magazine distribution

Please take my four-question survey for newsagents on early return behaviour and reasons: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/KLBV87H

Please take my four-question survey for newsagents on early return behaviour and reasons: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/KLBV87H

Here is an update just now from Network Services from their IT outage:

Please be advised that NETonline will be available again tomorrow.

If you wish to process returns for the month of July or claim shortages from today’s delivery, please log in to your account and process as soon as you can. We will be tracking the returns for the next week and ensuring that no one will miss out on credits for their July statement.

For those customers using XchangeIT for returns, we will begin pulling your return files through overnight. Please be aware that there may be a large number of files and so processing them may take all day Friday.

You will receive a confirmation email or you can check your NETonline account to ensure your returns have come through.

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank all our customers for your patience and support during this time. Our Customer Service Centre have reported that everyone has been very understanding and we certainly appreciate it.

Thanks again and happy trading!

Magazine distributor Network Services has suffered a major IT outage impacting primary and secondary systems. This has stopped newsagents being able to lodge returns. It has also stopped network sending out electronic invoices for magazines for tomorrow – the busiest day of the week.

Network advises that they hope to have files ready at some stage tomorrow however this will be too late for your morning processing.

My newsagency software company Tower Systems advised all its customers earlier today. That advice included:

It is our recommendation that you manually arrive titles so you can get magazines labelled and on the shelf so they can be sold.

The following knowledge base article has advice for those needing a refresher on arriving manually: arriving magazines manually.

Network are in the process of sending their own email explaining the situation.

If you have any questions please contact the help desk.

Other software companies are welcome to publish their advice here.

The implications for newsagents of the outage are considerable with the processing of returns cutoff passed and no visibility to Network of the quantum of many returns processed – leaving the company challenges as to how to finalise newsagent indebtedness.

Here is information I received from network about this earlier today:

As you have no doubt noticed or heard, we are experiencing some system issues here at Network which has affected Netonline.

Our IT department are working on the issues, but we do not yet have a solid timeframe as to when NETonline will be up and running.

We are aware that the biggest concern for customers will be their crediting of their returns, as the final cut for the monthly statement is today.

If they are using XIT, at the moment their returns are queuing up and they will not be receiving our confirmation emails. XchangeIT have advised that they will be able to pull those forms trough from POS systems when our system is up and running.

If customers use Netonline to do their returns, their position is a little trickier.

In light of this, we will be working with our accounts department to ensure that any stores who attempted to complete their returns today and were unable to are able to have their credits moved forward.

We encourage those customers who are concerned to contact us so that we can register their account for credit checking when the end of month statement is generated. Customers are then encouraged to process their return as soon as possible when our system is back up.

I will be advising customers when our system is back online.

Any questions of concerns, please let me know.

Network Services sent us four copies Diamond Rings magazine. had they asked us we’d have said no thanks. Instead, they sent the four copies. I am guessing they thought the delayed billing to the end of September let them think it was okay. It is not okay sending a title we are not likely to sell and for which we have no space and no decent category. It sucks that we had to send back all four copies as full returns – what a waste of money.

This is a perfect example of how newsagents are disadvantaged over our biggest competitors in the magazine space.

The installation of ExchangeIT software at newsagencies enabled PBL to track real-time sales of all titles and thereby fine-tune its distribution and cut costs.  After that triumph, Alexander as also put in charge of the Nine Network, which has since improved its leadership of the television stations. SIC.

This is from a story by Trevor Sykes published in The Australian Financial Review on June 10, 2004.

It is July 2014. While the magazine distributors may have fine-tuned their distribution and cut costs, newsagents have not. Indeed, the magazine distribution model does not offer levels with which we can control this side of our business. The processes imposed by the magazine distributors hobble our businesses.

Too often today, ten years on, we receive magazines supplied at volumes that do not reflect sales data. Indeed, the experience today and in the last ten years makes a mockery of the story by Sykes.

A good journalist would have done their research rather than taking the PBL spin about XchangeIT. Sykes clearly did not. I wrote to Sykes at the AFR at the time and no correction was printed.

For the record, the problem is not XchangeIT, it is a model that sees distributors ship all stock they are provided. For the most part, that is how they are paid – as a freight company. If their compensation model was based solely on sales newsagents would start to see fairness.

Today newsagents are not treated the same as our competitors – the two big supermarket groups. Coles and Woolworths are supplied on a more equitable basis, giving them an unfair competitive advantage.

With more than 60% of all magazine titles supplied to newsagents loss-making, something has to give. I think we are reaching a tipping point where newsagents will exit the category. Several have done so already – they have stopped selling magazine altogether. I am not advocating this, just reporting that it has happened.

Magazine distributors have the capacity to supply on the basis of sales data and to a model with a goal of selling out close to the end of the on-sale period. It is time they started using their data to achieve this.

The publisher of Car magazine took to Twitter last night to promote the latest issue – celebrating 50 years. In their Tweet they gave a call out to newsagents for which we should be appreciative.

I don’t like their use of good in the tweet since they do not disclose that as the publisher they control where their magazine is distributed so they decide which are the good newsagents.

The publisher could say their distributor decides. Enough publishers control which newsagents carry their titles that this publisher could too.

Are you a bad newsagent if you don’t stock Car magazine? No!

Did you get Photoshop for Photographers yesterday? We did – for the third time. And the stock we received looks like it has been around the country several times. It was dirty – not of merchantable quality. That’s why we early returned it. It looked like trash.

Shame on Network Services for letting this recycled old stock through.

Regardless of the poor quality of the stock we received I’d have early returned it anyway as we have had the title twice already. It’s an abuse of an unfair magazine distribution model that it’s send around for a third go.

Any publisher using Network and experiencing frustrating early returns should look at what happened here to understand why newsagents strike back at Network distributed titles.

The Bauer requirement to prove a minimum sales volume in order to get a direct account does not appear to apply to all with one new account reportedly being approved by Bauer in a town already served with plenty of newsagents and in a small centre that has a challenged retail business track record. The history of the centre alone would highlight reasons for caution.

The It Girl Loom band magazine is months too late to connect with the rapidly fading Loom band craze. Many of us were in this space last year and are now out with the market more than saturated. Also, we were making 50% and 69% GP and not the 25% we get on magazines. I suspect this magazine will be early returned.

I noticed this magazine, Online Privacy, on the shelves of another newsagency and was surprised it had not been widely scaled out. With the many stories about online security breaches and data hacking hitting international companies, this title would sell. Fear drives sales. Online Privacy is a title I am sure many newsagents would have selected had it been offered to us through a pull model.