If you’re chasing cost cutting in your newsagency, you may be chasing the wrong thing
Most of the conversations I have had with newsagents lately started with the same question. How do I cut costs?
Fair enough. I ask it in my own shops too. Rent is not going down and neither are wages.
But I have noticed something. Some newsagents are spending all their energy on chasing cost savings and none of it on the business.
Someone will spend an afternoon chasing lower EFTPOS fees or getting insurance quotes and feel productive. The same person has not looked at dead stock in a year, or brought on a new product category.
That is the wrong thing, I think. You can make more money today and into the future by working on your business, in your business. I know the business books don’t agree.
I think the cost saving wins because it is easy. A phone call, a form, done. Working on the business is harder. You have to look at decisions you’ve made and be honest about them based on the evidence. That is uncomfortable, and so it waits.
What I see in the numbers
Here is what I see when I go through the numbers in a newsagency, mine included.
A saving of a couple of hundred dollars a month is hard to find and disappears in one bad quarter. Meanwhile, there is stock on the shelves that has not sold since March. A section running at 25 per cent margin sits where something at 55 per cent could be. Prices on some items are lower than they could be without hurting sales. And every day people walk in, buy what they came for, and walk out without an impulse purchase.
That is where the money is. Not in a cheaper phone plan or insurance.
Where to start
My advice if you want to free up cash and make more money is to start here.
- Run a report of everything that has not sold in six months. Mark it down and get it out within two weeks. That is cash you’ve already spent, sitting there doing nothing.
- Rank gross profit contribution by floorspace allocation. Most who do this are shocked.
- Reset your counter to attract impulse purchases. Surprise people, so they notice.
- Audit where the labour you pay for is spent. Typically, 20 per cent of that time can either be freed for more valuable work or cut from the roster.
- Look at your prices for the products over which you have price control. A 1 per cent price increase is unlikely to affect unit sales. You get to bank the 1 per cent.
None of that is exciting. It is where I have seen the biggest financial benefit, bigger than you will get chasing a cost reduction on insurance.
An offer
If you would like a second pair of eyes, I will look at your business for free and come back with specific opportunities to improve its financial performance.
I need two things from you. A monthly sales comparison report for the year to 31 August 2026 against the same period a year earlier, and a rough sketch of your shop floor layout showing each of your departments. Send them direct to mark@towersystems.com.au and I will come back to you myself.
I am not selling anything here. I want to show, with your own numbers, that working on the business is likely to make you more money than chasing a reduction in an operating expense. What you do with what I find is up to you.
…
Disclosure: I founded Tower Systems (sold it in 2024 and still work for the business today) and I own newsXpress, and I own and run newsagencies.
Figuring out what’s next for your newsagency
Plenty of newsagencies are becoming something else. Some are turning into coffee shops, some into gift shops, some into toy shops, some into card and stationery destinations, some into something nobody has a name for yet. The owners doing this well share one habit. They researched before they moved.
I want to talk about how to do that research today, because the tools have changed. AI tools, used with care, can help you see opportunities you would not otherwise consider. Used carelessly, they will tell you what you want to hear. The difference is in how you use them.
Start by lowering your expectations about scale
There is rarely one big play available inside a newsagency. I have looked at hundreds of these businesses and I can count on one hand the times a single dramatic move was the answer.
What exists instead is a run of smaller opportunities. A category you have not stocked. A local audience you have not served. A shelf that could earn more. An online channel that reaches beyond your catchment. Add several of these together and you have a different business.
So when you sit down with an AI tool, do not ask it for the big idea. Ask it for twenty small ones. Then do the work of sorting them.
I say this based on years of experience doing this.
There is no channel-wide answer
I think the newsagency channel has ten years or less to run in its current form. Newspapers, magazines and agency lines are on life support. That is not a comfortable thing to write, but pretending otherwise helps nobody.
It means there is no template. What works in a coastal town of 4,000 people will not work in a shopping centre in western Sydney. Each business has to find its own path, and that path depends on inputs only you can supply.
The inputs that matter
Before you type anything into an AI tool, get these clear in your own head. Write them down. The quality of what comes back depends on the quality of what you put in.
Location. Where you are, what surrounds you, who walks past.
Catchment. How far people will realistically travel to reach you. Be honest. A destination store draws from further away than a convenience stop.
Your capacity to change. Time, energy, money, skills. And your appetite. Some owners want to rebuild. Some want a manageable evolution. Both are legitimate. Know which you are.
Floor space. How much you have, how much is earning its keep, how much could be freed.
Reach beyond the shop. What a website, a marketplace listing or a social channel could add. Your catchment online is not your catchment on foot.
Give an AI tool these five things in plain language and it has something to work with. Leave them out and you get generic advice about “customer experience” that could apply to any shop anywhere.
The valuable question is what you do not know
Here is the framing I find most useful. You already know your business. You know what sells, what does not, how the shop runs, who your regulars are. No AI tool will teach you that.
What you do not know is what you are missing. Which categories are growing in shops like yours that you have never looked at. Which local demand is going unmet. What is around the corner that nobody in your town has noticed yet.
That is where these tools earn their place. They are good at scanning widely and surfacing things you had not considered. They are not good at knowing your shop. Use them for the first job and trust yourself on the second.
Some prompts I have found productive, adapted for your own details:
- “I run a newsagency in a regional town of 12,000 people (name the town for reference) with an ageing population and a growing tree-change demographic. What retail categories are independent shops in similar towns adding successfully, and why?”
- “List product categories with strong gift appeal, margins above 50 per cent, low breakage risk and suppliers who sell to Australian independents in small quantities.”
- “What do people in a town like mine currently drive 40 minutes to buy that a local shop could offer?”
- “Argue against my plan to add a large toy range. What am I not seeing?”
That last one matters more than it looks. Ask the tool to disagree with you. It is the fastest way to find the weak points in your own thinking.
