There is a problem.

A number of our customers are calling us in regard to their EDI returns being suspended.

We are supplying the data correctly but XChangeIT software is not sending it until much later. So we believe that there is something wrong in the XChangeIT software.

I have been told this is being looked into now by XChangeIT.

Toronto Town Square News has set up a VIP marketing scheme, they are blogging what they are doing, what they are spending and how it is going. Today it went live.

David and his team at TLC Townsville, one of our clients just won the 1st place in the Emerald Club. This is an award our clients tend to do well in, and I think it must be partly because of our extensive magazine section.

Also what the judges really liked was the way they were using technology.

You can see their facebook page here. It is a very nice page.

I was asked how did the magazine distributors go in 2011 compared to 2010. Good question and this is my answer.

The first point is that in the magazine industry, because of the relative lower cost of a magazine production compare to the fixed costs involved in publishing a magazine plus advertising revenue it is much better to take a chance of making a sale then to lose a sale. This is true for newsagents too. It is better to supply a subagent with a magazine that might sell, then chance a lost sale.

So what the magazine distributor wants to see is that you sold as many as you could. They can see that if you return one of each magazine issued. In theory this works out to an oversupply of about 35%.

In practice, there is the difficultly in estimating sales. Furthermore, what happens often is a big bunch of magazines arrives in a magazine distributor' warehouse. They are doing nothing in the warehouse except taking room, which will soon be needed for more magazines. They need to be sent out to anyone who will take them. This is why the actual oversupply is close to 100%.

Over the years, POS Solutions has come up with two measurements that we think are the best to examine the magazine market. The first is sell thru rate. This is what sells compared to what they send you. In 2010 and 2011, the figures are about the same. The second is GMROP (Gross margin return on purchases) which is how much profit percent did a newsagent make for his purchases of magazines. Again in 2010 and 2011, they are about the same.
So the short answer is that it was almost exactly the same in 2010 as 2011.

We then compared GG with Network both in 2010 to 2011, again there was effectively no change. So basically they are as good as each other.

I reported here in 2010, that I thought the magazine distributors did a terrible job in that year. Well, they did the same job in 2011.

There are two ways of looking at this, 2011 was not an easy year for printed magazines. Many changes took place both structurally the move online and internally with the continuing problems of RDS. It could be argued that to do as well in 2011 was a good effort. The other argument would be that 2010 was badly done. Every year has its challenges in business one needs always to improve and in 2011, they did not improve. You decide.

I wonder if there any economic logic to these deals maybe it is more to artificially, build up circulation figures?

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A subscriber gets a copy of Herald Sun Monday to Friday to be picked up at the university and on Saturday and Sunday home delivery for 40 weeks. Plus they will get a home delivery of the Herald Sun, Monday to Sunday for 12 weeks during the summer holiday break.

Do you want to know?

This may help you to decide!

Toronto Town Square Newsagency is setting up a rewards program. What they are doing is for the Newsagency industry is setting up a website, showing step-by-step what they have done, how much time and money they spent and what was the result. The website has comments enabled so you can comment and suggest items too.

At the moment they have just come up with a card design and are working out their rewards structure.

Click here to proceed? [link gone]

I decided to see what departments have been doing in newsagencies now.

These are our benchmark figures for December 22nd to the morning of 28th.

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Lotto is by far king. The most profitable departments are lotto, cards, publications, stationery and tobacco. What is surprising is how little has changed over the years.

XChangeIT biggest complaint is that many of the items are not being scanned but simply rung up as a cash register department. Our figures are extremely good as a recent Gordon and Gotch study showed.

However, I decided to check out benchmarking figures to see how our clients are going. So in August, from our benchmarking system I took from about 35 shops a total of 30470 transactions. 66% of these were scanned. Almost all the non-scanned items were lotto and newspapers.

I wanted to know the XChangeIT unscanned rate. So I selected magazines. Immediately I could see the same problem which is mucking up almost all benchmarking figures in newsagency. Different people put different items in different departments. This is probably the biggest problem in benchmarking figure in newsagencies today and why so many of them questionable. Here as a result I had to weed out the newspapers out of the magazine department.

That left me with 5128 lines. Of that unscanned was six. I was stunned so low. However, it gets better as one of these items I believe is coming from a magazine company not associated with XChangeIT so really the figure should be five. So I was looking for our clients' scan rate of magazines is 99.9%.

That is an awesome record. It is no wonder Gordon and Gotch gave us such a good score.

Clearly, the Australian Newsagent Association likes our recent upgrade. Here is what they wrote about one of our improvements today.

This was a big project. It took a lot of work and testing to get it to work. We were in beta for months.

Here is what it does. Consider scripting as an advanced feature on automatic updates, which is done now in almost every software package. I do not update my anti-virus program or my windows software it updates itself.

Scripting is the next level. It allows us to do changes like newspaper price changes, bumper editions modifications as well as order changes, etc. Rather than the user having to waste their time entering information on the correct day for a task; we send a script down the line. It does the changes.

There were a couple of hiccups along the way but here is the proof how well it works. We released scripting for everyone this Christmas. This is software support calls by week number in 2011 compared to 2010. The difference I attribute to scripting.

Change in software support calls from 2011 to 2010

See the closer to Christmas the more the improvement.

Our clients were flat out now and did not need to remember what to do with their computer work ours can get on running their businesses.

