Our eight month old online ink and toner business, Inkfast, did ten times the whole stationery revenue of our decades old shopping centre newsagency in May. This is better than we expected. We created Inkfast to experiment and the learnings have been significant. Online you’ll find better margin business – certainly in the ink and toner category. People are browsing for a smaller range than you get asked about in your shop. Online you connect with more corporate and government customers than you get walking through the doors of your newsagency. By specialising on ink, toner and a few related products we can build better product knowledge and better pricing whereas in the general stationery department in a newsagency the stock turn is lower, customer theft higher and, as a result, your price offering less competitive.
Eight months in my feeling is that newsagents need to urgently re-jig their stationery offering. Newsagents bemoan the competition from Big W, K-Mart, Officeworks and Australia Post. The bigger challenge is from the unseen – online businesses. I’d bet that Officeworks online is getting close to 50% of online stationery business. This is traffic which newsagents just don’t see – traffic which they are not competing to attract.
This is their challenge – to get online and fast and in a smart way.
Newsagents have no one but themselves to blame for missing the online opportunity.