While it is easy for newsagents to complain about the falling traffic generated by magazines, oversupply, inefficient supplier processes or the poor margin, we can leverage magazines for greater economic benefit for our businesses. The best way to do this is through product placement decisions – what we put with magazines.
Placing other products with magazines is easier if you have magazine fixtures designed by a smart shop designer rather than the old school designers who tended to not think beyond themselves.
Check out the photo. The shelf at the top of the magazine fixture allows placement of products. Recently, we used this for jigsaws with excellent effect. Jigsaws are a habit-based purchase, as are magazines.n Enough shoppers purchased jigsaws to make destination magazine purchases more valuable than they might otherwise have been.
Yes, there are people who came in for $5.00 magazine purchased who spend over $40.00 on a premium jigsaw on impulse.
The key to success with placement of products with magazines is the selection of the product. You have to think carefully abut your shopper and what they could purchase. You have to think like them and not like you because what they may purchase on impulse is likely to be different to what you might purchase on impulse.
The next time you find yourself complaining abut magazines, think about what else you could do to drive value from the opportunity of magazine traffic in your business.
Many like me would like to have the money for new fixtures and re-fits. Its difficult with old stands to make your shop look good and do things differently.
Carol, I am all for repurposing old fixtures and other items in the shop and that we can pick up to bring more character into the shop.
The days of newsagency specific shopfits are gone.
Carol, I’ve just finished measuring up some dead space for some “new” shelving……from what I’ve worked out today for that particular spot I will be using “fence palings”……..sounds a bit odd I know but with a coat of spray paint……perfect for what I will need without breaking the bank.
Carol we enlarged and modernised our gift section by taking a bay of the magazine racks,patching the hole with carpet under that bay and bought fixtures (bookshelves & display boxes etc from Ikea. We put the whole lot together ourselves in two days which gave us minimial disruptionand now have a great little area all for well under $3000. we did the same thing for our toy section last year and our book section the year before. real low costs and shop looks fantastic. Still a lot we want to do but a bit at a time keeps it really manageable cost wise as well as not losing sales through being closed
We have done a lot of work in the gift section and toys but I would love to take the old fashioned magazine stands out that run down middle of shop and move them to the wall freeing up middle of shop for display purpose of higher margin items. I’d love to be near IKEA or Bunning’s but sadly 280k away. I would like to get some of the cubes. My best bet is milk crates because that’s about all I can get my hands on. Isolation has its draw backs.
Pallets provide a good rustic look.