Do not trust the first answer
AI tools are confident. That is a design feature, not a sign of accuracy. They make things up, they cite suppliers that do not exist, and they will happily agree with a bad idea if you frame it well.
Treat every answer as a lead, not a finding. Then do three things.
Look at it from a second angle. Ask the same question a different way, or ask a different tool. If two independent approaches land in the same place, that is worth something. If they diverge, dig into why.
Fact check anything that would cost you money. Supplier names, wholesale prices, margins, trends. Verify with a phone call, a trade show visit, a conversation with another retailer. Never order stock based on something a chatbot said.
Ask whether it is commercially sustainable. A category that is hot this year and gone next year is not a strategy. Look for demand with a reason behind it. Demographics, habits, gaps in the local market. Fads are fine for a quick win, but they are not a foundation.
This is the discipline that separates useful research from expensive guessing. It takes longer. It is worth it.
Nothing you find is mandatory
Research is a resource. You decide what fits.
I have watched owners take a long list of options and pick two, because two was what their space and their energy allowed. I have watched others say no to everything on the list and come away clearer about what they wanted to protect. Both outcomes are good outcomes. The point of the exercise is to make the decision with your eyes open.
This is an opportunity, not a threat
I know that is easy to say from a distance. But look at what is happening. Newsagents are becoming gift shops, garden centres are adding cafes and homewares, bookshops are adding stationery and events. Independent retail is reshaping itself, and the tools to research the reshaping have never been more accessible.
Ten years ago this kind of market scan cost money most small retailers did not have. Now it costs an afternoon and some care.
Spend the afternoon. Bring your five inputs. Ask the tool what you might be missing. Argue with it. Check what it tells you. Then make your own call.
That is how you find what is next.
And the goal that I think is important to remember: to discover what you don’t know. That discovery can be gold.
The first-ever AI ChatBot made for newsagents
In a first for newsagents in Australia, newsXpress quietly launched its AI ChatBot made for newsagents a few months ago. Last week, to released a major update.
This newsagent ChatBot uses closed-loop AI technology. What that means is that it only answers what it knows, what it has been trained in. It answers questions you ask in a regular way – as if you are asking a person. Here are some of the topics it has been trained in:
- Wage rates based on the current Retail Industry Award.
- Retail employee classification advice based on the work they do.
- How to deal with a difficult employee.
- Steps to take if you think theft is an issue.
- What insurance policy to consider.
- Checking your EFTPOS rate.
- How to dismiss someone within the law.
- How to negotiate with your landlord.
- How to deal with cashflow challenges.
- How to go about selling your newsagency.
- Ways to improve your business.
- How the business is performing compared to others.
- New products to consider.
- Which supplier stocks this or that.
- Where to seek mental health support.
The ChatBot covers many more topics that this. It can also read any report you provide it and give you insights as it sees them.
This is a groundbreaking resource for local small business newsagents and other retailers newsXpress serves. It’s not happened overnight. the work started years ago with the careful development of a searchable knowledge base for newsXpress members. That was the foundational basis. In 2025, the knowledge base was expanded and every existing article reviewed, and updated.
In 2026, each knowledge base article was reviewed again, categorised and new articles developed.
Next, access to FairWork, the Retail Industry Award and other publicly available resources were added, to ensure that advice provided was based on appropriate source material.
During the testing phase many questions were asked, and the answers checked for usefulness and accuracy.
This meticulous process resulted in a knowledgeable newsagents can trust, and use 24/7 to get answers to questions they would otherwise ask on the phone.
This is smart AI backed technology helping newsagents save time and learn tools that will help elsewhere in their business.
AI ChatBots like this one from newsXpress are the future. They help businesses operate efficiently and, through this efficiency, deliver quality services at a lower cost.
If you call someone for advice, you will get an answer with a natural human bias. The newsXpress ChatBot focuses on the answer, without the human bias. This can be important for the types of questions that I see newsagents asking.
…
Footnote: I am a director of newsXpress Pty Ltd.
Reflecting movement in the channel, there is a quiet shift occurring in newsagency software
Even though Tower Systems does not actively promote it’s newsagency software, it’s having a stellar year in welcoming newsagents switching to it.
Full disclosure: I started Tower Systems in 1981. I sold the business to Vela APX, part of the Constellation Group, in October 2024. I continue to work for the business today.
Newsagents are one of twenty different specialty retail marketplaces Tower serves. While making up a sizeable chunk of the customer community, more new customers come from other marketplaces combined. But, and this is what’s interesting, newsagents stand out for the new customers added to the Tower community.
Looking at the many newsagents added this year, plenty are switching from other software. Quietly and consistently, newsagents are leaving the smaller software companies. I think this is happening for a couple of reasons: the software they are leaving has not kept up and the software businesses themselves have shrunk of retreated.
Software for retailers has gone through tremendous change over the last couple of years. Embedded AI tools are a game-changer for retailers saving time and helping them make more money, for real. Software without this fails the businesses.
The cost of maintaining software is considerable. While it’s easy to make noise about software innovation, it is another thing entirely to deliver.
Software companies that don’t keep their product fresh and commercially relevant often take the route of landing profitably. By this I mean they cut costs, retreat, and make money from customers who remain. This means reducing staff, moving to a lower cost space and banking more profit.
I have seen this in several retail marketplaces. I think it may be happening in the newsagency channel. I’m not critical of it, it makes sense for the business.
A vertical market software company focussed on small business customers needs, I think, 500 or more paying customers to remain commercially viable. That does not allow for the level of new feature development necessary in 2026 and beyond. There are software companies in the newsagency channel with considerably less than 500 customers.
I think what we are seeing here is unsurprising given the transition the newsagency channel itself is experiencing with store closures, the retreat of print from newsagents and newsagency business pivots.
