Today we had a few people ringing up why do they did not get their GG invoices funny enough even when they got the invoices. It took us most of the day before we figured out what was happening.

Xchangeit emailed us and a few others this morning that GG server was down this morning at 3:00am and the problem was being addressed. Since it only went to a restricted group and since it did state plainly the problem was being fixed, we assumed that it would not be known in Newsagency land so why broadcast it? Well this restricted email got out. Many people who read it did not read the whole email from Xchangeit and soon they started emailing other people that today’s GG invoices were not coming though even though they had. Those people they emailed got it second hand and many did not check their Xchangeit first so they rang. Soon the support lines here were flooded.

Although I been assured that this was a once-off-problem caused by GG moving offices, I think this example shows the present system is not satisfactory. There are just too many cases where the physical items are coming before the Xchangeit invoices. Xchangeit invoices need to be at our client’s site at least 24 hours before the goods physically arrive. This would give our clients a chance to process and be ready for the items when they came. It would also mean there would not be panic if they were sent late.

Anyway I have been told there are plans to set up a quality system to check on suppliers in the new version of Xchangeit. What I am going to complete in parallel system into our system too. The information is already there in our system what we needs is a report. This would give me the accurate data I need to explain the problem to Xchangeit rather then this anecdotal one.

The report would look something like this

Supplier Late invoices Late/Ontime_%
XYZ.............5..................0.02%
ABC.............7..................0.2%

Angus and Robertson bookshops and Supanews now together have Border’s 22 stores. So that is about 300 good stores. They also have large reserves of money as they are owned by Pacific Equity Partners who are huge.

Supanews have recently just purchased a newsagency in a major shopping centre Chadstone, they are good operators so I am sure that they will be doing a lot with it and soon I further suspect they will be acquiring a few more such newsagencies. This will mean a revolution in newsagencies from the inside as Supanews are good newsagents with buying muscle.

http://maps.google.com.au/maps?f=q&hl;=en&geocode;=&q;=345+Clayton+Road…

Where: CLAYTON NEWSAGENCY
345 Clayton Road Clayton 3168
Tel: (03) 9544 1153 - Simon Richards
Melway Ref: 79 C2 (Corner Dunstan St) and Google maps here

Date: Wednesday 5th March 2008
Commencing 5.30pm – onwards

Why : To assist existing Users to improve their knowledge and use of Browser and to demonstrate to potential new users the benefits of migrating to Browser.

Agenda:

Customer Deliveries

Adding customers
Deliveries
Statements
HWT Customer transfer file

Sub-Agents
Supply management
Return processing
Statements

Stock
Automatic ordering
GNS Connect Order File
Family & Class management
Stocktaking
Magazine stock control

Returns
Returning stock
XchangeIT electronic returns

Reporting
Most commonly used reports

Questions
General Posbrowser questions.

Please Note: This is a Posbrowser user meeting. DOS Questions will not be answered.

For further information telephone:
Simon Richards - details above
or
Michael Varger - Telephone: 0419 553 901
or Email: [email protected]

I expect that shortly we will a large number of support calls from clients on how they should handle the SMH price rise. To help explain it we have put together some information sheets and shortly we will sent out newsletters to our clients with information on how to handle it.

A client asked me to send her some subscriptions information sheets. The great beauty of the web for support is often I can do one job for many almost as quickly as for one. As one wants it, I am sure others will too.

So I will put up information on how to create a subscription in a customer order screen and another sheet showing an example of how to do it.

They are now in our subscription section.

Nielsen has just released their survey on New Zealand newspaper readership. The result of this survey is that newspapers readership is up by slightly over 1%. Unfortunately they don’t give the sales figure. Still considering the figures in Australia these results are excellent.

This is despite an active distribution of free newspapers. Obviously the worldwide trend to on-line newspapers is not worldwide.

However with magazines looking at the list the big sellers all are unfortunately down for example the NZ Woman's Weekly down 6.6%, New Zealand Woman's Day down 4.8% and TV Guide down 6.3%.

Much more then newspapers, newsagents must look at their magazines.

So we have received a number of support calls from clients on how they should handle it. To help explain it we have put together some information sheets and sent out newsletters to our clients with information on how to handle it.

This work, of course, is important but frustrating. Consider the problem from the newsagency industry say it is just 10 minutes a site to answer this question, that is 10 minutes wasted on one site now multiple it for more sites. One would imagine that some process should be put in place that could automate the whole process.

