A blog on issues affecting Australia's newsagents, media and small business generally. More ...

Author: Mark Fletcher

Bookmarks work for magazines

just_in_may.JPGThe Just In bookmarks we are using from newsXpress are working at drawing customer attention to titles just in. We find them especially useful for the low volume titles which can arrive on different days each month. While it’s a small activity on which to focus attention and invest in collateral, it is things like these bookmarks which separate a magazine specialist from others – arrogant as that may sound.

My view is that we make our own success in many things we do. This is why an investment in the bookmarks and other local in-store activities around several of our categories is a worthwhile investment. We are backing ourselves, creating IP and not relying on suppliers to do this work for us.

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magazines

The shopping trolley challenge

troller_aisle.JPGShopping trolleys are a problem for newsagencies and other retail businesses. Their drivers too often care less about the damage they do to fixtures and products when they bump around the shop.

Trolleys often block aisles and make the shopping experience of others less enjoyable.

One way to manage the problem is to make our shops less trolley friendly. While this would cause some customer backlash, many others would be happy. Banning trolleys would give us back more control over the shopping experience.

On some Saturdays we have have upwards of six trolleys in the shop being pushed around and getting in the way. Two in one aisle disables that aisle for everyone else in the shop. This must impact sales. So, maybe it is time to build a newsagency which does not accommodate shopping trolleys.

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retail

Promoting the $50 million jackpot

pball50.JPGWe have papered right around the counter, up the walls and across the top to promote the $50 million Powerball jackpot.  We have also papered multiple places in the shop with the posters we made yesterday to promote the jackpot.  We have our team also offering the up-sell and several other strategies in play to make sure that we achieve our sales targets.  We have set two sales targets with team rewards at each point.  We are still building what we will do next week in the last couple of days of the jackpot.

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Lotteries

Easier mobile recharge for newsagents

Thanks to further discussions with the folks at St.George Bank, we have navigated a way for newsagents to more easily access Optus and Vodafone recharge product. eziPass newsagents who sign for the St.George Bank deal can install a terminal to process Eftpos and credit card transactions as well as dispense Optus and Vodafone recharge. Everything else can be sold through eziPass. If we are fortunate enough to able to bring Optus and Vodafone to the eziPass platform in the future and you then wish to move to an integrated Eftpos solution (where Eftpos is processed through your computer) St.George will swap out the first terminal for an integrated unit without additional cost.

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phone recharge

School days journal

school_days.JPGThis school days journal is a product we have at our Sophie Randall business which should work equally well in newsagencies.  It’s a folder with all sorts of sections for recording information about the school experience.  This is the kind of gift item which suits newsagencies.

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Gifts

Good Food and Wine Show

foodwine.JPGWe are promoting food and wine related titles in our category based magazine feature this week. It makes sense because it is the Good Food and Wine Show in Melbourne this weekend.

Connecting with local events like this shows we’re connected with the community – beyond our shop. It provides a framework of relevance to the broad range of titles we carry.

Being situated next to a lottery counter and newspaper unit helps drive good impulse purchases. These moves, driving impulse purchases from honey pot products like lotteries and newspapers, are vitally important to us if we are to build a deeper basket.

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magazines

Girlfriend magazine at the counter

gf_jun08.JPGGirlfriend with the free mascara has replaced our Men’s Health display between two register points at the counter. Thanks to extra posters from Pacific Magazines we have been able to create a good impression. The display has been up two days and is already working.

I know newsagents come here looking at photos for ideas – the key with this type of display is to feature magazines with valuable free gifts, to place it next to a busy register and to change the display at least weekly. By choosing the right title with a good gift like Girlfriend this month you ought to see a good kick in sales in a week.

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magazines

Lottery jackpots!

With Powerball not going off tonight, first division next Thursday will now be worth at least $50 million.  Tattslotto on Saturday is a superdraw worth $19 million, Tuesday’s OzLotto game has jackpotted to $10 million and Wednesday’s Tattslotto has jackpotted to $2.175 million.  This is the best week of jackpots and superdraws I can recall.  Brilliant.

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Lotteries

Bill Express in the news again

The Age has a good story today about some of the challenges around OnQ and Bill Express. My only comment would be that there could have been more complete coverage of the plight of newsagents.

Newsagents were actively recruited into Bill Express by representatives of the company and through the active endorsement of their association, the ANF. The ANF received a fee for success and pursued this by organising a national roadshow and other activities at which newsagent sign up was sought. This is where newsagents were signed on for the agreements they have today, the agreements costing over $500 a month.

How newsagents were recruited and who provided recruitment services will be key to any legal action by aggrieved newsagents as it is the representations made which will come under close scrutiny. I am aware that the ACCC is asking questions about this. Newsagents and associations with files from 2003 should be able to help the ACCC with their inquiries.

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Bill Express

Newspapers and the online challenge

The Age on May 23 ran a cartoon by Wiley which showed a chap reading the poster in front of a newsstand

Today in The Times. Print media isn’t dead. Go to our website for the whole story.

I thought it was funny and didn’t think much more about it. Gaye Lebardon writing at the Press Democrat takes a different view – it’s one well worth reading.

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Media disruption

Newspaper publisher hits small business

Newsagents have been split into two classes by the folks at The Age. Retail newsagents are paid a commission as a percentage of the cover price. Home delivery newsagents, the people who get up in the middle of the night to manage the delivery of newspapers to homes by 6am are no longer paid based on the cover price.

The Age has unilaterally decided to compensate home delivery newsagents based on a fee they decide. While they previously controlled the delivery fee, newsagents could rely on benefiting at least from cover price increases. Now that has been taken away.