Years down the track, if business degrees exist, they will look at the Australian newsagency channel as a case study.
In all of this change is opportunity. Change is when the nimble thrive. I know from a Tower perspective that the early adoption of AI and introducing embedded tools has been key to success. I know that in my own newsagency, early adoption of online sales has been the biggest factor in success. I know that there are newsagents today who don’t identify as newsagents because they pivoted and are more happy in their new incarnation.
This post is about change. We are in the middle of it. I think what’s happening with newsagency software is a reflection on that.
Most newsagents are giving their best space to their worst-performing departments
This post promotes a service my business sells. Read it with that in mind, and judge it on whether the argument holds.
Here is the argument.
The typical newsagency floor was laid out for a business that no longer exists. Newspapers and magazines got the front, the window, the walk from the door to the counter, because that was what people came in for. Print bays have been shrinking for fifteen years. In most stores the space they hold has not shrunk anywhere near as fast.
Now, while you may have made some changes, most I see are not enough for a bright future.
Meanwhile cards, gifts, stationery, art and craft, collectables, plush and the newer categories are squeezed in around the edges. They earn their keep in poor positions, which is exactly why they are worth more space. A category performing from a bad spot is telling you something.
I see this constantly. Not because newsagents are careless, but because layout changes slowly. Nobody wakes up and decides to hand prime real estate to a declining category. You take out one bay, then another, then you shuffle a fixture, and five years later the shop is a compromise between what it used to be and what it is becoming.
The numbers most newsagents never see side by side
Two figures per department. The share of your selling space it occupies, and the share of your sales and gross profit it returns.
Almost nobody has these two figures next to each other. Yet the gap between them is the single most useful number in a newsagency, because it tells you where your rent is being wasted.
There is a second pattern I look for, and it is the one that worries me most.
Revenue flat, transaction count down.
I see it constantly in this channel now. Revenue holds because prices rose and because lotto and agency lines carry a dollar value. Underneath, fewer people are walking through the door. Foot traffic is the whole basis of a newsagency, and when it goes, everything built on it goes with it, usually about two years after the owner could have acted.
You cannot see this in one year of data. It shows up plainly in two.
What newsXpress is offering
A Store Opportunity Review. Send two years of sales data from your POS software and a sketch of your shop showing what is located where. That is all.
It comes back as a written report — how your two years compare on revenue, transactions, average sale, items per sale and department performance; how your space allocation stacks up against what each area actually returns; research on your local area and who is in it now; and research on the category opportunities that suit your catchment. Opportunities listed in the order I would tackle them.
Three business days. Then a follow-up consultation with the retail professional who wrote it, included.
$595 inc GST. $395 inc GST until the end of September. Prepaid to qualify you. And you know what, since I own newsXpress, if the report you receive is of no value to you whatsoever, let me know and I will refund your payment.
It is open to any local retailer, not just newsXpress members and not just newsagents. Gift shops, bookshops, jewellers and homewares stores face the same space and margin questions.
help@newsxpress.com.au.
Why I think it matters more in this channel than any other
Because newsagents are running out of runway, and space is the lever they still control.
You cannot fix print decline. You cannot negotiate lottery terms. You cannot stop a masthead closing or a distribution frequency changing. What you can do is decide what occupies the best two metres of your shop, and most newsagents are making that decision by inheritance rather than by evidence.
The stores I see doing well in 2026 are the ones that stopped waiting for the old model to stabilise and started treating themselves as retailers with a good site. The layout usually changed before the results did.
And the honest caveat
A report will not save a shop in the wrong location on the wrong lease with the wrong rent. Nothing will, and I would rather tell you that in the follow-up call than take your money and pretend otherwise.
But if the business is fundamentally sound and simply arranged for a version of itself from a decade ago, this is a cheap way to find out what to move and what to back.
Draw the sketch badly. It is the part I find most useful.
To kick this off, email help@newsxpress.com.au.
Ten years. That’s what I think this channel has left.
I’m back from our national conference in Perth. Two and a half terrific days with newsagents, newsXpress members and suppliers to the channel.
Two subjects took up most of the room. Where this channel is heading, and what AI is already doing inside shops.
Where the channel is heading
I’ll put it plainly. I think the newsagency channel, as a channel, disappears inside ten years. It gives me no pleasure to write that.
Australia sits one decision away from the closure of a capital city daily newspaper. Several of them lose money. They’re being held up partly by emotion. News Corp has always loved ink on paper. Kerry Stokes has his attachment to The West Australian. Nobody wants to be the publisher who switches the first one off. That decision is coming anyway.
Print stopped delivering news a long time ago. By the time the paper lands on the counter the story is old. Your customers already know.
Magazines tell the same story in slower motion. Deliveries went from three days a week to two, and now to one. In some places it’s a coin toss whether they turn up at all. Titles we missed used to be couriered out. Not now.
Are Media is publicly up for sale. There’s plenty of talk about a break-up, including Are Direct and possibly XchangeIT. Worth watching closely, because whoever ends up owning the distribution business owns the physical route into our shops.
Stationery keeps drifting to Officeworks. Dollarama buying The Reject Shop means a harder shove from the value end of the market.
And when we make the news, it’s a closure story. Another one bites the dust.
The answer we spent most of our time on
Most of the conference went on what to do about it. We call it decoupling.
Disconnect from being a newsagency. Stop identifying as one. Present as something completely different, ideally something local and yours, rather than another national group’s brand painted over the top of the old shop.
This is more than a cosmetic change. Once you’re not a newsagency, you can sell to people who would never have walked into one, and that’s the whole point.
Three retailers who have already done it spoke to the room. Former newsagents, all of them. They talked about de-identifying, and about how their businesses run now.
AI, live on the big screen
Nobody gave a presentation about AI. We put it on the big screen and worked on real businesses, no script, in front of the room.