One such approach would be if newspaper suppliers adopted Xchangeit DDO standard for invoicing. They do not have to use the Xchangeit system just use email. Then our clients, when they imported in the invoices, would have among other benefits a system that could automatically update the price. As long as they import the invoices they would not have to worry about price rises.

The second approach that we are working on is an automatic scripting system. Using these we would be sent to our clients' scrips. If the clients' system allowed the scrips to function these could do updating of item prices but it could do much more such as stop a publication on a holiday, create bumper papers etc. The idea is that the program is as automated as possible. This is similar to what many software packages and some companies like 7-Eleven do now so their operator does as little such maintenance as possible.

What we want is to speed up the back office work while assuring pricing accuracy!

Like everyone in the newsagency industry, I went to look at the Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC) figures.

Of course, the main one that interests me is the newspapers, and the same patterns I reported earlier on a previous ABC audit showed up again. The national newspapers did increase in circulation, but the overall rate of fall in newspaper circulation is less than almost everywhere else in the Western world, and magazines are a real source of concern.

The results show an overall loss of about 1% in newspaper circulation for the last quarter of 2007 (October to December). Of concern is that this period included a federal election, which should have increased sales. So, like before, the newspaper market appears to be static.

Looking at them individually, it appeared that many News Limited publications took a hammering, although others like The West Australian also went down. That, of course, is more of an issue to the publishers, not us.

mX a free newspaper is now offering advertisers scented choices from today so they can have a newspaper that smell for example like roses. That is something different.

The mX newspaper is a free newspaper owned by News Limited given out throughout main CBD locations in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. If News Limited introduces this technology throughout its other publications, imagine what it would be like in a newsagency! Roses I can take but what if they made it smell like mint toothpaste?

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) have allowed A&R; Whitcoulls Group Holdings to buy Borders bookshop in Australia. The decision is here {link removed}

A&R; Whitcoulls Group (ARW) is a huge company who among other concerns owns Angus & Robertson and the Supanews chain of newsagencies. They currently have the largest market share in books in Australia. In total, they may also already have the largest market share in magazines too although their market share of magazines would be much smaller than books. I suspect soon this decision will have dramatic consequences to the newsagency industry if only because I remember an early attempt by A&R; Whitcoulls to use their market muscle to demand bigger margins from suppliers. If you don't remember this read here.

For those of you that sell books, I thought that this comment by the ACCC was interesting.

The ACCC's inquiries confirmed that Angus & Robertson currently prices many of its books above recommended retail price. The ACCC was concerned that Angus & Robertson would attempt to roll out this policy in Borders post-acquisition. However, the ACCC noted that Borders has also recently implemented a policy of selling some books at prices above RRP anyway. Further, as customer and retailer awareness of backlist pricing grows, other book retailers will be in a position to highlight their lower prices and win customers from Borders and Angus & Robertson if they attempt to increase prices further,"

These electronic downloads are saving our clients much time. That is why we are currently working with several other suppliers to get more of these electronic downloads.

If you require Simson please use

For this and other supplier files please visit here

Not the one that Simson is sending. As we have just finished testing Simson under the current card standard and it is fine. So you should have no problem importing this file.

The Magazine Publishers of Australia (MPA) have put together a great on-line site about magazines for advertising agencies and marketers. It has some great features for newsagents thinking about doing category analysis on their products.

One tip I can give you is when you talk to magazine producers they are always talking demographics and magazine categories, so keep that in mind while using this screen. The logic here is for an advertiser of a product, not a newsagent. Having said that they have made it easy for you on this screen to put in the various population segments and then you to study what types of magazines should go well in your area. Then it is up to you to see why they are different.

Having said that I doubt there will be any surprises to anyone as the best magazine buyers are young, socially aware, big spending, and intelligent women from families with good incomes. I suppose the question now becomes is your shop the place where these women would want to shop for magazines?

http://news.google.com.au/

On-line newspapers are about to get better still! There are now trialling local versions of their News service for Australia.

You can check out here the beta version of the Australian version of Google News Australia

But clearly this is going to be another threat to our main product the printed newspapers.

Still it will probably only have some affect as studies still show the main stumbling block on-line papers is that it is much more comfortable for a person to read a printed newspaper then one on-line. The problem is that it is getting more convenient and easy to get one on-line.

http://www.newstobusiness.com/

Brendan Geyer is a successful newsagent who decided to make what has become a successful consultancy business specializing in the newsagency industry.

This is a new clip by him on how to display newspapers.

[youtube]S4NJf7J2MtY[/youtube]

In the newsagency industry we are settling on the Xchangeit invoice file formats as the standard.

