http://www.asx.com.au/asx/research/CompanyInfoSearchResults.jsp?searchB…

As I stated, Harvey Norman are doing a great service to the community by releasing their retail sales figures every week. They are giving us indication weekly of what is happening out there to big business. It saids much of the newsagency industry no such benchmarking figures are available. I can remember in an ANF conference almost 10 years ago we were told that this would be done imminently.

Still even if this newsagency benchmarking was done you would still like to know where your business is compared others.

Last week’s figures from Harvey Norman were terrible; I estimate that they went down in retail sales 13%. This week they have dropped slightly another 1% down.

For you to do a comparison with Harvey Norman is easy, do a totals report in your cash register system for 28 days to 23 November 2008 and the 25 November 2007. Then divide the 2007 figure into the 2008 figure to see where you stand compared with them. They are 3.10% down.

We have just helped an important supplier to newsagents collect data from some selected newsagents. What they are trying to do is get their distributions better! Since we have a reputation for supplying good clean data and we are always willing to help, we have done many such jobs.

There is clearly a problem as anyone who has walked into a few newsagencies back office could quickly see in the unsold stacks of newspapers and magazines. The hidden problem is the goods that could have been sold but were not supplied.

As far as getting distributions mathematically right only so much can be done. For example look at the money spent in the finance world today with some of the smartest people working on the most sophisticated systems out, yet clearly they have no clue what is happening. Much less what will happen! Much cannot be predicted including retail sales.

Still it is frustrating that at the end of many of these studies there is so little to show. My thought after doing so many of these is that the most common source of resistance to improving is the sales and marketing department. They are just too comfortable with the existing system. It evolved when there was only patchy and out of date data available. If someone complains, which rarely happens as most newsagents have long ago given up they have ready excuses for everyone. I am sure you have heard many for example she is a trouble maker, someone misled them, they had too many copies, not enough copies to go round, how could anyone predict what happened etc etc etc.

Because everyone now has low expectations, the existing system gives these sales and marketing people a position of power and safety. Yet from a mathematical view they are the wrong types of people to administer these statistical projects, they are too much penny pinchers, are too close to their customers to get the distance required for such a project and with the best of intensions kill these projects off.

The Australian has an interesting article on the current situation with magazines from the distributors and publishers side as I stated, it is the weekly magazines that are in real trouble.

From my experience with Bill Express, I think newsagents have to move quickly to notify these distributors and publishers that they want to help with these efficiencies but it must not be at their expense.

In newsagency industry, healthy readership figures encourage advertisers to pay for advertisements so helping subsidise the price of newspapers and magazines and keeping the retail price low. The importance is so great to a publication that when you talk to their circulation managers they are much more concerned with the readership than circulation. That is one reason why we have oversupply.

The most influential survey on this is the Roy Morgan results in readership in Australia.

Recently, they have released their current results.

I decided to create a table of results for newspapers which you can see. These figures are in 1,000s please contact us for details.

As we do not see newspapers as a growing market but we need to keep what we have. So in this sense newspaper readership with its slight drop is acceptable, as to advertisers we can say what you had two years ago, we can offer you a similar result today. This is national, say locally in Tasmania you can see a terrible situation.

I decided to create a table of results for weekly magazines which you can see. These figures are also in 1,000s

As you can see, these are not stable. These have dropped by more than 10%. In the industry nationally, the weekly magazines are probably our greatest concern.

Note to create these tables, I did not use the link supplied but a confidential report that I subscribe too.

We are working to get an integrated service available for our DOS clients to allow them to do though their computer many electronic products such as mobile top-ups, prepaid music, calling cards and gift cards. We expect a roll out in January for this product.

I confess there is no sales figure I take more seriously than newspapers as for most of my clients; it is the reason they exist and by extension so do we.

So I am always watching what happens with newspaper not just in Australia but in other countries like the US and Britain as they are close to us.

In Britain, the latest circulation figures are out for October 2008 and the results are disappointing. Here is my chart.

As you can see overall they are down about 5%.

Considering how important circulation of newspapers is to the newsagents there, it is no wonder to make up the loss in revenue due to fall in circulation they are starting to consider selling newspapers at higher prices than the recommended retail price.