One retailer is doing well with clothing and wanted to build it out. In front of everyone we looked at the mistakes being made, then at how to tell a better price and sizing story for the demographic in that town.
Another had already decided to decouple and wanted to know what else to sell. That session produced a series of opportunities needing little capital, and then a four or five page business strategy report.
We spent time on the risks too, on where AI gets things wrong. It’s useful in small business retail, but only with a human checking the work.
What I said to the suppliers in the room
This channel will lose two to three hundred newsagents this year. So think hard about what you pitch.
The smart operators want product that brings more people through the door, and a broader demographic than they have today. Product that panders to the history of the channel has no future.
If you’re not helping retailers reach further than they reach now, you’re worth less to them than the supplier who will. We’re in this together, and the ones who understand that will do well out of the next few years.
I have been called pessimistic before
A newspaper publisher once stood in front of a room and told everyone I was wrong about declining newspaper sales. Magazine publishers objected to me discussing magazine decline at all. Those calls have aged fine.
There’s no doubt in my mind that the traditional Australian newsagency has no future. A business built on lotteries, papers, magazines, stationery and greeting cards, and not much else, is already dead. The owner just doesn’t know it yet.
Now look at a shop leaning into sensory product, Pokémon and other collectibles, and good quality gifts. People walk in for completely different reasons. That business has somewhere to go.
Where we are
newsXpress has 194 members. We’ve never chased being the biggest, and we’re not your average newsagency marketing group. What we have is a group of retailers who want to move, and are moving.
Our focus is a strong back half of 2026, then 2027 and 2028.
Mark Fletcher
mark@newsxpress.com.au
0418 321 338
What AI found in one shop’s sales file
I have been testing the newly announced newsXpress AI business performance analysis service with a few different shops and it is fascinating what it discovers, that the retailers love.
In each case, the retailer invested a few minutes to run a report and answer a couple of quick questions. The skilled and carefully prompted AI did the rest of the work.
What the retailer got back was immediately actionable, quickly money making.
One retailer found a new product category they had never considered, something they can trial for monomial cost but that, if it works as expected will be a game changer, that’s what they called it, a game changer.
Another retailer retail was direct: this is the kick up the arse I needed.
Another retailer didn’t believe the insights and advice. Two days later they came back saying they had done their own research and \had to apologise because the report was right. How could it know?, they asked. That’s the secret sauce here – discovering the unknown about local retail businesses and helping them make good decisions quickly.
Another retailer was amazed at the ToDo list. This would have taken me days to research and put together. That was weeks ago. The made half the changes and are already making more money as a result.
These are true stories that have come from the AI services that newsXpress is now offering to other retailers, not just newsagents.
This has changed how I see my business was the response from the most skeptical retailer we worked with. They thought AI was a gimmick and only became involved in the trial reluctantly..
None of this is magic, and none of it required new software. The numbers were sitting in the POS all along, the way they are sitting in yours right now. Every shop’s system quietly records what sells, when, at what margin, alongside what does not sell at all. What has been missing is not the data. It is the time and the tools to ask the data anything useful. AI has made the asking fast and cheap, if you know how to ask.
Teaching retailers how to ask is exactly what the AI training packs do, on your data, live and one on one. The snapshot is the free taste of it.
The offer stands this month: send a sales extract from your POS, any POS, and one page comes back showing what AI can see in your numbers. No charge, no obligation, and most owners are surprised by something on the page.
Start here: help@newsxpress.com.au.
AI training for local independent retail
I have written plenty here about what AI can do for a local retailer: the sales data it can read, the hours of writing it can save, the questions it can answer between customers. The most common response I get is some version of: I believe you, but I don’t not know where to start.
So we (newsXpress) built the place to start.
We are launching two AI training packs made specifically for independent retailers, like newsagents, open to any independent retailer in Australia, whatever group you belong to or none.
This is not generic tech training with a retail slide bolted on. The one-on-one sessions are built around shop questions, run by people who work in this channel every day.
The first pack, Getting Started with AI, is for owners and staff who have never touched AI, or tried once and gave up, or who don’t think AI is for them. Eight hours, delivered live and one on one, by call or video call, scheduled in blocks you choose: one-hour weekly sessions, two-hour sessions, or bigger chunks if you prefer. An hour a week is what most owners protect, but the timing is yours. You will set up accounts, write prompts for your own shop, produce a week of content in a session, and build a 20-minute weekly AI habit. From this pack alone, a retailer can expect time savings worth many times the cost within a few months. No jargon. Nothing you do can break your business. We will be as clear about what AI gets wrong as what it gets right.
This pack comes with a guarantee: if you feel that it’s not helped you, you will get half the cost returned to you.
The second pack, AI on Your Own Business Data, is twelve working hours, not classes. You bring your sales history, we clean it, and prompts are developed for your business. The sessions run deep research on your data, take your feedback, then go deeper. The result is a revised plan of action for your business to attract more shoppers and grow sales. Every session ends with a number you did not have and a decision you can act on that week.
Who delivers it? Someone with local small business retail experience who listens to you and talks in terms you can understand, terms relevant to your type of shop. People with retail experience and AI skills who speak your language. This crew has been helping local small business retailers put AI to work for several years, with terrific results: hours saved every week, better quality decisions, and owners seeing things in their business they could not see before. Whatever software runs your shop, we can help you benefit from AI. Two people per store. Full refund after session two if it is not for you.
And if you want to test the water first, do this: send us a sales extract from your POS and we will send back one page, free, showing what AI can see in your numbers. That page tends to answer the “why bother” question better than anything I could write here.
Details and bookings: help@newsxpress.com.au.
A card company paying cash for card space says a lot about their business
Greeting card suppliers are back at retailer doors offering cash for wall space.
Before you sign, understand exactly what you are agreeing to.
I don’t get it, I really don’t.
