Month: January 2024

Choose the Valentine’s Day card that feels right

Giving a card to the one you love is sharing feelings. You want to pick up different cards, feel them, read them, and then you can choose the card that feels right to you.

Doing this, visiting your local newsagency, to find the card that feels right to you says more than a couple of clicks online that all too often send money offshore. Supporting local retailers shows you love local and appreciate local.

Feeling the card you choose matters because there is a big difference between the way cards feel. From the card stock itself (how thick it is, whether it is a smooth finish or rougher, whether it is made from recycled material) to the type of printing to any treatments that enhance the card, feeling different cards can certainly help with your card purchase selection. This is why shopping your local newsagency for a Valentine’s Day card really does matter.

Another choice you may make when buying a Valentine’s Day card is where it is made. Turn the card over and see where it is printed. Some websites make it very hard to do this, to see the back of the card.

If you want to choose a Valentine’s Day card that feels right to you, shopping local, especially at your local newsagency, gives you the best opportunity to compare feelings, to find the Valentine’s Day card that feels right to you.

Newsagency suppliers take note: Powerball has jackpotted to $200M

Newsagents selling lottery products have a big week ahead of them. Time will be tight. Supplier reps should consider this when visiting, especially unannounced.

Smart newsagents will work hard to capture Powerball sales earlier, from today on. It’s a race to get the purchases from those who are engaging with Powerball because of the record size of the jackpot.

newsXpress offers half-price POS software connected Shopify websites to newsagents

Online is the biggest opportunity of 2024 without a doubt. The latest benchmark for Aussie retail reports online as 10% of total business revenue.

In the Aussie newsagency channel, the average figure for those with a website is under 5%.

If you don’t have a website, what would a 5% bump in revenue feel like?

We have businesses we have helped achieve a 20% bump in revenue in a year from online.

We leverage our Tower Systems experience and our newsXpress experience exclusively to help you be open 24/7, serve new shoppers and add valuable net profit in using existing overheads. Our skillset is unique, our experience backed by plenty of success.

newsXpress exclusive. We offer access to a half price, fixed price, beautiful Shopify website connected to your Tower POS software. We back this with advice and mentorship to help you find a profitable niche you like.

If you can’t increase local physical shopper traffic, online is a smart move to improve business reach and profitability.

One newsXpress member launched a website with us last year and added $50,000 in good margin revenue in six months.

Another newsXpress member used their website to pitch an entirely new product category and found a profitable second business as a result, using existing labour and facilities in the shop.

We showed another newsXpress member how to expand the reach of their website and within two months they achieved thousands in additional good margin revenue.

It’s easy to say no to a website if you don’t have one because you don’t know what you don’t know. It’s also easy if you had one in the past and it failed.

Most websites don’t work. Smart people use a failure to do better next time.

Core to website success is filling needs and wants. While needs and wants are quite different, they compel good online business.

Here are the top reasons why we think every retail business needs a website:

  1. Capture sales when you are closed. Typically, more than 50% of online purchases are then the brick and mortar business is closed.
  2. Engage when you are closed. Use chat to answer questions from anywhere, or you geek-out and have an AI chatbot do this.
  3. Reach people not currently shopping with you. Typically, 75% of sales are from people located nowhere near your shop.
  4. Have a second outlet for quitting stock.
  5. Have a place where you can experiment.
  6. Playing with a plan Bin case your shop finds itself in choppy waters.
  7. To learn. A website, especially your first website, teaches you so much: What people want. What they could pay. Haw awful some people are.
  8. To get you out of a rut. If you’ve been in your shop for ages and are mailing it in each day, a website could put a spring in your step.
  9. To make your shop more valuable. Having a website can make your shop more appealing when you decide to sell.
  10. To find a secondary brand. Could be the first step in a shop rebrand.
  11. To drive traffic to the shop. People will find products on your website and visit as a result, for sure.
  12. To give you another source of revenue that is completely unrelated to anything you do in your shop.
  13. To harvest email addresses. Email marketing from Shopify is a breeze.

