http://www.businessday.com.au/business/newspapers-still-have-a-future-f…

This I thought was an interesting interview by Fairfax Media’s chief executive David Kirk here where he states that the present circulation of newspapers is stable but states among other issues, a need for higher cover prices of newspapers to make up the drop in revenue from advertising.

Right now newsagents could use that increase in cover price too.

http://www.businessday.com.au/business/less-choice-as-coles-culls-its-p…

I think my readers would find this article interesting about Coles.

It states

Coles is to slash the number of products shoppers have to choose from by almost a third.

The supermarket group has launched a high-risk trial to cut its lines by 30 per cent, marking a drastic shift away from offering shoppers a wide variety of choice to limited ranges.

Although these trials are only in early stages Coles report that

early results are encouraging … it shows just how over-ranged we are in certain segments

If Coles is over-ranged, what can we say about many newsagencies? I have seen some newsagencies where the magazines and cards are so over-ranged that the shopper has to hunt though the shelves to find them. Few shoppers do! If the shopper was to ask the newsagent often they cannot find them either, what is the point?

If Coles can maybe newsagents should look into their ranges of items too. Both our Windows and DOS systems have many fine stock reports that can enable you to identify marginal products. Posbrowser in particular has some of the best of the best of the best reports for this. If you have it why not use it? Findout more at a user meeting.

If you consider culling, in my experience your magazine department is a good place to start.

The recent movements in the Australian dollar have really affected the market. Depending when you or your supplier has paid for the goods, the difference in price can be as much as 40%.

So my tip is now is the good time to shop between suppliers.

Although no one mentioned it to me, the market in inkjets might also be so affected.

Attached I have included a PDF sheet with GG returns form dates up until the end of 2010

I suggest that you keep it somewhere for reference.

[link removed]

My wife went for a run, with her iPod. I suddenly realized that for many people who deliver newspapers and magazines in the morning walking, an iPod might be a great solution as it is very light, easy to use, and reliable.

Not only could it carry run sheets, but it could also play stereo music while you work.

You would print out the run sheet as a PDF or load the text file into Word. Then save it as either a PDF or a Word document. Then load it into an iPod.

If anyone tries this, please let me know how it goes.

I received today a few enquiries about rather than printing run sheets, having them sent to a mobile.

This technology has been available for a number years for our users both in DOS and windows. All you need is a cheap mobile that can display a web page.

If you want to do this, make sure that you have an easy to read mobile. Early in the morning when it is dark, you will need it.

You can do much more than just run sheets, since any report can be a web page you could run computer reports before you go to a supplier. Then while you are in their warehouse away from the shop, you look up these reports on the mobile.

One newsagent who is on DOS goes further than that. For a year now what he does is runs a full DOS system on his mobile.

It runs fast.

We have just checked and updated Henderson Greetings Barcode File

For this and other supplier files please visit here

The instructions on how to import on the website maybe different to that on screen.

We had a conference today with them over the data files.

Unfortunately there have been problems with earlier copies sent for example the formats are wrong and many values in the files are wrong.

Now we have just finished processing the latest copy of Simson cards. The file is huge even after we culled thousands from the original list.

If you have imported Simson file recently, you will need to do it again.

For this and other supplier files please visit here

For posbrowser, please use standard import.

Several clients of ours have reported problems with the current Simson imports. Frustrating is it is 2008 and still we are having problems with stock imports.

The current file has several things wrong with it. I will be talking to them tomorrow. So there will be a slight delay till this new stock file comes out.

I have been looking at some of the new products coming though.

This one is an Adult Prepaid products. Customers will be able to buy a voucher in your newsagency using cash, so being anonymous. These vouchers will enable them to access an upmarket Adult website at home using the codes provided.

The POS material supplied contains no offensive images and is designed to fit a spot where such a magazine would be.

The margins are great.

I have been looking at some of the preliminary survey results. Although the results are still coming in, it shows only 29% of our users are on Xchangeit. That alone clearly shows that it has not become the industry standard communication system. Currently POS Solutions transport more supplier information electronically than they do. This would be true of several other newsagents suppliers too.

I remember when Xchangeit started up, I told them it will work only if it is free to the newsagents. Also it was unfair to charge newsagents fees to get invoices electronically and I was not aware of such charging in other industries. Today I wonder if Coles Myer is charged extra for receiving their invoices from the magazine suppliers electronically?

