ACP is introducing Sales Based Replenishment. We expect it to start in less than a week.

It promises to be a huge advance on the current method of magazine orders. The heart of it depends on getting accurate sales data from XchangeIT. If you are on posbrowser and are not sending sales data, could you please follow the instructions we have sent. If you have any problems doing so, please contact us ASAP.

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Advertising is an important part of newspaper revenue; in Australia, in 2007-08, it was $4.1billion. I doubt they will see that sort of money this year.

Today, advertising budgets are shrinking, so the newspapers have to prove their effectiveness of newspapers to advertisers to keep their share. So the newspapers have put together a website aimed at advertisers with the latest news, research and insights.

Cardplai has been busy.

Clearly they took on board many comments from newsagents and consumers and have sent me a list of what they have done:

Removed all logos from front of cards

Increased stock quality and weight in line with greeting card industry standards.

Improved colour and graphics on cards.

Focused on birthday cards (including 18th & 21st Milestone cards)

Copy on all new cards links to music as a gift

'Thumbprint' graphics on back of all cards to help consumers understand how cards can be used as gifts (eg. 'Blondie' card highlights extensive back catalogue)

Graphics on back of card help newsagents understand they scan this code only after they have scanned code on inside of card.

Code has been reduced from 16 to 12 digits

We are also supplying a 'thinking of you' caption card to replace the 'sympathy' caption card (confusion between 'sympathy' and 'condolences')

We have also updated to the point of sale posters with the following amendments:

Colours are more dramatic and will stand out in busy retail environment

Messages focus on price point and gift

Posters include artist IP & new card designs

We are also supply 10 pocket size Cardplai 'how to' cards for newsagents to hand out to staff (we have identified that much of the information supplied to newsagents has not been read or passed on to staff, creating a situation when customers come into store and ask for the product the person behind the counter often doesn't know anything about the product).

The B2B site will be up in the next 72 hours and will act as a resource centres for participating newsagents

We will begin sending out new product, POS and training material next Tuesday.

We are currently developing a 3 minute online training video to help improve product knowledge.

The next issue of Jmag has editorial and a full page ad on Cardplai

We are also working on an instore promotion with a major instore prize per participating site.

We are also waiting on approval of a national promotion with News Ltd for late March.

The CEO of The Australian Newsagents' Federation, Anthony Matis, told the Federal Government's Credit Summit some of the problems newsagents faced today about credit.

He sees much of the problem as the banks' lack of understanding of the newsagency industry. Interestingly I thought his early comments were more relevant that "newsagencies' cash flow is being chocked because payments due from large corporate clients are being unnecessarily delayed."

You can read some of his comments here and make your comments there too.

We are having discussions with XCHANGEIT now about their new systems coming soon. We need shortly to do some tests on the new XchangeIT Link with some newsagents.

In August 1, 2008 I blogged how bad the Victorian and Tasmanian switch to Intralot. Then several readers thought it was bad but that it would get better. Well it has not got better.

The Lottery Agents Association in Victoria now claim since it happened more than 500 of their operators are losing 15 percent or more of their lottery income and estimates the government's revenue losses at $900,000 a week. That seems conservative as the Sunday Herald Sun released last week here, the conclusion of a detailed sales breakdown of Intralot’s figures including these figures.

204 of Intralot's 769 agents lost money between September and January last year - while 196 agents made less than $22 a week.

Intralot is likely to fall $226 million short of its sales target of $293 million this financial year.

Intralot admit there are problems and blame their lotto agents for the appalling sales figures, the Victorian people for not understanding its games, Tattersall's and Optus. Now this part of the story I thought was particularly interesting.

And rather than apologising to the retailers who have paid up to $10,000 to sell Intralot's products, Mr. Katakis says the company should have been tougher with them, as they are overseas.
"Our problem with the retailers is the following - we never imposed any sales targets," he said.
….
"We say 'OK, these are the rules, if you are going to sell you will make money. If you don't I'm going to take away your equipment'."

I wonder what they are planning to do to those people that paid those fees. On these figures, I doubt many retailers would have a hope of making any sales budget.

NSW newsagents should be very concerned about the current review into NSW lotteries there.

To those interested in what is occurring worldwide with free newspapers, I think you will find this article informative.

One point he makes here.

2. The more newspapers rely on advertising, the
more vulnerable they are. This explains why free
papers and paid newspapers that rely mostly on
advertising (like in the US) are hurt more.

This is exactly what we are seeing now in Australia, the more a publication depends on advertising the more affected it is by the current economic conditions.

POS Solutions’ clients just picked up all the awards at the prestigious for excellence Victorian Newsagent of the Year Awards 2009 in newsagency management and operations.

This year's winner was Hadfield Newsagency and Lucky Lotto.

East Ringwood Newsagency won the Distribution Newsagent
Yarrawonga Newsagency won the Employee of the year
Morwell Newsagency the Retail Newsagency

It makes us all at POS feel good as all these people picked us.

