One newsagent looking to upgrade to posbrowser asked me to look at his data to see what his magazine department looks like.
While discussing it, we decided that if a magazine sells about 20 in a shop. A delivery of 25 would be acceptable. However, a delivery of 40 would be unacceptable.
I imported his information of the first quarter of this year into posbrowser and processed it using a business rule, that an acceptable return rate was the greater of one or between 20 and 30% of expected sales.
So I made an excel chart,
I used nil are magazines that come into the shop and posbrowser based on history expects no sales. As you can see 41.6% of all magazines coming into the shop are expected to sell nothing. These did include a few new titles so it was exaggerated slightly but almost all were genuine. A typical example was BRITISH FOOTBALL WEEK. It was coming frequently and selling nothing. These magazines were uselessly labelled, paid for, put on the shelves, a while later they were taken off the shelf, processed as returns, electronically sent by XchangeIT and then physically sent back all at the newsagencies expense. In this newsagency, the worse offender for nil products was Gordon and Gotch with 46% and Network was the best with 33.7%.
Over are those the newsagencies are getting too many. As you can see about 23.8% of magazines are coming in higher amounts then the newsagency would like. RDS were the worst with almost 34.6% of its titles, Gordon and Gotch the best with 14.0%.
Okay were the magazines the newsagency thought got it right. That is 21.7%. Say five titles came in now, only one could be expected to be in a quantity that this newsagency wanted.
Unders were those magazines that posbrowser thought the newsagency did not get enough. About 13.4% of magazine titles, the newsagency needs more.
Clearly, with these figures, posbrowser could make an immediate improvement in his magazine department.
