In the Australian, I thought it was interesting that it is not just newsagents that
complain about it. The journalists at The Sydney Morning Herald were complaining over their newspaper's use of a wraparound. They think that it "imperils the prestige and integrity of the paper,"

Rob came in to get some help with his Dos system from Leon and me. We predominately spoke about invoicing magazines from XChangeIT. He was having this issue where when he brought in the magazines they were linked to the wrong items. This was causing him major issues with putaways – customers would have the wrong magazine assigned to them when they come in. Also occasionally when he scanned a magazine in the register it would come up with the wrong item. This is all due to incorrect invoicing. Leon and I took Rob through the process of bringing in the magazine and either matching it to an existing item or if the item is not in his system, creating a new one and establishing the link.

Rob had a few other small queries which we answered and by the end of the session he was feeling a bit more confident – we gave him some documents to take home and go through. We told Rob to call if he had any further issues or just wanted to make queries. It was nice to be able to show the client what to do rather than describing it over the phone like I am used to. Hopefully, when he goes back to his store he’s now able to invoice like we showed him and avoid those problems he was coming across.

Recently performance has been improved with the loading and editing of subagent orders. The orders section has been changed to allow selection of what type of orders (i.e. you can view a breakdown) to speed up loading time considerably.

Here’s how it works.

From the side menu, select Subagents and then Subagent Maintenance. Call up a subby and then select the type of order under the Standing Orders tab.

Make a selection and then click the Get Orders button. You are then shown the paper orders for the conditions you have chosen. Note: you can change tabs now to view the other breakdowns.

Pos Browser is constantly being update to become faster and more useful.

Years ago all the card companies came together at a big meeting and agreed on a standard industry-wide card classification method. Then they all went back and used something different. When challenged all card companies would announce that they were following the industry standard. Finally we had enough.

For technical reasons with POS software, I decided the John Sands category system would be the easiest. So I went to Ron Thorpe the National Business Development Manager for Hallmark Cards in Australia and explained to him the situation. He then asked me what I needed. I told him what I need is for Hallmark to follow the Australian standard and then tongue-in-cheek presented him with the John Sands category under the heading Australian Standard. He immediately assigned one of his staff Kim Kan to produce a file with Hallmark cards of this category standard. What even made it nicer for us was only our clients could do it as Kim Kan only sent this file to me!

I then went to many small card companies and told them this is the standard. John Sands does it, Hallmark does it, this company does it, etc so you should be able to do it and generally, they would. Soon our clients were handling integrated card layout.

Our clients were happy and we were happy as we picked up a few good deals out of it as the card representatives soon discovered that only POS Solutions could handle integrated card layouts.

These happy times lasted until Kim Kan left Hallmark. Without Hallmark, we were back to no industry standard. So off I went to Ron Thorpe again. He told me he was working on it with John Sands as we speak. This I already knew as earlier John Sands had already spoken to us about it. However, interestingly Ron committed himself to a new system in place by 13th August 2007.

Well, it is now October 25, 2007. It is still not done. However, it is not from lack of activity as my meeting yesterday with one of the managers Ron Popp of John Sands and Hallmark showed.

It was a very productive meeting, I thought what the three of us today have agreed at the meeting was to have meaningful names for the cards. Soon your customer if they look at the receipt will have something that makes sense for them for example not “Everyday card” but say “Mum’s Birthday card”

Furthermore what we now have is a Proposed Card Classification of 16 pages of specification and discussion notes with an extra one-page summary. Although no agreed card standard yet we are close! Remember there are about 28 companies involved all with different systems all of who have to agree. So this is not a quick process as everyone is looking at something that can last about six years.

What is proposed now though is great! I would be prepared to run with it *AS-IS*.

All cards are going to be divided into several groups.
The first seven will be.

1) Product type – The physical description of the product for example Boxed Card, Flat Wrap, Calendars etc
2) The Occasion for example Birthday, Anniversary, Get Well, etc
3) The Gender of the recipient for example Male, Female, General, etc
4) The relationship to the recipient for example Mother, Father, etc
5) The life stage or Age for example Adult, Teenage, Age 3, etc
6) The Segment style for example Comic, Inspirational, Photographic
7) The Colour mainly used in Wrapping paper

I thought that number four was a particularly brilliant idea.

