I was challenged yesterday by one newspaper supplier over my conclusion here that many of the problems with subagents relate to small orders.
To a newspaper publisher, a sellout means that a potential customer for a newspaper, may not get a paper.
So I ran posbrowser using our benchmarking data to compare the subagent order size with the sellout rate. The overall return rates were about the same.
Here is my results for newspapers
Number of Orders...Size of order...sellout rate%
----------------------------------------------
371...................1-2...............37.74%
202...................3-4...............25.74%
271...................5-10..............23.25%
196..................11-20..............28.06%
328..................21-50..............18.29%
359...................51+...............15.04%
Explanation: The first column is the number of orders considered. The next column is the number of papers on the order. The last column was the rate that no returns occurred - sellouts.
So in the first line, I compared 371 orders with one or two papers. Of these 37.74% had no returns. Similarly the second line out of 202 orders of three to four papers, 25.74% had no returns. And so on.
As you can see, it is the smaller orders that are more likely to sellout.
