If your newsagency does not have a website, you are invisible to anyone who is not already walking past your door. That covers most people.
Your current customers are likely mostly locals. Regulars. People who found you years ago and kept coming back. That is not a bad thing — but it is a ceiling.
A website reaches the shopper in another suburb, another state, who typed “gift shop” or “greeting cards” or something else into Google and got results. Right now, none of those results are you.
The wrong website does not fix this.
A page with your address and trading hours is not a selling tool. Your site needs to show up in search, look right on a phone, and connect to wherever else you might sell — eBay, for example. A cheap site that dates badly inside a year costs you twice: once to build it, again when you have to redo it.
Your POS software should drive the whole thing.
Product names, descriptions, pricing, stock levels, images — all of it should come from your point of sale data. When something sells in the shop, the website should reflect that without you touching anything. If it does not, you are doing double entry. You will make mistakes. Customers will be annoyed.
The POS software and website platform need to talk to each other properly — not approximately, not with a workaround.
Now for the pitch:
Tower Systems builds this for newsagents.
Tower Systems is the POS software most Australian newsagents run on. It also builds Shopify websites specifically for newsagents — connected to your inventory, set up to handle payments and other things vital to success online.
The service is a fixed price. No scope creep, no surprise invoices.
Get in touch: sales@towersystems.com.au.
The thing about getting online is that it offers a plan B option – you can experiment with new product categories that may be far away from what you do in the shop. You can do this using existing infrastructure, like starting a second business with minimal capital.
I can’t imagine a reason any any retail business to be a physical only business. Not today. It doesn’t make sense to me at all.
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Mark Fletcher founded newsagency software company Tower Systems and is the CEO of newsXpress, a marketing group serving innovative independent retailers, including newsagents, who continuously evolve their businesses to be enjoyable, relevant and successful. You can reach him on mark@newsxpress.com.au or 0418 321 338.