Morwell Newsagency, I remembered immediately after it was burnt in an arson attack coming to see a depressed owner, Ray. Everything was broken, trashed or burnt. Many business documents that are irreplaceable were gone. It looked dangerous as the electrical wires were hanging everywhere so we were all so careful just in case one was live. Later it was rebuilt. When I saw it at a user meeting, it looked terrific. Clearly the judges agreed, as they awarded him the prize. Ray is shocked about winning. He said to me that he was amazed that so many people are happier about it than he is. He is just in shock.

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I think a dramatic change could soon appear in the newspaper industry in Australia with Fairfax.

Here is an interesting article in the Australian titled Fairfax has some trouble with the fair facts

For those who have not been following the story, Fairfax owes about 2.5 billion dollars. It has debt covenants with the banks and these are close to the limit.

The market is clearly worried. Fairfax's share price was $4.80 at the start of last year, last month it was $1.32 that is a 72% drop. Now it is 93 cents. A 30% drop in a month. Two days ago, it went into a trading hold.

Now they are looking here to make a special issue at 75c a share, a discount to market of 20 percent on what is already a cheap price to try and raise 684 million dollars.

What is troubling to the newsagency industry much of the problems are blamed on the newspaper side of the Fairfax! That is why I am concerned.

As of tomorrow, 28th February 2009, the Sydney Morning Herald will be going up in price.

The new prices are $1.40 Monday—Friday, and $2.40 on Saturday. As far as we know the Sun Herald is remaining unchanged.

We have sent out newsletters explaining how to change the prices for your Sydney Morning Herald stock items, to ensure that they are delivered at the correct price, and sell at the Cash Register at the correct price.

Regards

Garth

Yesterday Fairfax released some bad financial figures to the market. The problem is their metropolitan titles, The Age and Sydney Morning Herald. These were once jewels in their empire. Now it is dragging them down

However, the immediate danger to them is their debt. It is about 2.5 billion and if it gets much higher the banks could move. The immediate solution for them would be to move some of their debt to newsagents. This may be why their policy now makes newsagents responsible for some booked advertising debt if the person does not use a credit card.

The Lucky Charm Group (TLC) is an example of what a small group of committed newsagencies can do together. For TLC, this year has been terrific. What is surprizing is the benchmark figures, they released at their conference.

I can believe it as I remember a person who worked in a newsagency for years. He became an expert on newspapers and magazines. He decided to buy at a bargain price a rundown newsagency, only to see it go worse. He discovered there is more to a newsagency than newspapers and magazines. Realizing that he was not doing it alone he decided to join TLC. Some of the ideas caused positive changes to his shop almost immediately. His business turned around.

What is disturbing is their big growth was not in newsagency lines. It also was pleasing that many winners at their conference, use posbrowser.

This newsagent views, I think will be of interest to our readers.

After carefully gone through all the different available options from NDC for the magazine returns, found the most effective option to obtain the maximum credit and lowest supplementary returns that may have to wait for six weeks before NDC process/credit and the lowest manual work is to forget about all their weekly/monthly returns form from the web-site, treat the returns for NDC as monthly returns and generate returns form once a month from the POS system, convert the printout to match their online supplementary returns directly and put those magazine that they even do not allow in the supplementary returns as our supplementary returns for them to process manually.

Thanks and best regards

Mr To
HORNSBY NEWSAGENCY
SHOP 3008, WESTFIELD SHOPPINGTOWN
HORNSBY NSW 2077
Tel (02) 9476 3208

One of my clients got this story about them. Click on the picture above for details. I was shocked so I rang Neil the newsagent up immediately. We had a talk about it.

Neil has no idea how the story got out. Although he did tell me that they have had a rough time with the bushfires there. He reported the only thing working there now is our computer system.

One part of the story they confirmed is that now they have a problem getting drivers and that is causing problems with the Age. I hope the Age is more reasonable than the story states.

In Australia, about 10% of newspaper circulation is free newspapers. This competes directly with many of our client’s newspaper products. So some good news for many of our clients is that now overseas free newspapers are reporting serious trouble.

The problem is advertising. Free newspapers rely on advertising for their revenue since that revenue is down many free newspapers are in serious trouble. Some of the big ones have closed. This has resulted in a dramatic drop in circulation.

This client of ours, Esperance Newsagency has sold five major winners, including four division one winners since 2007. They have had three major wins in the last few months.

Here is a youtube of one of our newsagency client's shop.

[youtube]JUleZrfSXJk[/youtube]

Take a look at the size of it.

Here are the latest figures from the Australian Audit Bureau of Circulation for the December quarter 2008 just out. South Australia has a sharp drop. The rest are as good as could be expected.

An interesting report in the Australian. It shows the same trend is continuing with newspapers that I blogged about in February 2008. Generally, the national papers are up and the state newspapers slightly down.

Overall compared with international newspapers sales overseas for example in the USA and Britain we are doing well especially considering the current economic crisis.

From what is happening, I think the newspapers have delivered as good a result as can be expected.

Newsagents should be more concerned with magazines than newspapers as the results for weekly magazines from the Audit Bureau of Circulation are just dismal, the magazine companies blame the economic times but I think it is the internet.