The latest copy of the Artwrap stock catalogue has been put up on our website here. (Outdated file - decommissioned) It has been checked.

Last time, I felt that over 6,200 items was excessive. Well now it is over 7,800 items.

However there are still many items we had to weed out because they are not the best in terms of data quality.

What does really annoy me is that they supply no category listing. I am sure that our clients would have appreciated that as it is nice for them to know how many wedding cards they sell, how many birthdays etc.

I was looking through our benchmarking project at electronic products. What became immediately apparent is that the rate of sales of these products through newsagencies has increased dramatically. We now have people doing just under $30,000 month in electronic products. That is a dramatic increase on what I reported six months ago.

I put this down to these factors. One is our integrated systems is just so good that it has made it easy for people to sell these products, the range we offer our clients has gone up dramatically, and more people are getting the message that our clients sell these products.

Network Services have just released their half-yearly analysis on magazines based on the ABC Audit results compared with the previous year. Overall the results are not good. However, the little one can do about this!

However, no matter what happens overall there are major changes in the type of magazines that get sold. This is because as fashions and peoples’ taste change, so you will see over time categories going up and down. This is something we can do something about immediately such as increase the amount of space a magazines is allocated, put them in a better location, put more titles in that category out etc.

What I am primarily looking for is what is going up. My clients after all through their comparison reports over a period know what is going down. What they sometimes miss is magazine category going up because they are not giving that category a chance. Say for example, a newsagent and tried ABC magazines years ago, and they bombed, so now he always puts them in as an early return. Now if peoples’ tastes have changed and ABC magazines now sell, because he never gives them a chance, he misses out.

Now in this Network Service report, a key finding was

Photography publications, under the craft and hobbies category, grew by 11%.

So I thought to myself that sounds reasonable, people have more digital cameras, people are taking more photographs, computers are making photography cheaper and more popular and with Facebook and email people are sending more photos than ever before. So it makes sense that magazines on photography are doing well.

So I decided to report it, but before I did I checked on our benchmark figures to give a newsagencies perspective.

I created using our software a virtual class for photography called it P1, and then decided to check its sales figure in newsagencies.

Here are some newsagents figures.

This is a suburb newsagency.

In 2010, they had 43 titles in this range, which sold 775 copies for $8835.
In 2009, they had 35 titles, which sold 783 copies for $9071.
In 2008, they had 32 titles, which sold 800 copies for $9326.

Hardly, what I would call a growth category, over the years we see more titles, which means more work. There are fewer unit sales, and turnover is almost $500 less.

I decided to look at a country newsagent. So I set up again my virtual class P1 and checked out their results.

In 2010, they had 50 titles, which sold 226 copies for $3774.
In 2009, they had 49 titles, which sold 350 copies for $5042.
In 2008, they had 44 titles, which sold 364 copies for $4525.

These results are even worse. In fact, they are terrible.

So at this stage I was very confused, so I went back to the initial report by Network Services. Take a look what was said “Photography publications, under the craft and hobbies category, grew by 11%.” Emphasis added.

Then it clicked. I suspect that photography magazines have not grown at all. What has happened is that because photography publications are split over several categories, and in one of these categories photography magazines has done well this is what they have selectively reported.

When reading any of these reports, please remember the old Roman saying “caveat emptor”, buyer beware! Just because it looks right does not mean that it is.

A blogger in England shows a picture of a papershop in England. See on the top a sign advertising a magazine "INSTYLE",

now the same paper shop, has a sign on the top is advertising phone recharges.

At some point this news/gift outlet just across the road from Paddington railway station has lost its InStyle magazine branding and accepted a new fascia sponsored by a mobile phone card company. It speaks volumes about the relative marketing power of the two industries.

This comment by the blogger in England may be applicable in Austalia soon too.

If you want to read more about papershops in England has a read of his blog here..

It has been reported that some of these Kat card invoices today being sent electronically are blank.

If you are having problems with Kat's cards invoices, contact them and ask them to resend.

http://arabnews.com/lifestyle/offbeat/article317082.ece

For the first time, online readership and advertising revenue has surpassed that of print newspapers. Online advertising revenue in the United States is projected to overtake print newspaper ad revenue in 2010, according to the latest report, the State of the News Media, from the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism.

Shirley Joan Lovell passed away on Tuesday the 15th March 2011. Over 40 years, she together with her husband worked in the newsagency industry and built up a huge newsagency at Shepparton.

She was a lovely person, and it was a pleasure to have her as a client.

We would like to express our sympathies to Gary, Wendy, Louise and David and all the Lovell family.

If you have many Irish people where you are you might be able to make some function in the shop for St Patricks Day tomorrow.

