Just a few days ago, a newsagent told me that a major card company IT department suggested that I talk to him about using his stock sales report. He wants to look at sales trends and pocket turns for his cards in their shop.
The problem is that they change their designs often. So each week, they get more than twenty new designs arriving. To decide which section to put it into is often arbitrary, difficult to select and tedious.
Yet now thousands of newsagents do this all the time when one card company could do it. They do it as properly managed, cards using categories can increase sales by over 20%.
Why could a card company not supply proper categories for each card, as magazine companies do now? That would make cards much easier to display.
This mess has been going on for years. Yet nothing has happened. It is not from lack of meetings. In the last lot of meetings, a common category card system was promised on the 13 August 2007. That is over a year ago. Nothing happened. Unlike other departments in newsagencies, the only one without common categories is cards. Clearly, the card industry has failed newsagents.
Also if done, we could provide newsagents with some brilliant reports as we do with magazines. I am sure that this would result in similar savings to newsagents as in magazines.
The card supplier was either John Sands or Hallmark. I am not saying which as both are guilty.