VANA, the association representing newsagents, has effectively endorsed the change in compensation arrangements from The Age. They did this by writing to newsagents at the same time as The Age. VANA should have left this issue alone and let The Age muck this up for themselves.

With fuel, labour and other costs rising, it is unconscionable in my view that a rich company like Fairfax, publisher of The Age, stops newsagents from charging a fee which at least covers their costs. This latest move protects the Fairfax subscription base asset and does not help home delivery newsagents achieve fair compensation for what is a world class service.

I am okay because I sold my home delivery run in late 2006. Newsagents trying to sell now will, in my view, get less because of the new fee structure implemented by The Age – they have certainly made home delivery runs less valuable than they were two months ago, something I suspect VANA has not seen yet.

If I were Fairfax I would increase compensation to newsagents because they more they make the happier they will be and the more they will work to increase sales. Treating them as cheap labour will come back and hurt the company in the long run.

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Newsagency challenges

Happy Tower Systems newsagents

It has been a thrill to catch up with so many Tower Newsagents at the ANF convention these last three days.  They are a happy bunch of people.  This is a common comment from all of the Tower team at the convention – how happy our users are.  Back in the mid 1990s when our customer service was not what it should have been many of our newsagent customers were not happy.  It is the memory of those couple of bad years we caused which drives us on customer service today.

Once consequence of happy newsagent users of our software is the conversations which lead to new opportunities being uncovered.  Happy people share more because they trust you more.  We are returning from the Gold Coast with several excellent suggestions.

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newsagent software

Everyone loves lottery jackpots

jackpotts.JPGThe Powerball jackpot tonight is generating excellent business for us.  It is a traffic and sales bonanza and we are certainly making the most of the opportunity.  My excitement is somewhat dampened by the news from Manaccom about their online OzLotteries deal with ACP.  Theirs is an interesting play since it is outside the sites built directly by the lottery businesses themselves.  They attract customers we cannot reach from bricks and mortar businesses.  They also provide a convenience offer to current bricks and mortar customers who will want to migrate their purchases online.  This has to make us work harder on customer service – to prove the value of face to face sales of lottery products.

I was interested to see press stories talk about the value this week especially because of the jackpot.

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Lotteries

Mills & Boon cards

free_willy.JPGWe don’t sell Mills & Boon books in our newsagency but if we did I’d want to have the Mills & Boon range of greeting cards.

They are a nice fun take on the covers of the popular Mills and Boon books. I can see the cards and books being displayed next to each other – almost as a gift package.

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Greeting Cards

XchangeIT declares DOS dead for newsagents

Finally the magazine distributors have started to get serious about IT compliance in newsagencies through their XchangeIT platform.  Their presentation today made it clear that DOS is dead.  For all their bleating that DOS has a life, POS Solutions has been ignored and their remaining 300 DOS users will have to make alternative arrangements to get access to the technology suite other newsagents will be able to access.  The announcement at the ANF Convention today is long overdue.

Of course, I am pleased because our Tower Systems newsagents community of 1,500+ is well placed. I feel for the 300 or so newsagents using DOS software. It should not be a surprise that DOS is dead because Microsoft an others turned their back on this old old platform more than ten years ago.

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newsagent software

Trading Post smacks newsagents

Decades of faithful support from newsagents of the Trading Post weekly newspaper has been “rewarded” by the publisher choosing Australia Post as the partner for its expanded online Trading Post auction offering. Traders will need to go to an Australia Post outlet (and stand in a line for too long) to complete a 100 point check to be approved by the Trading Post. This is an insult to newsagents who could have easily provided the 100 point check service and another example of the disregard Trading Post publisher Sensis has for our channel.

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Australia Post

The elephant in the room

The elephant in the room at the ANF National Convention this week has been the Bill Express issue. Just about every newsagent I meet asks what is likely to happen and whether they will have to pay back the lease they took out on the equipment. Like so much about Bill Express at the moment not much can be discussed publicly. I can’t help but feel that the Convention would have been a good time for newsagents (and only newsagents) to get together and talk about the situation.

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Bill Express

The Vodafone window

voda_apo.JPGThe Government owned Australia Post shop opposite our newsagency had a big display window promoting Vodafone installed late last week.  It looks better in person than the photo shows.  We are jealous of the professional looking window and the deal they must on to justify the space and stock investment.

Mobile phone handsets are a challenge for newsagencies as our stores carry more stock per square metre than most other retailers, space is limited.  Newsagencies are visually noisy too – a corporate display like for Vodafone would get lost when competing with bold magazine displays and lottery jackpot displays.

We have some ideas on how handsets could be represented and this is something we hope to play with soon.

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Australia Post

Correlation between gifts and cards

Digging deeper into the benchmark study we undertook based on sales data from 89 newsagencies, it is clear that there is a correlation between gift sales and card sales.  In each store with strong gift sales, the card sales were considerably above average for the benchmark.  Based on this, why would a newsagent not have a crack at gifts – even if space is tight it makes sense to try and find a way to play in the category and therefore enjoy growth in cards.

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Gifts

Newsagency of the future workshop

I have been asked by three newsagency suppliers to present my Newsagency of the Future workshop from the ANF conference elsewhere. A couple want it presented internally and another would like me to present it to newsagents on their behalf. When I get back to Melbourne I’ll look into this and maybe consider a presentation in each state. I am certainly keen to open for discussion the issues / challenges raised.

Newsagents have a tremendous opportunity to control their future, all it takes is willingness to embrace change and a desire to think and act as business people focused on the future as opposed to the past.

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Newsagency challenges
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