Newsagents must take action on overseas crossword titles. All three magazine distributors, Gotch, Network and NDD are supplying us with these titles. Collectively, overseas crossword titles perform appallingly. This performance is driven by having too many titles on offer.
Given that the distributors seem unable to resolve this problem, the only option is to tell one or two of them I no longer want overseas crossword product from them. This will leave me with selection from one distributor and, hopefully, better sell through rates from a smaller range. Based on performance, I am likely to drop NDD and Network (except for Puzzler titles which perform well).
The only alternative is for distributors to agree to a pay for performance model. If a crossword title has a sell through of lower than 50% they pay me a service fee. This has been put before and rejected.
1 response so far ↓
1 Terry Thelwell // Jul 9, 2008 at 12:27 PM
I heartily concur with your comments. Imported crossword titles account for 70% of supply but return only 20% of sales. I was recently in a newsagency who had 62 imported A5 titles and 14 local A5 tiles on display. The newsagent admitted that the vast majority of the titles didn’t sell. When asked why he continued to tie up his valuable real estate and cash flow, he answered in the time old tradition of “I haven’t got time to analyse the sales”. Isn’t it better to spend a little extra time on scanning the magazines on arrival and allocating space accordingly, surely this is a time saver in the long term. It’s still frustrating to see agents using the computor as a glorified till. I’m not saying not to stock any imported titles, if the title sells, well done, but do you need 30 Find A Word pockets when 3 would suffice. Selling just as many magazines and freeing up space to display your better selling titles resulting in increased sales. Over supply is a major problem in the industry, I encourage any agent who feels they are being over supplied with any Lovatts titles to contact me and I’ll personally address your concerns
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