Our small suburban newsXpress business in Mount Waverley sold $9,000 worth of charity boxed Christmas cards over the 30 days of November 2022.
80% of the boxed Christmas card sales were to online shoppers.
Online purchases of boxed Christmas cards have taken off for us this year, after already terrific sales in 2021 and 2020.
We are not doing anything special. Any retailer of boxed Christmas cards could do this from any location.
But having said that, we do carry a broad range, describe the cards so they are found through Google searches and we regularly pitch on social media, leading with the charities the cards support.
There are some in our channel who say that online is a small part of newsagency businesses and that most newsagents ts are not even doing online. I think these types of comments are ignorant and designed to discourage newsagents engaging in online.
Again, what we are doing in this newsagency in suburban Mount Waverley any newsagent, any retailer, could do.
The thing is, what this business is doing with charity boxed Christmas cards is only part of the online story. This business has already passed $300,000 in online sales this year. No, that is not a typo, $300,000 … of good margin sales.
The detail of what we are doing is part of the DNA of newsXpress, in the advice it provides for store specific websites – about range, margin opportunities, product descriptions, online marketing, and plenty more. What we are doing in this business we are also doing in another business, for a different category of products, with similar success.
Online retail is strong, but competitive, high-value, but challenging. It is an opportunity to play outside the constraints of the shingle, an opportunity to leverage space and labour to improve the return on these business costs.
To be clear, a newsagent selling online does not have to restrict what they sell to what is sold in a newsagency. We are in some of our businesses, but not in others.
Once you have established yourself online, thanks to excellent insights data and captured customer data it is easy to grow at a faster rate than in a physical store.
I get that plenty of newsagents will read this and think they cannot achieve the same. You will never know if you stand still.
There remain many online opportunities that newsagents can leverage to drive the value of their businesses and to improve the efficiency in their use off labour, space and more in their businesses.
Important footnote: The value of the online boxed Christmas cards purchases goes beyond the cared themselves. These shoppers do put other things in the basket – not all but plenty, making their shopping with us even more valuable.
Second footnote: This is a business without lotteries and without magazines FYI. I mention that to reinforce-orce that we do not have two key and newsagency-traditional traffic drivers in the business.