Then we are also going to include a range somewhere else, for example, Spiderman, Anne Geddes, etc probably using the author field of the stock file.

I cannot wait to get it going and I am sure once we do our clients will pickup an extra 5% in card sales.

Please press here for details of newsink

The Australian Press Council has just issued its 2007 Supplement to its 2006 report. This is the best report on the industry available with one particularly interesting point from our view, nowhere are newsagents even mentioned.

Still, the report is available here for reading online.

[link removed]

I recommend reading chapter 2, which has a detailed study on current circulation.

If you prefer, you can download a pdf version of the report here.

[link removed]

Recently XchangeIT gave us some excel sheets on the data that our clients have been sending. By a lucky accident they included a few accounts that were from several competitors. So giving us a chance to compare what we were sending in comparison to what they were sending.

The percentage of our clients sending is still low about 70% of our competitors. The good news is when we rolled the sites back to see how we had been going before the campaign we could see that our current campaign has clearly worked. Considering that we only started to push sales data in the last few months this is an better then expected score. Clearly here we have more work to do.

However the reality is that it is not just sending it, the problem is that if the data does not arrive daily it is often useless. That is why the old Dartboard made such a big deal about when the data was being sent.

So we decided to compare figures for accuracy by using how often the data was sent as a guide. It did confirm what we have been told a few times by the magazine company analysist the data coming though with us is the best. This confirmation made me feel good!

Having said all of this, the best sales data unless it is available is useless. Currently the magazine producers don’t get any sales figures till too late. If you produced a magazine in late May, you released it in late June and you got no sales figures till late September. That is four issues later. Now try doing your subagents not knowing the last four sales figures and see how accurate you are. Is it any wonder that they overproduce? A big problem is to get the distributors to issue estimated sales data to the magazine producers daily. This is what the newsagents are giving the data to do. I was annoyed in my last discussion with them they refused with a comment that they were impressed with my analysis which you can read here.
http://shurl.net/ci7

I remember one sales manager of a women magazine told me the whole thing is escapism. That is what they are selling to women.

Keep that in mind when you see this clip on how a fashion picture shot happens. See this.

[youtube]iYhCn0jf46U[/youtube]

It is unbelievable how much it shows and says in just a minute. I found it fasinating how they take a beautiful woman, put her though 5 hours of make-up and shooting, then do about 4 days of Photoshop to come up with the picture. To me the final picture aint real but it looks real so is it any wonder so many women after seeing these pictures in magazines we sell for so long don’t feel pretty enough.

Over the years, word-of-mouth has been our best advertisement. Still, you need to write advertisements to promote our software. As the saying goes “The world never beat a path to your door.” So we are putting together a new ad for our DOS clients to promote our windows upgrade. If you are one of our DOS users thinking of going to upgrade, I invite you to read it.

Technology has moved on. It is not so much in what is there but how you get it. It will change the way, you think about your business and this new step is waiting for you now.

Small business owners evaluating point-of-sale software need to ensure they fully understand the terms of any transaction. What may seem like a good deal today could be a disaster tomorrow.

I was talking with another small business owner yesterday who is locked out of his system. He has no ability to get access to his business data as he has a serialization error. He cannot access his historical data or run his business. I have blogged about this before but it angers me every time I hear of such a lockout.

POS Solutions has no such serialization. We would never place a barrier between you and your business data.

Caveat emptor.

Many of our clients have attended these Newsagent mastery conferences. They all seem very positive about it.

Last year one of our clients Terry and Shirley Howland of Emu Park News was their overall winners of the 12 month Newsagents' Challenge so as well of winning monthly prizes, they also won a 12-day adventure to China and Hong Kong. I have done that trip too and its a great trip. Click on the photo for details

This conference is in NSW and will be held this weekend Saturday 20 and Sunday 21 October 2007

Those of you that use Xchangeit will know what the Dartboard is. What it is suppose to be is a measurement of the quality of the sales data. It includes a simple method based on quantities of how accuracy your data is, if the information came on the correct day and how often you were in sending it.

To us though it has been nothing but a nightmare, the figures did not make sense. Our stuff was correct. We knew that. But our clients though were getting low scores on the dartboard so they were frustrated. So I can remember showing the figures to one of the analysis in Network proving to him the figures were wrong.

