Last week I received an anonymous note following my posts here about people selling newspaper promotion sets online. In the email, the correspondent included banking and address details which I have edited of the post below. I am happy to share these details with publisher folk to investigate:
Hi Mark,
I’m a fellow newsagent and a follower on your blog, your recent posts regarding a select few rouge agents selling magazines on eBay drew my attention.
I have done some investigating and hope you can forward my findings to the relevant suppliers and stop this behaviour.
Excuse the long email as I outline my findings.
One seller in particular I noticed is prolific at selling News Limited Promotions and other current magazines often at below cost price, with free delivery.
Link to this seller’s profile:
http://www.ebay.com.au/sch/auton_goyck/m.html?I couldn’t find much initially, the item locations are mainly Carlton VIC, with a few others listings stating Sydney which are likely false too to throw off suspensions from News Limited.
Examples of the listings include the Roald Dahl Full set.
http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/The-MARVELLOUS-ROALD-DAHL-LIBRARY-set-14-books-case-advisor-courier-mail-/252760717924
We’re not allowed to sell without tokens and this eBay seller is selling for $39.99 inc postage.AFL Season Guide
http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/NEW-AFL-Record-Season-Guide-2017-By-Michael-Lovett-Paperback-Free-Shipping-/252762339055?
RRP $40 – Selling for $29.99 inc postagehttp://www.ebay.com.au/itm/OUR-WORLD-IN-CHARTS-UNDERSTANDING-THE-ECONOMY-MONEY-ALAN-KOHLER-/252688189246
RRP $30 – selling for $13 inc postageBy my calculations, with eBay and paypal fees close to 10% and postage for 1-3kg parcel close to $12. This seller must be doing dodgy returns as otherwise the items are being sold way below cost.
I created a fake account and purchased a small item, found the banking details.
In the checkout process, eBay actually linked me to another similar product which I discovered was the same seller with a different account :
http://www.ebay.com.au/sch/32168732/m.html?
This account has over 2300 listings for sale, mostly old magazines dating back to 2013 and around 600 stationary items from GNS all with the item location in Glenroy VIC.
The photos in some of the listings from these 2 accounts share the same floorboard in the background and I found the banking details matched too.
Quick check online showed no recent rental or sale history, presumably this seller own it, can’t really confirm it unless I do a title check but that has a fee.
With the AFL Season Guide I mentioned earlier, I bet not many newsagent’s receive over 12 copies for this title. I’m sure they are able to filter a list of newsagents receiving 12 or more (with a high history of returns) in Melbourne and cross check against Owner’s Names and address.
Hopefully this is enough of a lead to work with and you can forward this to the contacts at News Limited and Gordon Gotch who can do something about it, this character has obviously been around for a while given their feedback history.
There are of course other sellers on eBay selling magazines and promotion items, but none with the same scale and magnitude.
If the outcome from this finding leads to an appropriate action (ie a full audit on the identified newsagency account) , I would be willing to dig through the other sellers and gather more Intel.
Perhaps you can also share this on the blog and enlist some help. I myself do not seek any credit and wish to stay anonymous.
I, too, am concerned about people operating outside the rules when it comes to these promotions. It gives our channel a bad name.
For their part, publishers appear disinterested in what looks like rogue behaviour.
I welcome comments from others on this.
No time for dodgy traders within or outside of the channel
Great work anonymous. If News and Gotch don’t defend themselves from corruption, they will be tarred with the same brush. Earn some respect guys.
Congratulations and thanks to Anon for the thoroughness of his (her?) investigation and for the clarity of his presentation. He is someone with whom I would very much like to meet and discuss other, and in my view, exponentially more urgent concerns in our industry.
I can’t understand why newsagents are so excited about publishers’ rules being broken when the publishers, themselves, are not concerned. They are not concerned because they knew it would happen, they know it is happening, they know it will continue to happen. Unless they are complete fools, and they certainly are not, they would have made an estimate of the cost of this rule breaking, made their calculations, and decided it would be more cost effective to bear the cost of the misdemeanour.
This is a specific instance of a change our society that has become the norm over the past several decades: once there was right and wrong and villains would be pursued because what they did was wrong. Now to face the consequence it is now necessary to both do wrong and do that wrong in such a way that it cost effective for the victim to pursue the matter.
How does it give newsagents a bad name and in whose eyes? Certainly, not the publishers! They are the only ones who can stop it and they choose not to. The public know nothing about it unless it reads this blog. In any case, anyone who does know about it is smart enough to know to know that if you draw a red marble out of a bag, it does not mean all the marbles in the are red. If a sportsman cheats, it does not all sportsman are cheats. If a newsagent cheats it does not mean all newsagents cheat.
Let’s think less about publishers’ rules and more about publishers’ ethics. Let’s put our indignation in trying to correct the abuses of market power the publishers and the suppliers subject us to. How about a fair go in our competition with supermarkets and service stations? How about deliberate oversupply? These are things to which we need to devote our energies
Henry, you couldn’t have put it any better. I don’t get what all the hooha was about with this agent selling on ebay. I’ve been into a number of newsagents, who, after plucking them from bundled packs, onsell freebie mags at full price, or put gift with purchase things, like bags, cosmetics, notebooks, & such, that were once attached to Vogue, Cosmo or Belle, into baskets marked “clearance”. I say good luck to them for being so enterprising. I totally agree with you that there are bigger isuues, like G&G’s hitleresque type attitude towards us, the retailer. After a family tragedy in November, that cost us a small fortune, funds were a little tight, so I called G&G to ask if I could pay half of my bill one week, & the other ONE WEEK later…not a month, not 6 months, but JUST ONE WEEK…& they stopped our supply. WHO does that to their main source of circulation? My other suppliers came to the rescue in the end & gave me weeks, even a month extra to pay their bills, so we wouldn’t have to endure anymore pain from the tyrant that is G&G. I’ve bee in retail a very long time, (37 years), & have been in charge of buying for almost all of that time, & have dealt with a lot of different suppliers, but have never, ever encountered such disgusting, indifferent, moronic, staff as I have at G&G. And where are VANA in all of this? My husband called VANA 2 weeks ago, to speak to someone in the hope, as our supposed industry representatives, that they could address the issues that newsagents are having with G&G, but to date, we’ve had no response from them either. I think we’ll seriously re-think paying them $651 this year, They are seriously having a lend of us too. No-one there (VANA), has ever been able to explain to me, exactly what that fee is for. One thing I have learned in our first 11 months, is that there seem to be a lot of “bullshit” associations sucking us dry for very little in return. So, yes, Henry, you’re absolutely right when you say there are “things to which we need to devote our energies”. Cheers!
Sally in another post you said conditions are conditions, rules are rules. The agent doing what has been written about above is breaking the rules. They are disrespecting their fellow newsagents and their supplier.
To endorse this is to encourage anarchy and while anarchy has its place, I don;t think that place is our channel right now.
Newsagents have more power than they think, rarely is it used.
I wonder about those who know this person, who could
Dob them in
Spill the beans
Name and shame
We have the internet, let’s use it
Sally Mac, I’d like you to know that all newsagents and, indeed, all small business people who read your comment would have sensed the pain you are enduring following your family tragedy. Many of us, perhaps most, would have spent the worse days of our lives desperately trying to come to terms with what has happened and the relentless demands of the business on which our family’s future depends. Strangers though we may be, we feel for you and your family.