What does it say about the card company that they have to give a retailer cash to buy their business. I would have thought that the retailer and the card company would make more money if the cards were the best and backed by the best service. A bag of cash takes consideration away from product. maybe that’s what they want.
The offers I am hearing of are big. Fifty thousand dollars. One hundred thousand. Sometimes three hundred thousand. The old structure was an interest free loan, repaid through rebates on card sales. More recent deals leave the rebate untouched and require the retailer to repay the cash on top.
Either way, the deal is the same. The supplier is not investing in your business. They are renting your wall. And you are the one carrying the debt.
It doesn’t make sense to me.
When choosing a card supplier you need to choose based on revenue for the business from cards, and what else happy card shoppers will buy in your business.
A card company should earn its space through sell-through. Once money enters the deal, performance stops being the measure. You stop asking which cards sell and start planning what the cash will pay for. That is exactly what the supplier wants.
The evidence is clear. We have seen a business where one supplier held the entire card wall. Splitting the wall fifty fifty delivered immediate double digit growth. A later supplier change lifted sales again. Competition and range drove those results. No cheque did.
One newsagent with multiple stores took around three hundred and fifty thousand dollars from a card company and later collapsed, leaving the supplier out of pocket. I wonder if retailers ended up paying for this?
Plenty of retailers are unhappy with their card company and cannot leave. The debt locks them in.
The cash is not free. You pay for it in weaker card sales and lost freedom to change suppliers. If a card company wants your wall, make them earn it with product that sells.
If a card company offers you cash up front for a commitment, pause. Sure, the cash would come in handy. The question has to be – over the lifetime of the contract, what is the real cost of the cash I might get today? Also ask: how bad are their products that they need to buy my business?
What The Lottery Corporation’s FY26 results mean for newsagents
The Lottery Corporation released its FY26 results and annual report this week. There is plenty in them for anyone with lotteries in their shop, including one number that will get less attention than it deserves: the migration of lottery sales online has stalled, for now.
The year in numbers
Lotteries turnover was $6,547 million, down 3.1%. TLC puts the fall down to a ‘bad’ run of jackpots, which it calls a 1 in roughly 45 year outcome, costing around $700 million in turnover. There was no $100 million-plus Powerball for the first time since FY21 and no $50 million-plus Oz Lotto for the first time since FY17.
That context matters. Soft lottery commission in FY26 was bad luck with jackpot sequences, not a collapse in play. Base games grew 5.6%. Saturday Lotto was up 9.4%. Instant Scratch-Its rose close to 8%, and scratchies are a retail product.
Digital migration has stalled, for now
Digital turnover fell 2.3% to $2,760 million. Retail turnover fell 3.8% to $3,787 million. Digital’s share of lottery turnover crept from 45.7% to 46.6%, and the share gains are shrinking each year: 2.3 points in FY24, 1.4 in FY25, 0.9 in FY26.
Digital sales have now gone backwards in dollars for two years running, from a jackpot-fuelled peak of $3,005 million in FY24. Retail still writes the majority of lottery turnover.
Before anyone celebrates, I have two cautions to share. Jackpot games skew digital, so a weak jackpot year flatters retail’s position. Some of this pause is mix, not migration reversing. And TLC’s strategy leaves no doubt about direction.
TLC describes itself as moving from a lottery operator to a digitally-led entertainment platform, calls digital its primary growth engine, is building a new app for 1H28 and wants to convert more than 4 million unregistered players into known, registered customers.
The shift online has slowed, not stopped.
What retailers should watch
A commission review is coming. In the FY27 priorities published by TLC is: “review retailer commission structure”. No detail is given. Individually and through our representative bodies, we need to engage early and argue for a structure that rewards service and performance rather than one that shrinks the pool
The network language has changed too. TLC now talks about its retail footprint as quality over quantity. Expect continued pressure on marginal outlets and higher expectations of those that stay. At 30 June 2026 there were 3,880 lottery outlets and 3,263 Keno venues, more than 7,100 points of distribution in all.
The channel is still valuable. TLC paid $637 million in commissions to retail and venue partners in FY26, and its CEO acknowledged those partners are primarily small businesses.
Price rises keep coming. Powerball went from $1.20 to $1.40 a game in November 2025 and held 63% of the increase. Set for Life goes from 60 cents to 70 cents in September 2026, with an Oz Lotto change slated for 1HFY28.
On integration, new terminals have been rolled out in NSW, the ACT and Queensland, with Victoria to follow. QR codes on unregistered tickets, digital prize claiming and Check & Collect blur the line between channels. Where TLC connects digital play back to a retailer, support it. Where it does not, ask why.
What I would do in-store
Nothing in these results changes my long-held advice. Don’t run a business reliant on lottery commission to survive. Lottery products bring traffic on thin margin, and around 30% of turnover from lottery commission is the most a well-balanced newsagency should rely on. Even though it is hard hard work, use the traffic to build baskets in cards, gifts and good margin categories. And watch that commission review like a hawk.
The point
TLC had a soft year because jackpots ran cold, not because Australians stopped playing. Digital sales fell and the migration online has stalled for now, while the company’s plans remain firmly digital. Retailers have been handed time and a warning in the same set of results. What we do with both is up to us.
General commentary, not financial advice.
When you consider EFTPOS rates: who makes money off each sale you make
Retailers are starting to be pitched new post October 1 EFTPOS payments processing offers.
My advice is be careful.
Make sure you know who will make money from your decision.
Every dollar taken across the counter has more hands on it than most retailers realise.
Depending on the point of sale software in use, the software company may be taking a percentage of each sale.
Depending on how payments are set up, a payments provider is almost certainly taking a slice of every card transaction.
And some leases include a turnover clause, where the landlord takes a percentage once sales pass an agreed threshold.
Plus, there so sometimes a clip to be made by the party proposing a payments provider to you.