So I am pleased that our complaints have led to something positive and the dartboard is going to be replaced.

There will be a major update being releases on Tuesday dealing with News Corp subscription data. Could you please download it and use it to send subscription data to them.

We expect soon once we get clarification from them that there will be several more major updates to be released on this issue.

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,22571809-661,00.html

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,22571809-661,00.html

This article, I thought with some interesting comments.

"Under the new 10-year licences, Tatts and Intralot will be free to expand the sale of their products to all retail outlets, including servos and supermarkets from July 1, 2008.....Tattersall's ....is expected to match Intralot's retail expansion plans."

So in July 2008, not only will be see scratchies going into large number of shops but more ominiously we can also see the number places selling Tattersall's products in Victoria will be increased.

Interestingly in all the discussions in the news media on this, I have read no one even talking about the affect on the Tattersall's franchises who depend on these products and are now looking at a major drop. Not only will many lose scratchie sales but they will also lose some of their Tattersall's sales as their will be more outlets for Tattersall.

It is a bit too early to speculate on those without Tattersall now who are now looking at exciting chance to get into soft gambling!

In Victoria this is shocker to newsagents. When I heard it, I was stunned. I then listened to Tattersall’s spokesperson saying it is going to have little effect on them as scratchies are only about 15% of their lottery sales and would have on the “bottom line (profit), probably no impact.” Well the market does not agree with that figure as their share price has dropped about 12% in the past few days.

What I also thought was interesting was the announcement by Tattersall’s also stated that "dedicated Tattersall’s points of sale within their shops and specialist lottery outlets, including kiosks in shopping areas, will continue to sell only Tattersall’s lottery products.“ Note the word only I have added the emphasis too. Are they planning to stop these areas from selling Intralot’s instant tickets? So the customers there with some spare cash, the newsagent is not going to be able to sell them instants there!

Clearly the dynamics of an old proven market will change as a new major player with new philosophies and ideas has come into it. We know that they Intralot state that they plan to have about a 1000 retail outlets by moving into supermarkets, service stations and other shops. They don’t even talk about newsagents. If Victorian newsagents get some of this share, it will not be much.

Also what I found interesting was a further announcement by Intralot that states it won “a 10 year license to operate a variety of lottery and instant games in Victoria” so I wonder what the “variety of lottery” means? Will instants tickets change too?

Anyway I quickly decided to test how it is going to affect my clients - newsagents. Quickly looking at some databases my figures are that many newsagents are looking at losing about 25% of their total lottery sales. It is hardly trivial!

It will be interesting to see what the ANF and VANA has to say about all of this?

A newsagent considering our software was told by a competitor this week that our software had a deficiency in the way it cannot read the 2 digit addendum on magazine barcodes. The claim by the competitor was put with such conviction by the competitor that it made our prospect doubt us. While we are happy to show that what the competitor has said is a lie, sometimes part of a lie sticks.

I hope that the experience this week is a one-off and that appropriate counseling for this employee of this competitor involved will guide them to focus on their offering rather than lying about us.

I stress to all within POS Solutions that we need to focus on what our software offers and to demonstrate every claim we make. I also remind our team that we can bring any prospect into any of our retail businesses and show first-hand how we use the software ourselves to achieve we claim it can achieve.

The software sales person who lied is now in our sights. We will watch him carefully. Another lie like this week and we will take action. It is disrespectful of newsagents and it demonstrates a lack of confidence in his product to win the sale on its merits.

I have spent the whole day yesterday trying to get many of my clients to send Xchangeit sales data. Everyone is a different story. Still by the end of week, I expect to have a few more on.

The main problem now we find is that many more of POS Solutions clients are sending data but we don’t know they are sending data. This is because say we had a client John Punkmusik who sells his newsagency to Helen Green. She owns a shelf company called 123 Suny Rd Pty Ltd and two newsagencies one in West Oak and the other is East Oak. Now we could have in our records West Oak Newsagency. Someone else could have Nextra West Oak Newsagency. Another person might have 123 Suny Rd Newsagency Pty Ltd. Another supplier Oak East Newsagency because that is where they send the bills! Another knows them as Helen Green Newsagency and another might still have it under the old name John Punkmusik Newsagency.