Now it is time for a change in the business model for Xchangeit. It should be free. If you want the information in the mail, then you should be charged extra as it costs them postage and handling costs.

The Magazine Publishers of Australia MPA did some good work in newsagencies. They set up the MPA categories. Most newsagents that tried it were pleased with the result. Many offered to help as they wanted to make it better. Nothing came out of the offer. Newsagents were also keen to hear more. Yet nothing more came.

Then the director Helen Kingsmill who was there for years left. She has not been directly replaced and its seven months now. We still do not know what is happening with her position.

So little came out of the MPA that we almost forgot about them. Still I am stunned with the email, I received today about the MPA.

If what I am hearing is correct, all MPA want to do is concentrate on promoting advertising in magazines. Nothing else. You would think with some of the recent magazine circulation drop that the emphases now must be done at the retail level. This is not a individual magazine problem but an industry problem.

If things are just left, I can see a major paradigm shift with retailer reducing magazines soon. There are many products that could go into that magazine space.

If that happens maybe MPA should consider that much of that advertising revenue will disappear too.

If you change a magazine supplier from monthly to weekly returns, there will be some problems as the two do not exactly correspond.

For example a magazine with a week number 37 monthly return date is 1/10/2008. When you change over you will discover that the week number for the 1/10/2008 is 40. This causes problems.

The Swish Group is introducing a range of music cards. They want to sell them into newsagents to competition to iTunes by this Xmas. It is an exciting product, however it does not leave us a lot of time.

A problem is that after the product is sold, the retailer scans a special barcode on the back of the product. Then the product is activated.

There are some problems; I can think of. Although it is easy to do, you still need to show people how to do it. Say 2,000 newsagencies take on the product. That is at least 2,000 people that need training. Those people have to then have to know it well enough to train up many more people. Once they are trained up it is still messy. Who wants on the front counter to muck about activating product?

Then on many registers in shops, broadband is not available so it cannot be activated.

Also there is shop theft, if the item has already been activated the retailer will not know it is damaged till he tries to activate it. What happens then? Nodoubt you can think of more problems.

I think a better solution is a number covered by a seal on the back of the card that a buyer removes and activates at home.

A few days, a newsagent supplier Brown Trout gave us their supplier file. They had tested it and it was fine. We also did our tests and it was fine. Then we put it up on the net in a CSZ format.

We use CSZ files as they are most advanced system available for data exchange. They are designed to be used by any supplier for example Browntrout and Hallmark to send catalogue files to newsagents.

Shortly after a client rings up there is a problem. We test it again and it is fine. Thinking maybe something was wrong with the file our client had we sent them another copy. It worked. Soon another client rings up with the same problem. We sent them the same file out and it did not work. What was going on?

We tested it in our office and discovered that on some machines it worked and some it did not. It became one of those problems that had us all tearing our hair out to what is happening.

It took about two days for our programmer to find a fix. It is a dirty fix but it works. We never did figure out exactly what caused the error but I suspect that possibly, a Microsoft automatic update caused this hiccup.

Yesterday we sent a special automatic fix to all our sites and it is working again.

For this and other supplier files please visit here

For posbrowser, please use standard import.

Angus & Robertson Book shops have just launched the first Espresso Book Machine in Australia in a retail environment. They are talking of putting more in.

These are incredible machines.
[youtube]mkQa7tHpnn4[/youtube]

These machines printing cost are claimed to be about a cent a page. Printing time for a book is about 3 minutes. Consider if a typical book is about 500 pages, we are looking at production costs of $5.00. As cheap paperbacks now are $24.99 to the consumer, it could be a dramatic saving to them. It depends how good the printing quality is but it could make a major dent in the book market. What I like is its ability to print books that need to be specially ordered.

I have always thought there could be a demand for such a machine in a newsagency for interstate and overseas papers and magazines. The technology is all there but somehow it never happened. I know some ocean liners have such machines now.

A newsagent asked that I look at Lovatts publications. He felt what the industry was saying, he was not getting. Was he doing something wrong?

According to the Wikipedia article here. {link removed}

Lovatts Publications… has developed into Australia's leading crossword and puzzle publishing company, with a range of 20 crossword and puzzle titles, 12 in the top 10% of magazines sales.

