality works better in the long run.
Take a look at the cheap no name brand stationery from China compared to name brand products. We all have stories about customers buying cheap and complaining. Yet too often I see newsagents drawn to cheap knock-off products. I don;t get it.
At the Gift Fair in Sydney earlier this week I saw this issue play out. In a range of categories there were suppliers of quality product and suppliers of similar looking but considerably lower quality product. One retailer I spoke with said they bought the cheap stuff because that’s what customers want. I doubt that.
Often here I talk about the need for each of us to stand for something in our businesses. While we can stand for selling cheap products, I choose to stand for selling quality products of which I and those purchasing them can be proud.
Quality matters when choosing gifts to stock in the newsagency.
I agree wholeheartedly Mark. I find the advertisements by Coles, Woolworths, Aldi and Bunnings disheartening because they’re almost always about price. What I’m interested in is value. For some products, ‘cheap and nasty’ is fine, but for many others, I prefer to pay a bit extra and buy quality as that delivers better value. Bunnings’ adverts say that ‘price is just the beginning’. Ah, um – NO. It’s almost all of what they promote. Range perhaps – but it’s often a range of competing low quality products. My husband won’t even buy sandpaper from Bunnings now because their drive to focus on low cost has resulted in their only stocking very poor quality sandpaper – it simply doesn’t last and doesn’t allow him to do a good job.
Megan
I’ve just purchased some beautiful bronzed
statues of Soldiers (WW1 &2) and they will sell for about $150 each but I am going to do a window display for Anzac Day this year (the centenary) and I will buy some good books about the wars to go with the display.
I sold them about 6 years ago and they were snapped up so here’s hoping again.
When we purchased this particular shop in a shopping centre the owner told us to “never offer a gift over $19.95 because it won’t sell”
I’m glad I didn’t listen. I sold a clock yesterday for $99.95 and that is not unusual.
We need to value our real estate and understand that we are paying large rents to be in shopping centres and largely our customers understand that premise.
The same principle applies to cards as well. We are a Hallmark store and we have 2 discount shops close to us who sell cards and wrap for $1 each yet our sales of cards is great. I prefer to be seen as a shop who sells quality items rather than cheap. Yesterday I had a great moment when a customer whom I had not seen before came in and asked for a product. I said I did not have it in stock but could order it for them and they said yes as they heard that we only get quality products and not cheap versions. Little things like this show that I am not always hitting my head against a brick wall!!
Our repeat business is based on our quality. Having completely refitted just four months ago I believe our sales are now growing because of the trust we have gained for being that place that doesn’t sell crap and has something for everybody.
It’s strange that newsagencies have often been trapped by the mental hurdle of price points.
I diversified my Newsagency into hobby lines such as model kits and gaming prodctts and pitch to that audience as well as my historical audience. On a couple of occassions I’ve now had someone come in to buy a magazine, see what I have there and walk out with a $79 kit as well ! 🙂 Aisde from that for the hobby side of the business it’s not unusual to have $200 – $300 sales with my best being one of my regulars (a doctor) who spent over $1000 in a single transaction.