Make you know who will make money from each transaction you process and how much they will make.
None of those third parties, the POS company or the promoter of a payments offer, are doing the work in your business. The retailer is out there every day, bringing customers in, working the floor, and grinding out the sales. The fees come off regardless.
That is why the question is worth asking properly. Who makes money off the transactions in this shop, and how much?
Payments are singled out as the most actionable place to start. The goal is a payments arrangement at the lowest possible cost. A retailer paying less than the shop down the road is already ahead of it, on every single sale, without selling one extra item.
A cost plus model is a good situation. There is where the payments company charges you their actual cost and an agreed margin for themselves. This pricing is lean, focussed and transparent.
There is a timing point too. From October 1 there is a direct hit to margin rather than something passed on. Getting those costs down now is the practical response.
Ask tough questions. List every party earning something from a transaction, put a number against each, then work through them one at a time. The individual savings look small. They are fractions of a sale. Those fractions add up quickly across a trading year.
Why a franchise model may not suit Australian newsagencies in 2026
The newsagency channel is in the middle of change that will not reverse. It has been for years, but in 2026 the pace of change has increased. Print is declining. Lottery purchases are shifting online. Foot traffic patterns have changed. How, when and where people shop has changed. The business model that worked in 2010 does not work now.
In my opinion, this is the wrong time to lock a business into a franchise agreement.
Let’s consider the regulatory framework of franchises first.
Franchising in Australia is regulated under the Franchising Code of Conduct, but the Code governs disclosure and dispute processes, not the day to day restrictions written into the agreement itself. Those restrictions are extensive. A franchise agreement typically binds you to approved suppliers, set trading hours, mandated fit-outs, brand standards and system-wide promotions whether or not they suit your shop.
You also inherit the behaviour of every other franchisee in the network. One store cutting corners, one public dispute, one head office misstep, and the brand you pay to trade under takes the hit in your suburb too. You carry obligations to a system you cannot control, run by people you did not choose, alongside operators you have never met. Independence has risks, but at least they are your own.
Innovation happens in stores, not head office
Franchise head offices move slower than the market. A new product category or a local marketing idea has to pass through approvals and brand reviews before anything happens in-store. Sometimes it needs a contract amendment.
An independent retailer can trial a new line this week. They can negotiate a local supply deal or move fixtures tomorrow morning. I have watched stores add a category in a fortnight that a franchise network would still be scoping six months later.
No two shops are the same
A regional newsagency and a shopping centre store need different product mixes. Franchise models tend to enforce supplier mandates and centralised ranges.
When your local market shifts, you need to move into whatever works there. Niche gifts. Collectibles. Product from a maker two suburbs away. Waiting on franchisor approval means missing the window.
You carry the risk, they keep the control
In most franchise arrangements the franchisee carries the lease, the working capital and the staffing liabilities while giving up strategic control. If you are taking all the financial risk, you should have full authority over direction, brand and where your capital goes. Especially now.
Franchise fees are inflexible when margins are not
Royalties and marketing levies are predictable overheads in stable conditions. When core categories are shrinking, they are cash drains you cannot switch off. Every dollar of mandatory fees is a dollar less buffer for volatile trading.
Independence does not mean isolation
A good marketing group gives you buying power and shared marketing without telling you what to stock. Good POS software gives you the data to make your own decisions.
Right now, autonomy is the most valuable asset a newsagent has. Signing it away to someone else’s model is a strange way to prepare for the next five years.
Stop! Is that mountain with riches at the top waiting for you worth it?
I keep seeing the same ads. People selling scale. Courses, seminars, mentorships at a few hundred dollars a month. That is what this video is about, because I have had enough of the pitch.
You know the look. The bright new car. The house they bought for mum and dad. Dinner at some restaurant in Europe. It is all there to sell you the idea that the same life is waiting, if you just pay for the secret.
Here is what bothers me. Those ads are built to make you feel bad about a business that is already working. There is no guarantee attached. The money only moves one way, and it is not towards you.
My argument is simple. A profitable, well run local independent shop can give you more than a scaled one ever will. Scale has costs the marketing never mentions. The money, sure. But also the worry, the hours, and the control you hand over to other people. I have watched retailers chase scale and lose plenty. I have watched others stay local and do very nicely.
So what actually works? Be careful with every dollar you put into the shop. Decide on facts, not on a hunch. Make mistakes and get on with it. Fail early, fail often, learn each time.
One more thing. We are economic champions in this country and almost nobody says it out loud. The media certainly does not. So say it to yourself at the end of the day. You traded today. You will open again tomorrow. You like the work and you met some good people doing it. Sit with that for a minute. It counts.
If you are banking money and you are happy, you do not need someone charging you to tell you to want more.
Try and ignore the noise from the scale promoters because, in reality, they are only promoting themselves as they want to scale. Too many of them genuinely care less about you, no matter how slick their pitch.
As always, buyer beware.
There is no easy road
Despite what some will try and sell you, there is no easy road for success in a newsagency. Every day it’s work. The rewards can be good, for the right work.
A better way to handle the never-ending donation requests
Unless you have a structured approach to handling donation requests, it’s likely you are giving value away for no benefit. You’re in business. Unless you are successful you cannot afford to give away donations for nothing.
Practical AI for newsagents and other independent retailers: a starter guide
AI is software you talk to in plain English. Type what you need and it types back – or tell it what you want through voice input. Most of the tools run in a browser, many cost nothing, and you do not need to be technical to use any of them. Here is how to put it to work in your shop this week.
Start with what is already in your POS software
The easiest AI to use is the AI with nothing to set up. For Tower Systems customers, the Retailer AI tools are built into the software, with no prompts to learn and no extra subscription. Because they were built for local retail, they already understand shop data.