The problem I have in doing a benchmark on this section is that it is difficult for me to know which are Lovatts magazines. So I use a simple rule, if in the title it has Lovatt in it, it is one.

I then took a benchmark of all the magazines sold in newsagents from the three major suppliers YTD. Weeded out a few and got 4617 publications. So my top 10% would be 462 publications. In that list, Lovatts got 15.

So they are selling better in newsagencies, than elsewhere or they are underestimated in the industry. This maybe as this organisation is active in the newsagency industry. I know I have spoken to them a few times and it has always been positive. They run good promotions. They have their own newsagency ordering system which has bought their returns down so saving newsagents’ cash flow dramatically. Because of this, newsagents do promote Lovatts.

Looking at the percentage clearly they are in total, a minor section with 1% of the total. My concerns started when I looked at the comparison with last year YTD figure when they were 1.4% of the total. That is a huge drop in such a small section.

The trend on my observations for Lovatts does not look good

YTD...............8.40% of NDD DISTRIBUTION products and 1.03% overall.
Last YTD.....10.74% of NDD DISTRIBUTION products and 1.44% overall

Quarter..................7.41% of NDD DISTRIBUTION
Last Quarter...........8.54%

My first thought was maybe this shift from NDD doing the orders has not proved effective. Maybe we are seeing the effect of undersupply. NDD have after all access to more information than Lovatts do. Sometimes it is better to piggy back on someone else rather then do it yourself. Or maybe the internet and publications expanding their puzzle section is having a long-term affect. I cannot say. All I can report what our own benchmark figures are saying.

Still I suggest that newsagents look into their magazine sales reports and make their own conclusions how it is going.

The top three sellers in this section are

LOVATTS COLOSSUS CROSSWORDS
LOVATTS CLUEWORDS
LOVATTS MEGA!

We have had some problems importing in from Andrews McMeel Publishing the current stock file.

We have been working with them to try to get it right. We should be able to get something out soon.

As soon as we do it will be available For this and other supplier files please visit here   (Outdated file - decommissioned)

I was speaking yesterday to a person who is trying to get newsagents to sell magazine subscriptions. What he offers the newsagent is a commission that is good for a virtual product. I then mentioned that newsagents are concerned, that this commission is much less than the profit that a newsagent would earn if a client buys the copies of a magazine in the shop. He replied that magazines bought on subscriptions are not really the same as those that sell in the newsagencies; so many newsagents could open themselves up to a new type of customers by selling magazine subscriptions.

After he left, I decided to investigate on the magshop

I looked around and saw their top ten listing. I then compared it to our benchmarking project for network products.

I then made this table.

Description---------------------Mag No------Newsagents
TOP GEAR-------------------------------1-------------64
AUST WOMENS WKLY-----------------2--------------9
WHEELS---------------------------------3-------------32
GOURMET TRAVELLR-------------------4------------142
SHOP TIL YOU DROP------------------5-------------36
COSMOPOLITAN-----------------------6-------------15
MONEY MAGAZINE---------------------7-------------43
CLEO-----------------------------------8-------------16
Australian GoodFood-------------------9--------------?
AUST PC USER-------------------------10-------------27

To explain the table

The top selling magazine in MAGshop.com.au is TOP GEAR; to newsagents from network it is the 64th best seller.

WHEELS ranks 3 in the MAGshop.com.au but in a newsagency it ranks 32.

MONEY MAGAZINE ranks 7 in the MAGshop.com.au but in a newsagency it ranks 43.

Australian GoodFood has a ? because it is new.

Overall these magazines make up about 6.3% of the newsagencies network magazine account. Of course there are many more magazines in MAGshop.com.au than just these, so you could probably double it.

But he is right when he said the typical subscriber is not buying the same magazines as the customers in the shop.

I had a request to do horse magazines. To find them is not easy. What I decided to do was a search in the title for HORSE or EQUESTRIAN, then edit out the few that are obviously not horse magazines.

Overall they are to newsagents’ steady sellers over the year. They make up about 0.5% of all magazines sales.

The two top sellers in this section are

HORSE DEALS
AUST HORSEMAN

Next one I have a request to do is Lovatt’s type Crosswords, Sudoku and Puzzles magazines. This will be interesting as this supplier unlike most magazine publishers calculate their own supplies to newsagents.