I am surprised that this story has not been picked up by any news outlet: Many Queensland newsagents have reported their lotto terminals being down for 24 hours to yesterday lunchtime. It seems to get back online they have to call a help line at the Golden casket office and wait a few minutes while they were reconnected to the network manually. Pretty frustrating for the newsagents affected.
Books are the tip-on of 2007 for magazines it seems. Last month Notebook came with a free book. This month New Woman and Eve each has a book as a gift with the magazine. Customers seem to like these free books more than the bags, sunglasses and umbrellas from last year.
While there is a challenge sometimes in displaying the bulky stock, sales are such that it’s not a problem for long.
Check out the National Distribution Monitor webiste to see how wholesalers and retailers transparently handle newspaper delivery times. It was created as part of a strategy to improve newspaper delivery times, thereby enabling retailers to maximise sales. For those involved in negotiating supply issues with publishers around Australia, the UK website model could be worth considering. Newsagents often complain about the high cost to their distribution businesses of late newspapers.
Four days ago I blogged about the success we had moving Notebook next to our women’s weekly titles. Real Living is also selling well as a result of this move. We will sell out this month. While both titles were doing okay in our store, this move will result in us ordering additional stock for future issues. It proves that the location in our store was not helping the titles to achieve their potential. Better Homes is also benefiting but not as much – this is in part due to a co-location strategy we use for that title which sees it promoted elsewhere. Better Homes also has a much higher sales based before we moved it to this new location.
We have broken the MPA magazine layout guidelines with this move but I don’t think anyone would be unhappy with the result.
While it is not possible to load this high traffic women’s weekly magazine are with all sorts of titles, my view is that careful planning can see mid range titles better supported and sales increase as a result. Sometimes customers who don’t browse too far need to be shown what you have.
Further to my post yesterday about the Inspector Morse partwork stuff up. Yesterday afternoon we received 20 copies of part 1 of this new partworks product. We had sold all twenty copies of Inspector Morse by lunchtime today. Here’s the empty unit (photographed in our backroom) which we used to achieve this sellout in less than 24 hours – from the front of the shop.
Partworks are a goldmine. Some of our customers for Inspector Morse from the last 24 hours have signed up as putaway customers. The challenge will b to ensure that we continue to get the stock we need to serve our customers.
I was talking with a colleague last night about the challenges of selling their newsagency. They have been in the game for ten years and want to purchase a bigger newsagency. Their business has been on the market for three months with little interest shown. He says it’s because of the market. I am not so sure. I’ll share below what I suggested he do in response to his request for suggestions on how to get more interest:
From the front of the shop through to the back make sure the business looks appealing to customers, that it is easy to navigate and that it does not feel cluttered.
Clean, clean and clean. You cannot clean too much.
Take all your stationery off the shelves and put it back on, neater and better laid out.
Make sure all your employees have clean and fresh uniforms.
Have flyers going out in bags as customers leave – show that promoting the business is easy. I good flyer to have while you’re selling the business is a two page A5 size flyer promoting your business as local, friendly and there to serve the community. People like to belong and they are more likely to buy a business which is well connected.
Make sure all your lights are working and are turned on.
Have appropriate music playing.
Reengineer your back room – make it look like a GREAT place to work.
Get on top of your paperwork – make the business look easy to run.
Have a good system in place for employee communication – so you can show that managing the team is straightforward.
Bring in a visual merchandiser to freshen your in store displays and make the shop look sexy – this is just like bringing in rental furniture for a display home. People need to see the possibilities.
This is by no means definitive list. Post your comments with other suggestions and maybe we could create a formal advice sheet.
Selling a newsagency is like selling a home. It has to look appealing – where people would want to ‘live’. If it doesn’t, they will move on to the next store available.
Of course, some buyers don’t want to see any of this because they get pleasure from turning a scruffy poorly run business into a local hero.
Click for commitment was a good story in The Age yesterday about online dating. The sidebar story, while listing various online dating sites at the end, was a pitch for Fairfax’s RSVP. Even thought our 3loves is tiny I would have thought it deserved a mention since it was targeted in a campaign designed to drive traffic for RSVP. But then we’re free and they are not. We’re trying to build something of value for newsagents and they are not.