I think you will find this interesting. It is an information sheet from the National Federation of Retail Newsagents (NFRN) in Britain.
It is available now.

I am just stunned at some of the prices for these Obama newspapers that people are paying on ebay. I am wondering how high they can go.

The Melbourne Age
Thu Nov 6
Item number: 110308610767
Sold $111.51
Plus delivery US $25

Australian Herald
Thu Nov 6
Item number: 110308610169
Sold $111.51
Plus delivery US $25

I was in a newsagency; a few days ago were I saw an appalling lack of concern with credit-card security. He had a report of all his customers’ credit-card numbers with expiry dates on the counter where anyone could have grabbed it. Not good!

In Australia, a business is responsible for security of these numbers entrusted with them. A recent case involved a florist where one of the employees got details of a customer’s credit-card. This then led to fraud. The bank went after the florist claiming that they had not looked properly after the information. The bank won. That is the reason, why many Australian businesses today refuse to store your credit-card details.

You may find yourself in court one day, having to explain what steps you took to protect those details from misuse and unauthorised access.

Some tips I suggest if you store credit-cards

Ensuring your backups are in a secure place such as locked filing cabinet.

Remove any credit-card details no longer needed.

Ensuring that only appropriate staff has access to credit-card details.

Try to only send for confirmation only the last four numbers of a credit number for example (****-****-****-1234). If you must send all, do not email credit-card details but fax it.

If you print credit-card details, make sure all copies are always secure and once no-longer needed destroy the copies.

Was it $26.00 and was the delivery fee $9.10?

Checkout what this guy got?

He might be more now. Check it out on ebay.
The Item number: 380079164438

Years ago I wrote that newsagents were missing a great opportunity to sell to collector - Newspapers, posters and magazines.

Here is what I wrote

Newspaper posters (Business tip)

Hold this thought, how many video library sells the old posters of movies.

If you think about it, many people want posters to hang on the wall. It’s a chance to remember and think about major events that are important to them.

So while I was looking though eBay, I discovered an idea that, I am sure, would interest you. Newspaper posters are sellable items. Most of you knew that but until eBay had little chance of accessing this memorabilia market. Well yow you can.

In case you are wondering what you can get for them on eBay! The following are some I checked off on eBay of newsstand poster announcing the death of Steve Irwin, The Crocodile Hunter

The Australian newspaper poster went for $22.50
How many of you, just threw out $22.50 in the rubbish bin?

The daily tribune got $6.50

CAIRNS POST got $42.99

Apparently it’s the most valuable because that is where it happened. As well as that it’s looks nice and glossy. Still I bet quite a few of our client in Cairns there threw that one out too.

Doing a check how many newspaper posters for sale on eBay.

I suggest just keep them for a month and doing a collection called Australia remembers September 11, 2006, then October, November etc and then next year plan to do a year collection called Australia 2007 and putting that up for sale?

If some major event occurs then consider releasing a theme collection of newspaper posters.

Are wondering what the old newspaper went for? Well a set of four old newspapers on the same event went for $56.00 today.

There has always been a problem with out of date subscription data, often incomplete and just inadequate for the publishers. It is costing the industry dearly as telemarketers do not have a clue whether the subscriber is in subscription. So they are ringing up people who are still subscribing and avoiding many out of subscriptions. Clearly it is a mess that needs to be fixed.

In Victoria, it appears that we are getting close to fixing this. Although I am sure there is much to do on News Corps side, our part is almost done. Our clients are now sending weekly automatically subscription data to the publishers.

It has been a massive project that has costed News Corporation as they have paid for many newsagents to update their computers, modems and software. It has been surprisingly difficult to get so many systems up to send the data automatically particularly the DOS sites. But now I am sure that we should be able to solve this subscription mess in Victoria.

Once it proves itself in Victoria, there is a good case to set it up in other states as the technology is now available.

We introduced Tyro into the newsagency industry, a long time ago. We liked it both for technical and commercial reasons. Tyro connects directly through the internet so no phone lines needed. That saves money. Also because of this, Tyro is fast. With it, you can do an EFTPOS transaction in seconds. As it is a single entry, it reduces keying errors.

