Early year on year sales data I am seeing indicate a solid start to Christmas with some stores achieving terrific year of year growth. This data is from a range of newsagency business situations – city, country, shopping centre, high street, banner group and independent.
Card sales are strong, especially boxed cards with some stores tracking double digit growth. This is good news given the early sales of boxed cards compared to singles.
Gifts are strong too.
While it is too early to say how Christmas 2017 is compared to 2016, the early indications are encouraging.
How is Christmas going for you?
For the month thus far compared to last year our sales are up about 15% on last year and traffic about 10%. Funny enough our cards department is showing as 8% down on last year.
Gift which we have put a lot of work into this year is showing a 350% increase on last year (Small base). This with a higher overall margin makes us have faith in the future away from print/lotto.
As an independent we have an erratic November, gifts encouraging but cards well down so far.
How are you able to comment on Christmas sales for non banner and independents. Is there a grouping exchanging trade numbers I am unaware of?
7% up on last year so far. Broader range of gifts is helping.
No further comment?
Colin I have stores sharing data on a regular basis. These are newsagency businesses I connect with through Tower and which I work with outside of the software co. relationship. Some are in the benchmark pool and others are not. Tower has 1,750+ newsagent customers so the newsagents pool I have contact with is broad.
Excellent! Off a great base our cards are up 21% and gift sales up 24%.
Card sales I attribute to the introduction of another supplier in the range.
Gifts have been our primary focus for a few years now and we have developed a following in our area. Due to these increases we have quit Tobacco completely and print sales are of little/no interest apart from being a mild traffic driver. We are almost ready to cut back more magazine space for gifts or cards.
This year we had pop- up cards from “For Art Sake” and it is attracting new buyers even though it is expensive. Our candle bark cards are trendy and will do well as every year.
Hi Mark,
I was just curious looking at this how wide your frontage of store is? Always looks well presented and laid out.
Pretty happy with November, Cards up 22% and Gifts up 20%.
Hi Allen
what do you put the large increases down to?
Cheers
Our cards are up 10%, gifts 35%, toys, 25% and plush 12% – all off good bases. I put these numbers down to actively engaging with newsXpress strategies, like ranging, out of store marketing and online sales.
Andy,it comes down to lots of things. We work hard to keep gifts ticking over all the time. Always trying new things and going hard at things that work. We have worked especially hard at growing card sales too. As Mark points out above, actively engaging with new opportunities that newsXpress presents to us is probably paramount to our success (this is not an advertisement for newsXpress…lol). Going hard at things that are working is especially important, making sure stock levels more than meet demand and promoting them outside of the store. I`m really excited about unlocking even more potential and have a great feeling about December……Kaching!!!
Did I miss the 3rd quarter benchmark results?