Some newsagents are seeing more traffic thanks to Australia Post no longer doing Transurban (Citylink in Victoria, Go via in Queensland and eventually Roam in Sydney) account top-ups.
The challenge for newsagents is the 55 cent fee they get for what can be a sizeable transaction. The impact is around banking, to ensure money is ninth business account in time for the sweep by Touch.
If the top-up is paid for by a card, the newsagent will have to charge a fee to cover costs of the card. otherwise they lose money.
My understanding is the 55 cent fee is set by Transurban. Certainly that is where I would start in ,lobbying about this. I have raised it afresh with Touch and will share here what they come back with.
I first raised this with Touch early this month – that’s how I found out more about the move away from Australia Post.
Certainly noticed the increase but can’t process many of them due to the error “invalid invoice number”, according to Touch the invoice must be over $40 or else it won’t work.
Dumb.
We are seeing more requests for Rail tickets and Opal cards/top ups, and just this week had a customer wanting to pay for Roam.
Even though I don’t like sending these people to other businesses I don’t think it would benefit my business to go down this path and clog my shop with customers who are not spending on higher margin items.
We sell lotto which is labour intensive but we make good money from it but I think if we start selling all these agency lines we will end up like the post office with long queues and frustrated customers.
We have had an increase in those with Fines/Reminders to try and pay these with us. Not once has the Touch system allowed us to process the transaction but if you look at the bottom of the back of the fine it clearly says payable at Newsagents…
There is a little glitch in the system whereby the invoice and account number shown on the bills does not correspond to the number of digits required by Touch to process the payment. Scanning the barcode produces too many numbers.
The trick is to locate the account or invoice number inside the barcode number, and then identify the number immediately following the account or invoice number. When you then add that number to the account to invoice number in the touch entry screen, the payment will proceed.
You will spend your 55 cents just doing that.
Touch has advised they are raising this topic with Transurban.
Very interesting they are now only paying 55c, in The LPO we were getting around $1
The newsagent concerns re 55 cents has been put clearly to Transurban. I expect we will hear a result soon.