There are newsagents in Australia right now doing $500,000 a year and more in online sales. I know a couple above $1 million.
I appreciate those numbers may feel out of touch, made up even. They are not, I can assure you.
What the numbers are is ame changing. The rent does not go up because you shipped 40 orders yesterday. The labour you already roster packs orders in the quiet hours you were paying for anyway. Online revenue makes the two biggest overheads in the business, the lease and wages, work harder. Same costs, more sales across them.
There is a second benefit that few talk about: A serious online business is an off ramp. If the landlord turns difficult, if the rent at renewal makes no sense, if the centre dies around you, a business with real online revenue can move, downsize or walk away from the lease and keep trading. A shop with no online presence has no such option. It negotiates from weakness.
We are way past “should I”
Should I sell online is a 2015 question. The newsagents doing this well settled it years ago. The question now is how, and that is where I see it go wrong.
Where online fails, and why it is on the owner
I know plenty of newsagents where online has failed. Money spent, site abandoned, owner telling anyone who will listen that online does not work for shops like ours.
In every case I have looked at, the failure came down to choices the owner made.
The most common failure that I see: they put their existing shop online, selling a bit of everything the shop carries. I have recommended against this for years. Nobody in Australia is searching for your shop name, and nobody wants to browse a general store online. Online shoppers search for a thing they want. A website wins by being the obvious answer for that thing.
The ones doing $500,000 and more are not newsagencies online. They are niche stores: a jigsaw store, a plush store, a collectables store, a pen store. One passion, deep range, named for the niche. The physical shop behind it is almost irrelevant to the shopper, and that is the point. I run several niche online stores myself and this is the model behind every one of them.
The second failure: they did not feed the website. A website is a shop. Left alone, it dies like one. New product, fresh content, updated photos, week in, week out. The owners winning online treat the website as a store with its own opening hours: always.
The third: they did it cheap. A template thrown up for a few hundred dollars, no thought to search, slow, clunky on a phone. You get what you pay for. Online you are ranked against the best in the country, not the shop across the road.
If you are starting now
Pick one niche where you already have supplier access and knowledge. Name the store for the niche, not for your shop. Go deep on range rather than wide. Commit to feeding it every week before you spend a dollar on it. And budget properly, because a website that cannot be found is a shed with no door.
The newsagents at $500,000 and beyond did not get there with a better shop. They got there with better decisions, made early and kept to.
Online is not the future for newsagents. It is the present, and it has been for a while. The only question left is whether the decisions you make are the ones that work.