Several newsagents have contacted me about approaches made to them by parties interested in accessing sales data from their computer system. The pitch is that the newsagent allows the installation of a box between their front counter barcode scanners and their computer and that this box sends barcodes of all items sold to the company pitching the idea. In the return for their participation the newsagent received a gift or small payment.
My view is that newsagents ought to control the aggregated data from their stores. Only this way can they honour their obligations under current supplier arrangements. I am aware of work being done in this area and suggest that newsagents approached hold off for the moment.
Newsagents have been advised that the March issue of Gardens & Outdoor Living magazine, published by Horwitz Publications, will be its last edition. The question newsagents now have is how long to keep the title? The title has been pulled because of poor sales – below 40% sell through in many stores. Some newsagents have told me that following yesterday’s announcement, as proof that the publisher now gets what newsagents knew, they will early return the last issue and use the space more productively. Seems fair.
I’ve been on a plane for the last hour and a half and thinking about my post this morning about yet another partworks stuff up. There has to be a way to connect newsagents and overseas partworks publishers and cut out the middlemen – the importer and the distributor – since they are where the most expensive problems occur.
Newsagents who embrace partworks do so wholeheartedly. In my store for example we would go hard on every new partwork offering. We’d consider a firm sale commitment as long as supply was guaranteed and as long as we got access to all the subscription deals the distributor offers through their website. We would even allocate a permanent high profile space in-store to promote the category. The current sporadic releases coupled with hit-and miss management techniques mean we cannot allocate such space.
So this blog post is a call to partwork publishers such as Marshall Cavendish, Eaglemoss and DeAgostini. Give us your partworks, deal direct with newsagents and let us show how successful your product could be in Australia.
Gordon and Gotch, in their wisdom, decided to not allocate us any copies of the new Inspector Morse partworks released this week by Bissett Magazines. We discovered that we had been left out of this opportunity when the Gotch merchandiser visited us yesterday to put up a display. Our enquiries revealed that this was not a missed delivery by Gotch – they had not allocated any of this new partwork series to us.
We escalated the issue through Gotch and were asked later in the day by Gotch representative if we would like to be put on their list of newsagents who support partworks and therefore want good quantities of new releases. We were surprised to discover that such a list exists. Our partworks interest has been well established, or so we thought. Consider this:
I have blogged here before and spoken at newsagent conferences about the importance of partworks to newsagents – urging newsagents to take up partworks.
I have shared sales data with Gotch management about the efficiency of partworks customers – baskets with partwork product are more efficient than almost any other category we carry.
Ben Kay, Manager of my newsagency, and I have met with Peter Bissett, owner of Bissett Magazines, and discussed partworks at length and out commitment.
Ben and I have had discussions up and down Gotch chasing more and more partworks product , impressing on them the sales we can achieve with the right stock. These discussions have been from the GM down.
Through my software company, Tower Systems, we created some exclusive partworks specifics enhancements and advised the folk at Gotch and Bissett about these – enhancements which help newsagents better manage partworks with a view to better customer service and lower time cost management. The enhancements were delivered to Tower Newsagents free.
I launched the newsagency industry’s first ever magazine loyalty card in 2004 in part as a result of our partworks success and to drive even greater success. Gotch was made aware of this at the time.
Peter Bissett recently brought a UK executive to our store (and others) to show best practice.
Our commitment to partworks is absolute. We only wish we had more new releases to promote.
This time around like others Gotch will blame others, Bissett will blame others. In the meantime TV hits, customers come to us looking for the product, we look like hopeless retailers and we lose them to someone else. These are sales worth fighting for.
Obviously someone at Gordon and Gotch is not across any of this so they cut us out of the Inspector Morse game.
And magazine distributors wonder why newsagents complain about them. Sure we will get Inspector Morse. The ‘system’ which took us off the list is flawed and no one cares enough to fix it.