They cover the jobs that quietly eat a retailer’s week. Product descriptions get drafted from basic item details, ready for your website. Supplier invoices arrive as PDFs and import automatically, with stock codes, costs and quantities filled in. Reorders can be generated on rules you set, for your review before anything is sent. An end of shift email summarises the day’s trading. Pricing can be checked against other retailers without you giving up an afternoon.
If you do nothing else from this guide, turn those on.
Three rules before you go further
Outside your POS software, the rules are short. Never paste customer names, emails, phone numbers or addresses into an external tool. Treat everything AI writes as a draft and edit it before anyone else sees it. And start with one task rather than ten: test it, judge the result, then add the next.
Which external tool
Start free. Free plans are enough for most retailers, and within a month you will know if you are hitting their limits.
Claude (claude.ai) is the strongest writer of the group and suits customer emails and planning. ChatGPT (chat.openai.com) is the general all-rounder for ideas and quick answers. Gemini (gemini.google.com) makes sense if your shop already lives in Google Workspace. Canva (canva.com) handles social media graphics, posters and shelf signage. Perplexity (perplexity.ai) answers research questions with sources you can check.
Paid plans run roughly $20 to $28 a month. Consider one only when you hit daily message limits or find yourself uploading documents regularly. One chat tool and one design tool is plenty.
Six things to try
Hand over the basic writing first. Social posts, promotion copy, signage. A prompt as plain as “Write a friendly Instagram post about our weekend candle sale at a small Melbourne gift shop, under 60 words” comes back usable in seconds.
Paste messy notes from a supplier call into a chat tool and ask for an action list for your team.
Let it draft replies to routine emails, the late order and the event invitation, then read and adjust before sending. The reading part is not optional.
Use it to brainstorm when the calendar looks quiet. Ask for ten Father’s Day ideas for your kind of shop and expect two or three good ones, which is a fair return on two minutes.
If your staff will use AI, write a one page policy. Say what is allowed, such as drafting and task lists, and what is banned, which is customer data and passwords. Anything public-facing gets a human read before it goes out.
Then, after thirty days, take stock. Did it save time? Did the emails get better? If something worked, add one more use. If something did not, drop it without guilt.
What to watch
AI states wrong things with complete confidence, so check prices, supplier terms and dates before they go anywhere near a customer. Make sure the words still sound like your shop and not a corporate template, and edit until they do. Keep passwords, financials and customer records out of public tools, always.
None of this is complicated. The retailers getting value from AI are not the technical ones. They are the ones who started.
For newsagents who want more than an average newsagency delivers
I have owned newsagencies since February 1996. In that time I have seen the best of this channel and plenty of the worst, and I understand why some newsagents feel stuck. The categories we were built on are in decline. Papers, magazines, lottery. That is not a criticism of anyone. It is arithmetic.
I also understand what stuck feels like, because newsagents describe it to me every week. You open early, you work hard, you do everything the old model says you should do, and the numbers drift backwards anyway. It wears people down. Some of the most capable retailers I know have quietly concluded that this is simply what owning a newsagency is now, and that the best they can hope for is a slower decline than the shop up the road.
I do not accept that.
Watching hundreds of these businesses up close has taught me that average is a choice. The newsagents doing it toughest are usually running the model as it was handed to them years ago. The ones enjoying their businesses, making good money and looking forward to Monday, are running something quite different, often from the same shop, on the same street, with the same landlord.
The difference is rarely luck or location. It is decisions. What to stock, what to quit, how to use the space, where new shoppers might come from. Made one at a time, with evidence, those decisions add up to a different business. I have watched a wall of slow magazines become the most profitable run of shelving in a shop, and shops attract customers who would never have crossed the threshold two years earlier. None of it happened overnight, and all of it started with one decision made on evidence rather than habit.
So where is the growth coming from? Not from the old categories. In the shops that are growing, the customer traffic, revenue and gross profit contribution growth is coming from categories traditional newsagents do not stock. This is where real innovation lies in our channel. The shops finding a brighter future are ranging products the traditional newsagency never considered, and they are being found by shoppers who never thought to walk in.
That belief is why newsXpress exists, and I should be upfront here: I own the business, so read what follows knowing that. What we offer members is hope backed by practical support. Hope on its own is just waiting. So the support is practical. We start by listening to what you want from the business, because that is different for everyone. With your permission we look at your data, and we almost always find early wins sitting in plain sight. From there we work beside you on a plan specific to your shop, your resources and your goals, at whatever pace suits you. Nothing is mandatory, and what you build stays yours.
There is also the company of others on the same road. Our members share what is working in their shops with a generosity that still surprises me after all these years. Nobody has to figure this out alone.
I will be honest about the other side too. If your plan for the business rests on newspaper home delivery, lottery commissions and parcel collection, we are probably not the right fit, and I would rather tell you that in the first conversation than take your money.
But if you are wondering whether there is a brighter future for your business than the one currently in front of you, I am happy to talk. No pitch and no obligation, just an honest conversation about your situation and what might be possible. Email me at mark@newsxpress.com.au or call me on 0418 321 338.
Asking your landlord for a rent reduction? Prepare before you knock
Asking a landlord for a rent reduction is a reasonable thing to do. Rent is one of the biggest costs in any retail newsagency, and when circumstances change it makes sense to talk. But how you ask matters as much as what you ask for.
The first question is a hard one, and you ask it of yourself: are you making good money? A smart landlord will want to see your profit and loss statement. If it shows a healthy, growing profit, your argument may disappear before it begins. Think that through before you knock on the door.
If there is a case, build it before you make the request. Know why you are asking. What is the commercial reason? Gather the evidence and present it clearly. Bring your P&L. Bring your sales figures. Explain the situation rather than simply asking for a discount.
Too many retailers ask before they have prepared. I have seen it plenty of times. Some have no real case. Others have a strong case but never present it, so the request quietly fades away. It is hard to blame a landlord for saying no to an argument that was never made.