We spent several hours over three days off trying to match what newsagency Xchangeit had to our list. We took a guess on a few and left at the end about 40 off as we could not figure them out.

What the industry needs is some industry wide coding system to determine the newsagency just like they do with other places.

Newsink is the lowest cost Newsagency promotion group,

Newsink is the original inkjet marketing group

Newsinks aim is to make your store the destination store for inkjet cartridges and associated IT products in your area

For just $250 a year Newsagents receives the following:

·Rebates from Newsink suppliers, currently 4% payable monthly,

-Tonnex for Original Equipment Manufactured (OEM) products,

-Keytek for compatible products

·A minimum 5 promotions a year with your stores personalized address header on your flyers. (cost of flyers and distribution at newsagents expense)

·100% Genuine OEM products

·Reliable service and delivery

·Ability to participate in consumer promotions provided by HP, Epson and Brother

·Reseller rewards program provided by Tonnex, choose from over 400 products LCD TV’s Holiday’s Homewares etc

·Competitive pricing to bring customers to your store

·Your personalized account manager to help you manage your account. Freecall 1800 number provided by Tonnex

·Ability to participate in Reseller promotions- By purchasing from Tonnex you are able to participate in reseller offers available from HP, Epson and Brother,

-I.E. Epson’s recent print, preview and project offer, whereby Resellers were able to redeem home theatre projector valued at $1699,

-HP free $300 fuel offer for just buying 60 HP inks in the 1st week of October.

·Access to P.O.S and merchandise provided by HP, Epson and Brother

·Access to exclusive products provided by HP, Epson and Brother; such as twin/tri packs and bundle packs which are always great value. Previously only available to major retailers, e.g Officeworks, Harvey Norman etc.

·Great trading terms 30 day account, FIS for orders over $250.00 from Newsink suppliers.

If you join Newsink now, for October you will receive the following

1. $300 free fuel voucher for every 60 HP inks on a single invoice from Tonnex between the 1st – 8th October, pay for inks 30th November!

AND Rebate of 4% on value of HP stock Approx $1500= $60 + 3000 reward points

2. 2 Free Greater Union movie tickets for every $500 Epson consumables ordered from Tonnex in October + rebate of 4% on value of Epson stock $500 = $20 + 1000 reward points

For the first week in October you can receive:

#$300 fuel + $60 rebate + 2 Movie tickets($30?) + $20 rebate = $410 APPROX + 4000 reseller reward points + 5000 bonus reseller reward points for filling out the Tonnex account form.

#Buy 2 lots 60 HP inks receive 2 x $300 free fuel!

The more you sell the more you get back in rewards.

October promotion will have products and consumer offers to bring more customers into your store.

REGARDS

Neil Chandler
NEWSink PTY LTD
M: 0417340817
P: +61 3 9879 4319
F: +61 3 9870 3552
 

Many of you trying to get into the ACP Emerald Club, will discover that one major factor is sending sales data on time - it is called timeliness on the Dartboard.

The easiest way to check to see what time the sales data is being sent out is, 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.

If you right click on the newest of these files and select properties it will have a created date and time. It will most probably be about 11:35 pm.

We will then need to check the time that XchangeIT is sending the files back to the suppliers.

If you open the XchangeIT interface, then go View, Configuration

Now click on the Timer tab. You will get the screen you see below (page two). What is needed is a time after the files are created by pos but before midnight for XchangeIT to automatically dial and send the sales data to the suppliers.

A digital publication is an adapted version of a printed publication that you access on-line and paid through subscription, donations or advertising.

In Australia, the Morning Bulletin in Rockhampton, Queensland is the only digital newspaper circulation currently audited.

Probably this is why on their website you can see a stress on the digital publication.
http://www.themorningbulletin.com.au/

its paper circulation is
18,474 Mon - Sat#
25,296 Sat#

Interestingly though the sale of digital editions is small as “the Morning Bulletin reported 14 sales of its weekday digital edition in the three months to June and 26 sales on Saturdays.

The most it has sold since July last year was 26 copies on weekdays and 40 copies of Saturdays.”

Do the math’s yourself!