Sunday newsagency management tip: take control of your magazines

Magazine supply is regarded by newsagents in Australia as the single most important issue to resolve yet many newsagents to not use the tools at their disposal to take on the challenge.

Good newsagency software offers magazine management reports covering:

• Magazine Sell Through Rates.
• Supplier Performance Comparison.
• Magazine Cash-Flow Performance.
• Non-Performing Titles.
• MPA Magazine Performance Tracking.

These reports and others arm newsagents with evidence of magazine oversupply and undersupply yet newsagents rarely reach for the reports when they complain about magazine supply. Instead, they rely on a cash-flow challenge indicating the problem or they rely on the work they see on the mornings of processing magazines into the business.

By not relying on magazine oversupply and undersupply evidence newsagents are not resourced to put their case and this, I think, is one reason nothing has been done about the treatment of newsagents in relation to magazine supply for decades.

Ignorance among newsagents and associations facilitates magazine oversupply and undersupply.

No association or newsagent has used reliable data to make the case in an appropriate forum to my knowledge. Why? Because they are ignorant or they think it’s too hard or both.

Any newsagent running good newsagency software can, in next to no time, document the fairness of supply of magazines to their business. This documentation could be invaluable in making a case to an appropriate forum through which real change could be required of any offending magazine distributor.

Taking action on magazine supply begins with newsagents using accurate data from their business. Individual newsagents and the channel more widely must treat this as a management issue if they want it resolved.