As it is traditionally celebrated with plenty of green, I suggest that you put some green up in the shop.

Debbie from Bellina News, thinks that Koala Of Course may be handy to other newsagencies who want to sell cheaper greeting cards. She found the margins very good.

Once something goes wrong with one supplier, it casts doubts on everyone else. We had many people ringing up today that network magazine returns have the wrong week. This we have so far not been able to establish.

As far as we know only week 9 of GG has been incorrectly listed as week 13. Nothing is wrong with network.

I thought that yesterday the number of calls over this issue of the wrong weeks being put into the return form was bad. Today we got over 120 calls just on this one issue.

I am still waiting for an announcement from GG how this happened and more importantly how they propose to make sure it never happens again.

Many of you now are having problems because the GG return forms from XChangeIT for week 13. This should be Week 9. It is a very easy fix.

On the screen, you can see where the blue arrow is the week 13, highlight that line by clicking.

Where the red arrow is changing this value to a 9.

Problem solved.

Please be careful, when doing EDI GG returns. Many people are reporting now that they are getting week 13 when it should be week 9.

At the moment, less then half the XChangeIT clients are sending data with reliability.

Part of the problem as far as we can see with our tests is in the XChangeIT software. Our software creates sales history files and then moves these files into the correct folder for sending. The XChangeIT program should then see that something is in the sending folder and send it. What, however, sometimes happens is that XChangeIT instead moves these files to the unsent folder and never sents these sales data files.

This needs to be looked at ASAP.

The BrownTrout catalogue file is now available for download

For this and other supplier files please visit here

As far as I know only POS Solutions clients now have the ability for your customers to enter in stops and starts for newspapers using the web and then either automatically or manually import these stop and starts.

This is one such method for doing this using Facebook.

As many of you are aware Facebook is a free and extremely successful way of getting an internet presence is Facebook. Another plus is that Facebook can interface into our system.

Here I have set up a simple sample home delivery screen for stopping and starting a publication that any member of the public with an internet account could use to stop or start a publication. See where the arrow is pointing on the picture above.

Check it out on our Facebook account here.

Once the form is completed it will send an email immediately to owner of the Facebook page. You have then the choice of whether you wish this information to be automatically entered into your system or whether you wish manually to enter in the details into your system.

Today I had a chat with one of our oldest clients, I left with an interesting observation that sales of items that cater to children seem to be very stable.

Not only that but the margins are good and each children’s product sale seems to generate a few more sales. Furthermore, as new lines come out regularly, there is regular repeat business.

So I guess my question to you is ask yourself how do you market children lines now say to Grandmother when she comes into the store to buy her lotto, newspaper or magazine? If not well, perhaps consider remaking your business to market children’s products?

Let us know your thoughts, and we can share them with others here that could benefit.

Following our discussions on the other day with Network services, we are now running a training course on how to set up and the correct procedures for your magazine sales data.

Thursday, February 24, 2011, at 02:00 PM

XChange Sales Data

How to set up and monitor Sales Data that is being sent to XChangeIT.

Closing date: Thursday, February 24, 2011, at 12:00 PM

Yesterday we had a meeting with them. It is frustrating. Today the reality is only a minority of people using XChangeIT are sending sales data. Currently out of about 2,500 users of XChangeIT only about 1,200 are sending sales data.

What this means is that magazine producers are not getting sales figures until its done manually often four issues later. Without feedback is it any wonder that magazine companies so often overproduce and as a result oversupply? Who in the industry is benefiting as people are not sending this data!

To help out please to check to see whether the sales data is being sent out. Please on the machine that sends the sales data, go to the directory:

C:\Program files\POSBrowser\Archive

In this directory, you are looking for the newest files with the extension *.sl2.

Check the date, if it is old please call us or XChangeIT.

Contrary to what some are saying, this group is not gone. It is now under voluntary administrators.

This group through its bookshops sells about 30% of Australian book industry, and it also controls the largest newsagency franchise of over 50 newsagencies, mainly in NSW and Queensland, although they do have some newsagencies in Victoria.

Last year this group announced a record profit, this year they lost about $43 million. Since the group is owned by a bigger organisation Pacific Equity Partners, who are huge and could easily afford these loses. What has happened is that Pacific Equity Partners has made a decision to get out of this market.

Since in Australia, most voluntary administrations fail as few agree to write off debt, I expect that Borders, Angus and Robertson, Supanews etc will be split and sold off. Most of the shops will be sold, and the unprofitable stores will be closed. So most of our clients will be largely unaffected. Since we have many clients in this group, I am wondering how badly we will be affected.