We were not the only ones impressed with Tyro. One of our competitors decided to follow us again. He is late but still now; he has gone to Tyro too. Clearly, he is not the only one impressed as it just went public. In today's difficult share market, their share offer was oversubscribed by 70%. That is an incredible score. It shows the share market, even in this difficult period sees it as a great product too.

Anyway, we arranged a highly competitive package with them for our users. When all is added, this package has saved our clients much.

If you want more information please contact Tyro direct
Anthony Haddad
Payment Solutions Sales
Tyro - Level 2, 125 York St,
Sydney NSW 2000
T: 02 8907 1726 F: 02 8907 1626 M: 0403 3475 74
 

If you need any invoice files to electronically enter you will need it supplied with the DDO industry standard specifications. If they can do it, it will save you plenty of time.

So I have mounted them as an information sheet so you can get them.

The EDI Specs Release 2v9.doc is available

Unlike Australia, US newspapers are continuing the slide down. A report states that

Combined weekday circulation of all 507 papers that reported circulation totals this year and last averaged 38,165,848 in the six months ending in September, 4.6 percent below 40,022,356 a year earlier.

To newspapers there it is a double blow as they have less circulation revenue and less advertising revenue. So to boost revenue, many papers there are increasing newspaper prices. This increase is causing only a small circulation drop. If so, a good case could be made in Australia for increasing newspaper prices.

There is an interesting article here on the start of the ACCC case against Bill Express and Mobius.

It is in the Federal Court. Unfortunately, the ACCC record in the Federal court is not brilliant and with $16.57 million a year in lease payments, I doubt the leasing company-Mobius will just go away.

I also doubt that this case will simply stop at the finance company now. Maybe that is right, that it should not stop there. Over $16 million dollars a year is a lot of money to lose for the industry! That is more than the entire IT budget for the industry. Surely the industry should not just forget about it and walk away. Maybe some should have to show that they did do the due diligence expected of them.

Although none of our clients were affected, people on other systems were by the change in the Hallmark cards product codes. It has been causing distress with shops as some are ringing up wrong prices on the cash register. Surprisingly this problem has been around for quite awhile but only now been noticed.

We have been discussing the problem with Hallmark. What Hallmark used to do is have all the items on one product code to have one price point, now the same product code has several price points.

Still the immediate solution, we have decided is for Hallmark to get rid of the product codes in the DDO files. Hallmark said that they will be doing this immediately.

I was curious to see if the public are buying cheaper priced items now.

So I decided to look at a few newsagency departments to see the average prices sold.

Magazine
Last year YTD the average unit price was $5.73
This year YTD it is $5.68

Over the last two months it has been $5.92. Magazines are slowly creeping up in price. Much of that is the Austalian dollar with its massive gyrations.

For greeting cards sold
Last year YTD was $4.06
This year YTD is $4.16

For tobacco goods
Last year YTD was $9.23
This year YTD is $9.49

Overall I do not see much difference in the unit item prices sold this year compared to last year. If anything, it is slightly up.

I got this question asked to me by a newsagent at the Caulfield cup.

It is a difficult question to answer because it varies some much from merchant to merchant. A while ago, Touch told me that a good newsagency site does about $285/week in sales commissions.

However since we have established a new link with its much faster speeds and greater convenience; touch tells me that the rate has increased so I suspect the commissions are higher now.

One of our clients won the award at the Shepparton Business Hall of Fame 2008.

Lucky Lovell's is one of the largest newsagencies in Australia and an institution in Shepparton. Also one of the most progressive.

Kerryanne and Renee from Lovell's Newsagency were awarded an award at the Shepparton Business Hall of Fame 2008 for Business and Service Excellence.

You will need to have a signed agreement with Touch.

This agreement is non exclusive and has no budget, no entry, no monthly and no exit fees.

You can contact Touch for more details on 1800 425 427.

You will need a permanent internet connection such as an ADSL connection or something similar. If you can surf the internet on the computer whenever the computer is on, then that’s good enough for Touch.

Regards

Paul

The electronic catalog list for Last Diary is now available for downloading and importing into your system.

For this and other supplier files please visit here