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

Tower Systems

The price increase you most likely haven’t tried yet

If you are like a ship I visited a few days ago, you are likely sitting on hundreds of well-selling products right now where a 50 cent or one dollar increase would go completely unnoticed by customers but would add real dollars to the bottom line by the end of the year. Not a dramatic margin overhaul — just a quiet, deliberate look at what you’re charging versus what the product is actually worth to the person buying it. That gap exists in almost every shop. The retailers who go looking for it find it.

When did you last put a price up just to see what happened?

Not because a supplier raised their cost. Not because the margin report flagged something. Just because you thought a product might be worth more than what you’re charging for it.

Most newsagents never do this. Prices move when costs move. Margin percentage drifts down without anyone noticing, and the business quietly earns less than it should for years.

The products worth testing are the ones customers want rather than need. A card for a specific occasion. A gift that’s genuinely hard to find locally. A collectible that’s selling faster than you can reorder it. For those products, shoppers will often pay more than the current price suggests — you just haven’t asked yet.

Put one price up. Watch it for a couple of weeks. If it keeps selling at the same rate, you’ve found margin you were leaving behind. If it slows, adjust it. Neither outcome is a problem. One earns you more money. The other tells you something useful about your customers.

The retailers doing this well aren’t testing everything at once. That’s not experimenting, that’s chaos. They pick lines with strong, consistent demand and move carefully. Over time those small experiments add up to a margin position that looks nothing like where they started — without a supplier negotiation or a ranging overhaul in sight.

Your POS data already shows you which products are moving consistently. Start there. Pick something with steady demand, nudge the price, and watch what the data shows over the next few weeks.

The worst that happens is you learn something. The best is that you find margin that’s been sitting there the whole time, waiting for you to notice.

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Newsagency management

Do you spend too high time repricing stock in your newsagency?

I see newsagents waste hours on work their software could do in minutes, and repricing is the worst offender.

You know the job. A supplier sends through a price rise across their range, or you decide the plush department needs a margin tune-up before Christmas. Someone sits at the back computer opening one product at a time, keying the new price, clicking save, a few hundred times over. Everyone hates the job, so it gets put off, which means weeks of selling at old prices on new costs.

Or, it could be that you have finally decided to adjust your prices ahead of losing the credit card surcharge you currently have and need to cover costs another way.

The Stock Manager facility in the Tower Systems newsagency software handles this in bulk. Pull up everything from that supplier or department and change the lot together. A range-wide price rise is a five-minute job.

The part I want every newsagent to understand is the gross profit option. When a supplier lifts costs and you only pass on the dollar amount, your margin percentage shrinks without you noticing. Do that across a few suppliers over a couple of years and you have quietly given away points of margin in a channel that cannot afford to give away any. Stock Manager can reprice a whole range to the gross profit percentage you choose. Decide what margin your gift department must make, then make every item in it comply. That is managing, not just retailing.

Pricing is the headline but not the whole story. Details, images and descriptions can all be updated across a range in one go. The bulk tag tools matter if you run a connected Shopify store, because building a collection by opening hundreds of products individually is nobody’s idea of a Tuesday night.

My usual disclosure: I work with Tower Systems, so weigh my words accordingly. But the advice stands whatever software you use. If your system makes you reprice item by item, you are paying for that limitation in wages, and in margin you never noticed leaking away. Ask your software company to show you their bulk editing tools. If they cannot, that tells you something.

One tip from the Tower support desk: back up before any bulk change. Bulk cuts both ways.

Your time is the scarcest resource in your shop. Better spent out the front with customers than out the back keying prices.

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Newsagency management

Beyond the hype: why I travelled to Singapore for SuperAI

Today, I am at Marina Bay Sands in Singapore for the opening day of SuperAI, Asia’s largest AI conference. Over the next two days, some of the most influential people working in technology will be here. Actually, it kicked off yesterday with some side sessions that were terrific.

I want to be clear about why I made the trip.

This was not tech tourism. It was not about watching demos of products that will not ship for three years. It was a practical decision driven by a straightforward observation: for anyone running or supporting a small business retail network right now, understanding where AI is headed has stopped being optional.

The conversation has shifted

What made SuperAI worth the flight is that this conference has moved on from where most AI events still are. Frontier lab demonstrations and theoretical research discussions are elsewhere. Here, the focus is on real-world deployment — how organisations are running AI tools at scale, what is working operationally, and what the actual results look like on the ground.

In local retail, we are already seeing tangible results. I am in my shop. Plenty others are too.

Automated invoice processing is saving small businesses hours of manual data entry every week. AI-driven inventory insights are surfacing patterns that would never appear in a standard report. These are not pilot projects. They are running in shops now.

But we have barely started.

What I am here to find

Being here gives me a clearer view of what is coming before it arrives. Three areas I am focused on across the two days:

  • Inventory autonomy — how autonomous agents are predicting stock trends, managing supply chain variability, and cutting dead stock without requiring specialist skills to operate
  • Accessible data insights — how complex business analysis is being simplified so a local shop owner gets deep, actionable information without needing a data analyst to interpret it
  • Operational efficiency — which tools are removing friction from back-office administration so independent retailers spend less time on screens and more time on the floor

Why this matters for local retail

The tools demonstrated at events like this do not stay at the enterprise level. They filter into the software platforms small businesses use every day. The gap between what a large retailer can do with data and what an independent newsagent or gift shop can do is closing faster than most people realise.

Being here on day one means seeing what is coming before it lands. That lead time is the point. The goal is to bring what is genuinely useful home and turn it into something practical for local businesses — not eventually, but as soon as it is ready.

… Mark Fletcher is the CEO of newsXpress and founder of Tower Systems, a POS software company serving independent retailers across Australia.

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