I have heard of some newsagents reducing their commitment to Back to School and so have created a quick and anonymous two question survey to harvest newsagent opinions. Please click here to register your response (you can only respond once from any location).
Can anyone please tell me who is the supplier for laminated times table, alpahabet etc charts? Had them many years ago and now customers are asking for them again.
Bluestirpe 0754464420 in at 1.92 out at 4.95 good sellers good service and range
Thanks Mick
For us, Back to Uni has actually become more profitable. Due to more bulk school lists, our Back to School is becoming less significant every year. Most uni students leave things to the last minute and we sell more full priced items then.
We promote them and get the orders and receive a commission on the sales. less disruption and labour costs than packing our own. We are a bit short on space.
A big outpost for us outside K Mart creams it at full margin
This is a good survey as I have thought for some time that we have blithely gone in to btw without thinking about it.
Back to school is loss making and for years I thought it would being people who would shop through the year. It doesn’t happen so I stopped running the discount promotion and made more money as a result.
We make a big deal about BTS but we do not discount this season as this puts you in a no win situation with the majors and their huge advertisement spend.
We do not stock a large range of “essentials” like books, calculators etc but offer alternative addons that has seen us make more money then if we ran with the stock lines. We cannot compete with the advertisement dollars of the big boys even though we are cheaper on most lines. We found that if we had a “sale” people did not spend any more then when they simple came in.
We make more more now then when we chased booklists and all the bells and whistles and we are not stuck with dead stock at the end
We are the only place in town to buy most back to school. Supermarket doe a bit. A good few shop out of town but that is nearly 300k away. Last year I gave every customer a raffle ticket to go in a draw for 10 prizes.( Some I bought with my connections point). We gave a small gift with each order bought from TNW – cost to me about $1. By the number of raffle tickets (orders) I was surprised to see I had captured about 2/3 of the market. We pick and pack . I discount a few items . This year GNS is going to distribute brochures in each area. How are others going to handle this? I will be only picking a few items but what do we do if the customer turns up with an adverting brochure that says available at your newsagent?
Carol,
anything you haven’t got got in stock you must have “old out of” due to unexpected demand and will order more in.
Works for us and next year you will know to stock a bit of that item.