Footnote: I wrote this blog entry last night but did not click PUBLISH. Just as well as today I’ve been able to edit out some of the more colourful passages. The facts are colourful enough without me needing use more robust language to make my point here. Maybe I should have slept on the email I sent to Gotch but then maybe they will understand how upset people like me get when we are denied an opportunity to do what our newsagencies have been created to do.
For non lottery sales over $20.00 recently we gave away one of our branded red reusable bags – like Coles green bag but bright red. It’s great to see people come back in with them next time, especially when buying a weekend newspaper – when we are most often asked for a plastic bag. Removing plastic bags is a step by step, transaction by transaction process and having an environmentally friendly option in helping us reduce the number of plastic bags we hand customers.
We’ve received a note from Universal Magazines advising that the Safeway near us is no longer carrying Dirt Action magazine. Their pitch is that it’s an opportunity for us to grow our sales. While our sell through rate is only 25% I am prepared to give the title a push and see what happens. While I am sure Woolworths / Safeway management cut the title because the return was less than what they required, maybe we can leverage some growth for us. We will commit to a three issue push and then review. I’m glad that Universal let us know about the opportunity.
I could be way off the mark with this but on a flight from Brisbane to Melbourne tonight many of the passengers walked on with a copy of mX, the free daily newspaper launched by News Ltd in Brisbane yesterday. I didn’t notice it anywhere in the airport but I was not looking. I don’t recall ever seeing anyone flying out of Melbourne or Sydney with mX. If they are distributing from the airport it’s a significant change.
Over the last three years the impact of the Melbourne Formula 1 Grand Prix has been falling in our newsagency. This year I expect no lift at all from car and racing magazine. I put the diminishing kick in sales down to an overall slump in sales of car related magazines. Maybe it’s just my store. If there are Victorian newsagents benefiting from the Formula 1 I’d like to talk to them.
I talked with a customer over the weekend who wanted to pay two Optus bills. She was explaining that she came to our store because we did not charge a surcharge on Optus bill payment like the Government owned Australia Post retail outlet opposite my shop. Given that one bill was 55 cents, the payment surcharge from Australia Post is more than the bill.
I hope that Optus consider how newsagents are helping their customers save money when they make the final decision on whether to cut the commission they pay us for mobile phone recharge. The talk is that they will cut us from 8% to 5%. If that happens newsagents are less like to to support taking Optus bill payments for no surcharge.
There is some confusion among newsagents, would-be newsagents and even suppliers about newsagency brands. Until recently there was Newspower, newsXpress and Nextra.
Confusion has arisen from Nextra’s launch of two sub brands – Nextra express and News extra. I’m particularly suspicious about their choice of Nextra express as it is very close in name to newsXpress of which I am a Director and shareholder. I would have preferred the Nextra experts demonstrate their skill by coming up with a more unique name.
For the record, newsXpress has nothing to do with Nextra express or indeed any of the other groups. Our stores are called newsXpress and nothing else.
Our Ink and Toner promotion – 20,000 flyers in letterboxes around our centre – is generating excellent sales. The success of the promotion certainly reinforces the importance of promotion outside your four walls. The campaign has been so successful that we’re going to relay our ink offering to broaden our offering beyond what we have today:
This space is generating a better return than our more traditional stationery offering thanks to the promotion.
While a tiny category, trading cards are a great habit based product for newsagency who play in the space. In my store our trading card range brings regulars back. We know from sales data that they produce efficient, deeper basket, sales. That we have the product on consignment is even better from a cash flow perspective.
Habit based product is important to newsagents as we deal with the challenges of falling newspaper and flat magazine sales.
Tower Systems is hosting a free footy tipping competition again this year and you’re welcome to join in. To join the NRL competition click here. To join the AFL competition click here. First prize is $300, second prize is $150 and third prize is $50. Results are accessible weekly so a boost to your pride is the real reward.
