POS Solutions sites in SA are now currently trading with the latest News Limited subscription system. This allows them to collect payments on behalf of News Limited from home delivery customers. They then receive a service fee from News Limited.

We expect that soon other states will follow.

According to an announcement made at the All Things Digital conference the Australian’s iPad app has had 4,500 downloads just one week after its launch.

My immediate thought was how many of these are getting a special deal but still, that is 4,500 potential customers lost to newsagents! You would need many newsagencies to sell 4,500 Australians a day.

It is priced at $4.99 a month. That is much less than buying a physical newspaper. Is printing and distributing that much of a cost to a newspaper, or is this just an introductory offer?

Consider the economics of the offer. A home delivery of the Australian and Weekend Australian for a customer for a 26 weeks subscription $180.70, an iPad app for the Australian for the same period is about $30.00 (26 weeks x 7 Days /365 Day x 12 months x $4.99 Monthly subscription).

Clearly, you would need more than an Australian subscription to pay for the iPad but it does show the problem in technology that newsagents face now.

I was looking for the contact details for one NSW newspaper and found this. I think it might be useful for others as well.

Click here for a list of links for Sydney metro and NSW regional newspapers.

[These links have all been removed]

Our software can email suppliers like Gotch with your order changes.

Gotch has now confirmed that they will no longer be accepting these email orders, as such we are putting a patch out to stop this email facility in our software to Gotch.

The reason why this was stopped was because it was meant to be a quiet trial between a few customers and Gotch. Too many people started to use it and many of these just went berserk using it. So Gotch got flooded with order changes. Many of these order changes Gotch felt were just unreasonable. For example we were shown examples of people requesting order quantity changes much less than what they were selling. It really is an example of where a few people doing the wrong thing have made it bad for all of us.

We are talking to Gotch soon in an attempt to rectify this problem. Our preference is that this facility be put into XChangeIT.

Just thought it timely now to remind everyone about the Education Tax Refund. If your clients have children in school which many of them do have, they may be able to buy items for school in your store and receive a 50% rebate on their tax form up to $750.

It really is a fantastic opportunity to sell your shop.

The iPad is nice and easy to read, but we wanted to see what it would be like in the morning in the car when people do their rounds so we took this morning the iPad on a test run.

For anyone that does deliveries, as an ereader the iPad has one big advantage. It has a GPS inbuilt. Where ever you are, you can call up a road map. So we tried our integration of round cards and google maps on the iPad.

So you get something exactly like a Melways, which shows you exactly where you are. Imagine just press a button and up pops something like this.

I was amazed, at the quality. What made it extremely useful was it had a black-light. So we could read it even though it was fairly dark.

As we are very strong on open source, we have decided on the google standard but for the time being the iPad is definitely worth considering for newsagents. Soon I am sure newsagents will no longer print round cards.

Note if you decide to get an iPad make sure that it has the WiFi, so you can run our software on it.

This webinar is now scheduled for next Tuesday.

XChangeIT errors

A recent study of XChangeIT showed that about 15% of all XChangeIT sites are failing. This webinar will take you through the setting up and administration of your XChangeIT system.

We have checked their catalogue file for the mid-year promotion and it is now available for import here. (Outdated file - decommissioned)

If you have any questions please contact

Kevin Mulhall
ANCOL (SA) 
Telephone: (08) 8346 6415

The Newspaper works an organisation that represents newspaper companies in Australia has put out a report partly in response to the recent ABC circulation report which did not look very good.

They point out that circulation figures are approximately the same as they were five years ago, they call it resilient. On the report check out page six and make your own mind up.

You can see too in this report what I consider the real problem with many newspapers now, the classified advertising revenue on page 30. If any of the major newspapers go soon, this will be the cause. It is an amplifying effect. The advertising drops, many who buy the newspaper for the classified advertisements stop buying it, the advertising and circulation revenue drops so the newspaper has to go up in price so public buy less. As less buy the newspaper, the advertising drops more and so on.

I think this tends to confirm what we have been saying for a long time. Newspapers are still a really good product. They bring plenty of people into the shop, the margins are reasonable, take up only a small space, etc. but newsagents need to change to accommodate the new market realities.

This article here starts with the comment

NEWSAGENTS claim the scrapping of individual contracts and new rules requiring them to employ delivery staff for three hours a day is a "hammer blow" to their businesses.

It then goes on to say

It also has the potential to toss out of work retired and semi-retired folk who like to work a couple of hours a day.

It is not a potential, I know many newsagents now, who have already tossed out retired, semi-retired, students etc. Many have as a result changed their shop hours.

Baring a change in government, going from federal Workplace Relations Minister Julia Gillard comment I doubt the government will move.

The two main surveys in the industry for publication numbers are the ABC circulation and the Roy Morgan Readership survey.

The emphasis is different as the ABC deals with circulation while the Roy Morgan deals with the readership. An example might be a newsagent would be interested in circulation while advertisers mainly in readership.

Roy Morgan readership survey has just been released and is available here.

The two results seem fairly similar.