The detail matters. What is your occupancy cost as a percentage of revenue? Are sales up or down? Is the location delivering the foot traffic you expected when you signed the lease? Compare this quarter with the same quarter last year, and this half with the same half a year earlier. The Tower Systems newsagency software can produce these numbers in minutes.
Do not be afraid of difficult numbers if that is what the records show. Honest data builds a stronger case than vague complaints.
Remember, too, that landlords are more likely to help a tenant they want to keep. If you pay on time, look after the shop and bring traffic that benefits the stores around you, you are worth keeping. Neighbouring retailers may even support your case, and it is worth asking them.
Preparation is everything here. Have your evidence in hand and a specific number in mind, because a landlord can take a prepared case to their own decision makers.
Walk in ready.
Fake NeeDoh is being sold in Australia. Check your stock today
Fake NeeDoh squishy product is being sold in Australia. Two wholesalers have been caught stocking it. The packaging looks like NeeDoh. The product is not. It is fake, it has not passed Australian safety standards, and every retailer selling it is breaking the law.
This is not a grey area. It is illegal.
The safety problem
NeeDoh is a sensory toy. Kids squeeze it, chew on it, carry it everywhere. Genuine NeeDoh is tested against mandatory safety standards. With a fake, nobody knows what is inside it or what happens when the casing splits in a child’s hands.
The law
Selling this product breaks the law in at least four ways.
It infringes the Trade Marks Act 1995. Selling goods with a false mark is a criminal offence under Part 14 of the Act, carrying up to 5 years in prison.
Not a fine. Prison.
It is passing off at common law, misleading or deceptive conduct under section 18 of the Australian Consumer Law, and a false representation under section 29.
It breaches section 106 of the Australian Consumer Law, which bans supplying goods that fail a mandatory safety standard. Penalties doubled in March 2026. A corporation now faces up to $100 million. An individual faces up to $2.5 million.
And under Part 3-5, a supplier is liable for injury caused by defective goods. With a fake, the manufacturer cannot be found. The retailer who sold it may be the only person an injured child’s family can sue.
No supplier invoice protects you. Buying in good faith is a reason to act fast. It is not a defence to keep selling.
The wholesalers
Wholesalers supplying our channel have been found offering fake NeeDoh. That any business person would sell fake product, risking public safety and all for profit, is appalling. It puts every retailer who buys from them at risk and drags the reputation of the whole channel with it.
What to do
Check your stock against genuine NeeDoh from the authorised Australian distributor – William Valentine. If in doubt, take it off the shelf now. Do not sell it down to clear it. Once you know it is fake, every sale is a deliberate crime. Report it to the ACCC and the distributor, and only buy NeeDoh from the authorised source. If a deal from another wholesaler looks too good, it is.
Why this matters
Local retailers trade on trust. Parents buy NeeDoh because they trust what is in the packet. One fake product on one counter damages that trust for all of us. Check your stock. Check your suppliers. If you find fake NeeDoh, it comes off the shelf today.
This one makes me angry. Risking the health of kids for a few bucks is disgusting.
Payments providers are chasing newsagents. My advice: don’t rush
Payments providers are chasing newsagents right now. Suncorp Bank exiting this space has plenty of newsagents thinking about what to do next, and the providers know it. The calls and emails have started, and reps are turning up in shops.
My advice is to not rush into a decision.
It is still early days. I know of three deals being pitched to newsagents right now, and I know of more options being prepared that are not public yet. Better deals may emerge. In my experience of moments like this, they usually do.
There is time, too. The new regulations banning surcharging start October 1. That sounds close, but for a decision like this it is not. You can watch the market for a few more weeks and still have plenty of time to move comfortably before the deadline. Nobody should feel pressured into signing with the first rep who calls.
When you do compare offers, look past the headline rate. What is the total cost per transaction once every fee is counted? What is the contract term, and what does it cost to leave early? Who owns the terminal, and who answers the phone when it stops working on a Saturday morning? When does the money land in your account? Cash flow depends on that last one more than people expect. Whatever answers you get, get them in writing.
Most of all, think about, and ask questions about, who is making money from the decision you make. Every deal being pitched earns someone a margin somewhere. Maybe the provider, maybe a referral partner earning a commission along the way. Once you know who gets paid and how much, you can judge whose interests the deal really serves.
This is not a criticism of the providers. They are doing what businesses do. But it is your decision and your money. Waiting a few weeks costs you little. A bad contract can cost you for years.
Take your time. Do your research. The right decision could save you a ton of money, which will matter after October 1. So, be careful, do your due diligence. Ask the tough questions. Sign only when you are sure.
If you’re at Gift Fair in Melbourne
Trade shows are exciting, and that is exactly why buyers need to be careful. A lot of money gets committed in a couple of days on the floor, so ahead of the Gift Fair, here is some calm advice.
Be careful what you buy. Some wholesalers use trade shows to shift last year’s stock, or the year before’s, because it has been slow to sell and the show is a chance to move it. So when a rep tells you a product is a runaway success, ask them to back the claim. What evidence is there? Can they show you? Better still, can you speak with retailers who are actually selling it well? Some salespeople are brilliant at helping you believe and much weaker at proving. It is your money. The question is fair.
Pin down delivery before you sign anything. Some suppliers will happily take an order without a firm date, then dribble the stock out over months, which suits nobody. Confirm when the stock will arrive and when payment falls due.
If you are unsure about a line, buy a small quantity and test it rather than speculating with money you cannot afford to tie up. And while you are talking numbers, check the price against what other retailers are paying.
One more thing we are seeing: some wholesalers have become less discerning about where they place product. In one town, several shops within a short walk of each other now carry the same lines from the same wholesaler. When that happens, nobody has a point of difference left, and everyone sells less.
Ask for proof before you order. It is your margin and your uniqueness on the line.