Gavin Williams, the exalted Grand Poobah of the Tower Systems Footy Competition Committee has decreed the following rules:
1. Tips must be in by 5:30pm EST on the evening before the first game of the round, either Friday’s or Thursday’s. (No late tips will be accepted this year, no exceptions)
2. Failure to enter you tips will see you get the lowest score of the round minus 1 tip. (So if the lowest score tipped for the round was a 0 you will receive a score of -1 for the round)
3. You must be a Newsagent, work at a newsagency, or be a friend of Tower to be eligible to register.
4. All eligible users must register before the start of the season (the first game is on Friday 30th March).
5. Have fun.
Liz Tay has written a good story for Computerworld about the manipulation of Google results in favour of Fairfax’s RSVP dating site using our 3loves brand. Tay looks at all sides and has been successful in getting comments from most of those involved. I am happy with how she has covered the story.
Fairfax and Commission Monster, the Affiliate marketing company contracted by Fairfax / RSVP, claim to be victims of a rogue affiliate. I don’t know if that is true. All I know is that the campaign was running for at least two months before I outed it here and that Commission Monster and their trading partners ought to have discovered it themselves and stopped it.
It’s good to see the Puzzler folk to run a special offer which supports Brain Awareness Week this week. Crossword and puzzle titles are ideal for promoting brain awareness issues.
Brain Awareness Week is an international effort organized by the Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives.
We embrace every awareness week opportunity through the year which has a connection with our range. While there is a business value in the promotion our support also demonstrates a community connection which you don’t see as often at our competitors such as Coles, Woolworths and Australia Post.
Click on the picture to watch a video a newsagent has loaded to YouTube of two people suspected of involvement in a spate of robberies on newsagencies around Newcastle in the last week.
All police stations in the Newcastle area are aware of the spate of attacks and would welcome any information which could assist.
Our decision to create a new health / healthy living area between food and home magazines is paying off. Sales for the titles in this new space are up significantly over the last month. While that may in part due to a more prominent position in our busiest magazine aisle, based on the browsing we see I’d say it has more to do with a more appropriate adjacency.
In creating this new space, we merges titles from two locations into a third single location.
I see the location of magazine categories as fluid. That is, location is determined by changes in the marketplace. They provide a sense that the business is moving forward. While some customers don’t want change, these same customers will turn off the business at some point because it doesn’t change.
While the change is outside the MPA magazine layout guidelines, we take them as a guide onlyin the absence of a mroe appropriate layout – as we have now found.
Tom and June Carter have run Glenside Newsagency in Adelaide for twenty years. It’s a strong home delivery and retail business with over 2,000 home delivery customers, 19 sub agents and two substantial retail outlets. Tom and June have been faithful agents for Advertiser Newspapers, the local arm of News Corp., actively marketing their product in an effort to grow retail and home delivery sales of the Adelaide Advertiser and the Sunday Mail.
A News representative last week advised Tom and June that the supply arrangement they had personally cultivated with Jackson Motor Inn was to be replaced by a corporate arrangement between a company called IPG and Jackson Motor Inn. The current arrangement provides Tom and June 25% of the cover price. The new arrangement will provide them with 10%. They have been told to continue delivering newspapers but for less money. To be fair the News representative said there would be less work because there would not be any returns. The few minutes saves each week do not warrant a chang to the financial arrangements.
This decision by News cuts Tom and June’s margin by 60% for that customer. Tom and June deliver to seven other motels which could be next in this move by News to cut their margin.
While I understand the obligation of News is to drive the share price, it has an obligation to its trading partners of long standing as well as to the community in which it exists. Taking money from small businesses like this, forcing them to carry the cost of a corporate deal, is poor form by News. This is not the Aussie fair go News touts in their pages. This action is unjust and socially irresponsible.
Tom and June cannot pass on the revenue cut forced on them since their costs for delivering newspapers to the motel have not changed.
Newsagencies are finely balanced businesses, relying on many small transactions everyday. Chipping away at the revenue base by publishers, such ads this move by News, devalues the channel. It will make selling newsagencies harder. It will also force newsagents to work longer hours and, as a result, put their health at greater risk.
News ought to revisit their arrangements with IPG. The money that this partnership is taking out of the newsagency channel is hurting many small businesses.
On a side issue, given that News says there will be no returns, does this mean that unused copies are treated as sales in circulation data and therefore possibly overstate circulation data? It’s a valid question given that this IPG company is responsible for similar hotel arrangements in other states.