Having a website gives people a landing page from your Facebook, Instagram and TikTok posts. This is important.

Online is the biggest opportunity for Aussie newsagents in 2024 and newsXpress can help

Online is the biggest opportunity of 2024 without a doubt. The latest benchmark for Aussie retail reports online as 10% of total business revenue.

In the Aussie newsagency channel, the average figure for those with a website is under 5%.

If you don’t have a website, what would a 5% bump in revenue feel like?

We have businesses we have helped achieve a 20% bump in revenue in a year from online.

We leverage our Tower Systems experience and our newsXpress experience exclusively to help you be open 24/7, serve new shoppers and add valuable net profit in using existing overheads. Our skillset is unique, our experience backed by plenty of success.

newsXpress exclusive. We offer access to a half price, fixed price, beautiful Shopify website connected to your Tower POS software. We back this with advice and mentorship to help you find a profitable niche you like.

If you can’t increase local physical shopper traffic, online is a smart move to improve business reach and profitability.

One newsXpress member launched a website with us last year and added $50,000 in good margin revenue in six months.

Another newsXpress member used their website to pitch an entirely new product category and found a profitable second business as a result, using existing labour and facilities in the shop.

We showed another newsXpress member how to expand the reach of their website and within two months they achieved thousands in additional good margin revenue.

We’d love to connect you with some of these retailers so you can hear for yourself what is achievable.

MAKING THINGS HAPPEN

Hello …

Our theme for 2024 is MAKING THINGS HAPPEN.

It’s about action, growth, success and enjoyment for newsXpress members.

We see opportunity for attracting new shoppers, helping existing shoppers spending more and increasing the overall GP% of newsXpress member businesses.

This is what MAKING THINGS HAPPEN is about.

In December 2023, participating newsXpress members each made, on average, $3,500 gross profit from a product opportunity we accessed without any downside risk. Plenty made twice this.

In 2023 we helped a member deal with challenging cashflow, another with employee theft, another with an exit strategy and another with a complex competitor situation.

We also helped a retailer cut their rent by a third.

Nothing we pitch is mandatory.

We’d love to help if you are keen for it.

How do I find a newsagent near me?

If you are searching newsagent near me you’re like to get some odd responses because what a newsagent is today is different to what it was two years ago, five years ago, ten years ago and more.

The Aussie newsagency today is very different and so searching for a newsagency near me may give you a response that is unhelpful.

Instead to typing newsagent near me into your search engine, type specifically what you are looking for. The product, the brand or the service. Be specific and the search engine will list businesses near you that have the product or service.

If you are looking to buy a birthday card, search for that. If you are looking for back to school supplies, type that into your search engine.

Assuming that all newsagencies have the same products is a mistake in 2024. We are not the same.

Newsagent near me searching is general, broad, and, ultimately unhelpful.

Take a look at the different brands of newsagent ties. newsXpress is very different to what you would find in an extra shop, a Newspower shop or a Lucky Charm shop. Hugely different. So much so that you cannot consider these to be the same businesses.

Your newsXpress shop will be locally owned and run, community connected, offering a terrific range of gifts, playing way outside what has been traditional for a newsagency business and always changing. We can speak to that as we are newsXpress. The others will need to speak to how they see themselves.

If you think you want to find a newsagent near me, consider what ti is you want to buy and search for that. We can assure you that the response from the search engine will be more helpful.

newsXpress is all about helping its members find and cultivate opportunity as this drives business value.

Business value is what the business provides you and those who rely on the business with today. It is also about what the business provides when you come to sell.

How newsXpress helps each member with this is 100% up to each member.

Nothing is mandatory.

We present insights, opportunities and commercial context.

newsXpress is a privately owned company. We have been in business since 2001. We are a marketing group.

We’re not a franchise. Nothing we pitch is mandatory. We do not charge a fee based on your turnover.