Last month we have been working with a newsagency supplier who was trying to provide electronically invoices to their clients. This is something that will save our clients many hours of work so of course we helped them. We supplied them with the specifications of the DDO and discussed it with them in some details. Later we tested it with them and it was fine. Almost immediately after that invoices were being sent electronically and everything is fine.

Today the supplier rings up. Some of their clients cannot import the invoice file but some can. Do we know what is happening?

Soon we find the problem. The supplier is no longer supplying DDO files but the newer invoice DD2 file formats. Now suddenly some of their clients with older software, say those without software maintenance, cannot accept the newer file formats.

So we told them go back to the older DDO file format and no matter what anyone tells them do not use the later DD2 because not everyone can import the DD2 version of the invoice. The problem was solved.

The reason I wrote this is to reminder everyone that DDO file formats is the standard invoicing in newsagencies. If it works don’t mess with it.

Now the change is done back to DDO the benefits will soon pass on to other newsagents who are not are clients too.

Let us consider the flow of magazines though the newsagency industry.

I am the magazine producer. I make the magazine. I have a pile of returned magazines. What do I do? Do I pulp the magazines get nothing or do I reissue them? Since I already have the magazines I don’t need to write or print anything. It costs me little to distributing them in comparison to the cover price magazine. So reissuing them as long as I get minimal sales is money for nothing. Reissuing will also give me the added advantage of boosting my circulation figures so helping me sell more advertising space. From a business view, what am I doing wrong?

Say I was the magazine distributor for example GG; I am getting paid to deliver them. My accountants have costed it out. My computers are monitoring them at all times. If they don’t sell later well I will get a fee from the magazine producer to pick up the unsold ones from the newsagent. So I am covered. About a month later I will credit the newsagent. I am doing what a distributor was made to do deal out magazines so from a business view, what am I doing wrong?

Say I was the newsagent. I get a pile of those reissued magazines. They are lousy seller. I pay for them immediately. They will take up valuable shelf room. I also need electricity to display them and staff to look after them. Even if they don’t sell unfortunately some will be shoplifted. Later when it is time to do returns, some are misplaced so I will miss a few returns too. I then get the credit for them in a month’s time.

So from a business view, which one is doing something wrong?

To me it is clear the bad businessperson here is the newsagent who either has not got computer system they need or they are not using it properly.

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,23156099-661,00.html

Reading this article in the Herald Sun. It looks like more delays and another major cost override for the Myki transport tickets in Victoria.

This delay, from my clients’ view considering the low margins offered by Myki is good.

As a taxpayer I think surely a billion dollars is a lot of money even for a state government today. What is really annoying is there was little reason to change!

All it needs is one person to press a wrong button and a computer could be issuing a newspaper delivery free forever.

Regularly we get clients from other systems and while our data entry people are retyping the information into our system, they find mistakes. They have a rule of the thumb that states for every 200 home delivery accounts, they expect to find an average of one (1) mistake. So if you are doing four hundred home deliveries a week, they expect to find 2 errors.

The expected yearly cost to the newsagency say servicing 400 home delivery clients = (2 errors) x (weekly home delivery paper charges x 75% + delivery costs) x (52 weeks a year)

It may pay you to do an audit of your accounts now!

I got a document issued by the government and notice it claimed that the newsagency industry is extremely competitive in world standards in recycling paper which is its core product.

Doing a quick net search, I discovered that newspaper recycling rate here has gone from 28% in 1990 to 75.4% in 2005. About 86% of Australian-made cardboard, 9% of tissue, 31% of newsprint, and 9.5% of printing and writing paper is from this material. Overall Australians are one of the highest reusers of recycled paper. Did you know that?

If you want to read some details on the newsprint and magazine recycle programme it is available on the pneb site

Yet I was shocked! No-one is telling anyone that newsagencies are green and so no-one knows about it even in the industry.

My suggestion is that we should as an industry looks into this AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.

I like this new promotion from HWT. If you buy or get a sun today in Victoria you can get a free compact fluorescent bulb (CFL) at your retail newsagent. Politically it is at a great time as now everyone is thinking about the environment. In my shopping centre today there were all these Australian conservationists out there today in force.

In my own home, I have replaced several regular light bulbs with these compact fluorescent bulbs. I am not only saving energy but also time and frustration as I don’t have to replace the light so often.

It will be interesting to see how this offer goes as if a person wants a compact bulb it’s worthwhile for them to get a SUN newspaper now. I just wish there had been more promotion about the offer with glossy posters for newsagents to show off.