Advice for retail newsagents and other retailers getting the most from your POS software commented Shopify website

newsXpress is grateful to share its e-commerce experience with other retailers through structured consulting and support for retailers going online through Shopify and delivering POS software connected Shopify websites.

What a retailer gets out of having a Shopify site is up to them. 100%

A website, is a hungry beast, it needs to be fed, with new content and changes, regularly.

Here is some advice based on our personal experience from years of successful selling online and experience and our work helping many small business retailers to bring to life POS software connected Shopify websites.

  1. Continue to add products and ensure they are named and described how people would search for them. For example, if you sell a Mickey Mouse teacup, in your POS software you might call it teacup – Mickey. From a search perspective, it needs to be called: Disney Mickey Mouse teacup.
  2. Refresh your collection / category landing page descriptions. A landing page is a collection page on which you have items for that collection. Write 3 or 4 crisp sentences of 15 or 20 words each with the sentences punching keywords people are likely to search for. Remember, you are writing for the search engines.
  3. The best photos are those you take, of single products. A photo of a display is not easily understood by humans or Google.
  4. Add articles. Your knowledge could be what differentiates your business from any competitor. Indeed, non-product content will most likely drive more traffic than product content. Write articles about what you sell and your business more broadly. Fresh text-based content helps drive the authority of your website. Each article should these rules to engage with Google:
    1. Be at least 350 words.
    2. Use a keyword or key phrase at 5+ times through the article.
    3. Be your own written fresh content.
    4. Cover a single topic or focus.
  5. Get suppliers and others to link to you. The more the better.
  6. Sell products on additional channels: Facebook, Instagram & eBay.
  7. Regularly pitch your site on social media.
  8. Use Shopify’s abandoned cart feature to push sales.
  9. Pitch promotional discounts to draw in new customers.

newsXpress would love to help you bring your retail business online through a Shopify site connected to your Point of Sale software.

E-Commerce strategies help newsagents find new customers

The e-commerce services offered by newsXpress help retail newsagents and other retailers to grow their businesses by commenting their POS software to Shopify and other platforms right from the sales counter of the retail business.

Using our own technical services based in Melbourne, Victoria, newsXpress and its e-commerce services is able to help retailers to develop and run successful e-commerce websites and through this top find new shoppers who can benefit the business beyond the local shoppers walking past the door.

The e-commerce services offered by newsXpress are backed by excellent technical skills including web development, SEO management and SEM for finding those most important shoppers.

The services offered by newsXpress help small business retailers to make the most of the Shopify POS software integration opportunity.

The reality is that a website will take more time than you can imagine. It most likely will not obviously make money, many don’t. We say obviously because there are ways websites make money beyond direct sales.

We suggest you approach launching a website as a start-up business. Sure, it may sell some or all of what you sell in your shop. However, it is different, it is its own thing with different needs and different opportunities. Seeing it as a start-up can help. Also, seeing it as a start-up could take you on a fresh path.

You need to love your website. If you don’t it will not get the attention and support it needs from you. By lovewe mean love what it sells, how it does this and how it represents you.

This brings us to what you sell online. That can only be resolved by you. It needs to be something, or a category of things, that people are searching for because if they are not looking, finding shoppers is much harder, something you feel good about.

Starting is key. In our experience, where people land with a website a year on, 2 years on and more is different to where they start. They would not have got there if they had not started. That is key in our view – starting, gaining experience, maybe stumbling or falling before moving on.

Think carefully about what you would like to sell, research it. Take your time. Make the move once you know. Starting before you know what you want to do could be a mistake.

newsXpress concerns about Australia Post magazine trial with Are Media

Are Media is trialling the sale of selected top-selling magazines in a group of corporate stores owned and run by Australia Post, a government protected and owned monopoly.

This trial by Are Media could adversely impact small business newsagents. It could encourage people to stop shopping their local family owned newsagency and, instead, shop at their government owned post office.

Mercury Capital, the Are Media owners, have been announced as underwriting a rights issue for Ovato (OVT). Ovato controls magazine distribution in Australia.
We are concerned that the Australia Post relationship is a step toward reducing magazine revenue for small business newsagents.
That a government owned and run enterprise is being gifted this opportunity to the detriment of small business newsagents is most concerning.
We can see the possibility of Mercury grabbing the magazine distribution business from Ovato, further strengthening the Australia Post relationship and small business newsagents being a further risk.
Australia Post continues to encroach on what small business newsagents sell. Recently, Australia Post got Lego product – we suspect because they are government owned and protected. Newsagents struggle to get access to Lego even if they have an awesome toy department.
This is a local small business story. It is an important story. One you will most likely not see covered in mainstream media.
The local family run newsagency depends on local shoppers for magazines as a core traffic generator. The Are Media move puts that at risk.
While innovative newsagents are evolving their retail businesses to be less reliant on magazines and related legacy newsagency products such as newspapers and stationery, magazines remain core to the average newsagency business. They are important.
Leveraging government monopoly protection to take magazine revenue from a newsagency to a Post Office would, in our view, be detrimental to small business owners and to the community more broadly.
We call upon politicians to look into this and into the general retail operations of Australia Post more broadly. They need to focus attention on what this protected monopoly is doing to the harm of local family businesses – all for the profit of the government.
Ideally, questions will be asked as to why Australia Post needs to sell magazines. It’s a postal service. The Act under which Australia Post operates is clear.