[link removed]

An interesting article of some of the frustrations felt by magazine publishers over the slow delivery of subscription magazines by Australia Post.

What it does not cover is the added problem of magazines being lost in Australia Post, which is also a problem.

In 2010, and earlier we used to do was issue information sheets for public holidays because of price changes and stops in publications.

It was frustrating work; the sheets had to be written up carefully. It was then sent out to clients. Clients would be ringing up with questions to go over the procedures. After all these tasks are done once a year and who can remember it. So we would need to explain it over again with many of them over the phone. Often, they would have to put it aside until the correct day, sometimes they would lose the information sheets, so they would have to ring us back. Then when they went to run it, they often needed to call us to check on some details. Of course someone would get it wrong, often causing a major disaster. This was not the way computer are supposed to be. They are supposed to make life easier.

This year, we introduced scripting. Just like the automatic updates for the software that everyone loves so much, as it saves so much time now when a newspaper price rise, bumper editions and more these are almost all done automatically! The user needs to do nothing! This is a terrific time saver for our clients.

Once set up, our system automatically sets up the stops and starts for your customers for bumper editions, change paper prices according to the supplier's releases and will also set any papers that will be stopped on public holidays with stop/start dates!

Here is a live example, as you can see the Age cover price will be increase and it will be stopped for Christmas as will the Australian, the Financial review and the Herald-Sun.

To see it in your system, click on the yellow bit on the bottom left marked on your software screen.

This is another great example of how our system helps save our client time and worry!

Lucky Charm took a big risk and decided that the main thrust of their marketing emphasis this year would be a computerized rewards program. So they created this program, which is now the biggest rewards program that I know in the newsagency space. It is national based and almost all supplier funded.

When we started our market research, 30,000 would be about what we would get.

When I first started reporting on this program,

In the 23th September, the program had 25,000 members.
By the 29th September, the program had grown to about 30,000 members.

So by the 29th September, we achieved budget, everything from now would be a bonus.

So on the 28th October, we were delighted as we benchmarked 43,000 members.

Then we could only explain that figure by assuming that people who were not customers of Lucky Charm newsagencies were joining the VIP program. That meant to us that the program had no immediate limit to growth.

The computer server that runs the program was then replaced. That was fine because we want the bigger one to crash too. The bigger the program gets the better.

On Tuesday, the 13th December when we did our latest benchmarking, we recorded then over 54,000 members so the growth had not stopped.

If this rate of growth continues, then we will need to move it to a bigger computer as this rewards program our data mining program said.

57,000 members by the start of 2012, almost double what we budgeted.
80,500 members by the start of the next financial year

Despite what the skeptics said when this program started, those skeptics now have much explaining to do why they were wrong.

This program has proven that the public will accept a newsagency rewards program.

The Hallmark catalog situation is now resolved.

The file is available with many others on our website here.  (Outdated file - decommissioned)

This is the stock file for the back to school sale for South Australian customers.

For some reason, ANCOL this year suddenly decided to change their file formats. This is why problems were reported.

We have patched the file so that it is the way it used to be. So it will be right to import now.

Outdated file - decommissioned

There have been some issues with the latest Hallmark catalog files for import. We are aware of this and have today been in communications with Hallmark about it. We expect to have a resolution very soon.

So please wait until Friday and then try again. If you still have an issue on Friday with it, please let me know.

Currently, we are installing several sites using a new EDI system using Nortech.

The problem currently the newsagency industry face is that many newsagent suppliers are too small to justify the current systems in place. So after many years, despite the hopes originally stated none of these systems has achieved anything that can be called an industry standard.

So what we have been doing is working with Nortech in an attempt to produce an alternative. It is largely but not entirely based on existing standards. It can be used by a full range of suppliers, although target markets are the small suppliers.

It is hoped that it means that most newsagents will be able to import invoices and catalogues and send return forms and stock holding reports from many suppliers.

Over 2011, XChangeIT has had a very rocky road. On one hand, they have improved their offering with IPS on the other hand they have definitely had major problems. To be fair, many of these problems are not XChangeIT problems, they are actually the magazine suppliers they service. XChangeIT just happens to be the public face.

This is a graph of the percentage of XChangeIT support calls in 2011 compared to all support calls.

As you can see what would really annoys us is when XChangeIT has problems many have problems and so our support lines gets hammered. The other issue is often the way they do support. This causes, I think justifiable criticism by its users.

So what do our users who use it, think of XChangeIT support? Here is a graph of our users' views.

As you can see the majority of our users do seem to think that XChangeIT support is adequate or better, although clearly, there is some level of dissatisfaction.

Artwrap latest barcode listings is available.

For this and other supplier files please go (Outdated file - decommissioned) for download.

I was asked today if any of our clients have had an issue with XChangeIT over sales data. As far as I know, not one.

Not surprised as we have had our system audited  and the quality is perfect

If you do have any problems with XChangeIT over this, please let us know.

Emaps are being transferred from Gordon and Gotch to Network Services.

Both our windows and our older DOS system will handle it automatically. So there is no reason for concern or even an information sheet.

The magazines when they arrive from network will be matched to the existing stock items by barcode when invoiced and the new supplier codes from Network Services will be added. Furthermore, the old issues will be returned to GG, and the new issue will be returned to Network.