Our clients could send faxes to Gordon and Gotch (GG) to adjust orders. This saved time with a telephone call. On 9 April 2010 GG announced.
Our Contact Centre team does not accept fax from any outlet either -- manually or computer originated in fact we have taken the faxing facility away from our Contact Centre team altogether.
However, they did say that they would continue to accept emails. So we rewrote to email.
Today GG national retail manager announced that,
Since my email of 9th April the business has had a change of policy and is now not accepting email returns from any source (manual or POS system generated).
Newsagents are back to manual entry on the GG website.
We want our clients automated, not keying in manually a website so we are having a discussion with Gordon and Gotch shortly over this.
Ideally though we would prefer XchangeIT to do it.
Gordon and Gotch position and probably any other magazine company is the current situation has problems with automatic standing orders.
GG is not happy about the quantity of changes sent by newsagents. This is why they are so far behind in processing these emails, and why there are so many they have not processed. These probably will not be done. I suggest if you have emailed them, that you go over your emails and enter them in manually on the GG website.
The next problem is many order changes are questionable. This is not just because of the many reasons in newsagencies that determines what sells! GG has adjustments to orders that they intend to show us that request standing orders to below what the newsagency sells. An example might be a newsagency, that sells seven of a magazine has asked for their standing order to be three. A newsagent is an agent, it is suppose to want to sell as much product as it can. This behaviour has hurt everyone.
Newsagents to satisfy magazine publishers and distributors must remember that magazine publishing is very expensive. The cost of printing and delivering is only a part of the costs. These people would rather distribute slightly more than lose sales.
To the magazine publishers and distributors, The ideal standing order = (newsagency sale) + 1