Part of the problem I think for news suppliers in 2009, is that we lacked enough big major news that are required to generate interest which drives sales.

I do not have the full results for the magazines yet but the overall market has dropped 8.3%.

One notable exception to the trend was Famous that actually went up 14.4%.

The two highest magazines in circulation were relatively steady,
Woman’s Day fell by 0.2%
New Idea by 0.1%

I believe these figures as ad hoc newsagency surveys are showing similar trends. Overall these circulation losses are worrying.

ABC’s circulation information for the period ending December 2009 was just released this month for the first quarter of the year. In total, they audited over 130 magazines and 290 newspapers.

Newspaper sales are continuing their downward pattern. All the major ones listed suffered circulation drops. In all, total newspaper sales have dropped by 5%.

Sunday newspapers circulation that was doing so well recently went down too, they went down 3%.

For Monday to Friday newspapers

The Australian Financial Review has the biggest drop with 8.6%. No surprises there as almost everyone been reporting that.

The best result was the Melbourne Herald-Sun with only a 1.1% drop. This seems to be confirming the trend that the major newspaper in any area is dropping less then number two. The Melbourne Age went down 4.1%.

The Regional Dailies which before were bucking the trend down all dropped except the Illawarra Mercury whose circulation remained the same.

If anyone wants to see part of the ABC report, please email me.

There is a free webinar for DOS users next week on advanced billing for newspapers as per the latest News Corp contracts.

It will discuss how to set them up and how to operate the advanced billing system?

There will be a new training session Tuesday 18th May on NDD returns.

The emphasis on this session will be on the actual mechanics of how to do them.

Click here for details and to sign up for this and other sessions

Our software attracts the lower cost for XChangeIT because it produces sales files.

Several people asked me about Master Chef as an example of how the allocations were mucked up.

So I took it up with the magazine distributor. What they did as it was a new magazine was base its allocations on other titles. They however held back many because what they did was use the sales data on the first days of sale to create extra orders. That is why many people who do not send sales data did not get more allocation. You need to send in your sales data.

If your question is are these sales files are being used. The answer is YES. If your next question is, does it cost me to not to send it. Again the answer is YES.

Our clients could send faxes to Gordon and Gotch (GG) to adjust orders. This saved time with a telephone call. On 9 April 2010 GG announced.

Our Contact Centre team does not accept fax from any outlet either -- manually or computer originated in fact we have taken the faxing facility away from our Contact Centre team altogether.

However, they did say that they would continue to accept emails. So we rewrote to email.

Today GG national retail manager announced that,

Since my email of 9th April the business has had a change of policy and is now not accepting email returns from any source (manual or POS system generated).

Newsagents are back to manual entry on the GG website.

We want our clients automated, not keying in manually a website so we are having a discussion with Gordon and Gotch shortly over this.

Ideally though we would prefer XchangeIT to do it.

Gordon and Gotch position and probably any other magazine company is the current situation has problems with automatic standing orders.

GG is not happy about the quantity of changes sent by newsagents. This is why they are so far behind in processing these emails, and why there are so many they have not processed. These probably will not be done. I suggest if you have emailed them, that you go over your emails and enter them in manually on the GG website.

The next problem is many order changes are questionable. This is not just because of the many reasons in newsagencies that determines what sells! GG has adjustments to orders that they intend to show us that request standing orders to below what the newsagency sells. An example might be a newsagency, that sells seven of a magazine has asked for their standing order to be three. A newsagent is an agent, it is suppose to want to sell as much product as it can. This behaviour has hurt everyone.

Newsagents to satisfy magazine publishers and distributors must remember that magazine publishing is very expensive. The cost of printing and delivering is only a part of the costs. These people would rather distribute slightly more than lose sales.

To the magazine publishers and distributors,

The ideal standing order = (newsagency sale) + 1

Now a battle is going on between ereaders in Australia now. Notably, iPad, which Apple is pushing, Amazon is pushing kindle, sony ereader which I still think could be a good chance in Australia, particularly if the large magazine and newspapers publishers adopt it and the iriver story that large Australian retailers such as Harvey Norman are pushing.

Still, the winner I suspect will be a computer. I tested the Kindle software last night, then downloaded a book and had a read.

While doing so, I felt that many of our readers here might like to experience the feel of what an e-reader is and how it functions.

So if you want to see what it is like, please do the following steps.

1) Click [link removed] to this site, and download and install the kindle software.

2) Then go to one of these sites and select a book. Read a chapter and see what you think.

[link removed]

I suspect you will notice that it is not as easy to read with the eyes as a book or magazine. This will change as the new screens come out.

NDD have just confirmed that they require all their clients on a weekly cycle to lodge a return form weekly even if they have no returns that week.

The Melbourne Age has asked us to pass on to our clients that they will be making a really good special this weekend.

Together with any sale of the Age, the readers can purchase the new Norah Jones Album (The Fall) for $3.00. You will need to stock receive them. Details on the offer, codes and barcode is available here. For this offer, they should consider providing posters.

Norah Jones is Billboard's 60th-highest artist of the decade based on charting of her songs. Click here for her details.