Tag: newsagency business advice

Why your retail sales are flat but your profit is falling

Flat sales with falling profit is the most common story we hear from independent retailers. It rarely has one cause. It usually has three, and they compound quietly over a year or two.

Start with gross profit by department, not total sales. Most shops carry at least one department that turns over well and earns almost nothing. Newspapers and magazines did this to newsagents for years. Now it can be anything: a licensed range bought on poor terms, a category discounted to move stock, a service line that eats labour hours. Until you see gross profit dollars beside sales dollars, you are guessing about which parts of your shop pay you.

Second, look at your buying. Not what you bought, but how. Deals taken at a trade fair in March get paid for in July. Minimum orders, freight, bonus stock that never sells, and quantity breaks on products with no proven demand all shave margin. A shop can be busy and still be buying itself broke.

Third, look at markdowns. Every dollar you discount comes straight off gross profit. If you are running regular clearance to make room, the real problem is upstream in ranging and ordering. Discounting is the symptom.

There is a fourth cost worth naming. Card fees, bank charges, insurance and utilities creep. They are boring, and they are usually reviewed less often than the stock. A morning spent on those bills often pays better than a morning spent on the shop floor.

None of this needs new software. It needs your own sales data, sorted properly, read honestly, and compared with what similar shops achieve. That last part is where owners get stuck, because you cannot benchmark against yourself.

We do this analysis for retailers using any POS system. Send us a sales extract and we will send back one page: where the money is actually made, what is quietly growing, what is quietly declining, and one action worth taking this month. No charge, no obligation, and about ten minutes of your time to export the file.

If your sales are holding but your bank balance is not, the answer is almost always in the detail. Email help@newsxpress.com.au and we will take a look.

Why Choose newsXpress As Your Newsagency Marketing Group

Choosing a marketing group is a decision you live with every day.

It shapes what you can stock, what you pay, what help you can call on and how your store looks to your community. It is worth taking time over.

Here is our case, put simply.

We have been doing this for 25 years. That is a long time in retail, and long enough for a track record to be tested by good years and hard ones. We are still here, and so are members who joined in the early days.

Our supplier access is genuinely different. More than half of our preferred suppliers do not supply newsagents at all. They do supply newsXpress stores. That single fact changes what a member can put on the shop floor. It means your range does not have to look like everyone else’s range, and it gives shoppers a reason to come to you specifically.

Then there is Seasonal Edge.

Seasonal Edge puts real prize value into each store, not a token gesture. It gives staff something to talk about and gives shoppers a genuine reason to say yes at the counter. The results speak for themselves, particularly on care sales, where the lift has been exceptional.

We are also accessible. That word gets used loosely, so we will be specific. Our entire head office team is made up of local retail specialists. People who understand stock, space, staff and seasons because they have worked with them. When a member calls, they reach someone who knows what they are talking about and can help that day.

Beyond all that, we do the unglamorous work. Category research. Business performance analysis. Cost negotiations. Practical advice that has been tested in real stores before it is shared.

We also try to be useful at the moments that matter most. Season planning. A range that has stopped working. A decision about whether to hold or exit. Those are the calls where an outside view, backed by data from comparable stores, saves both money and worry.

And we share openly between members. Good ideas rarely come only from head office. Some of the best moves we have passed on started in a member’s store, were tested elsewhere and then rolled out. A group works best when it moves information around, not just stock.

We are not going to claim we are right about everything. Retail does not work like that. What we will say is that we try things, measure them honestly and pass on what works.

If you run a newsagency and you are weighing up your options, have a look at what your current arrangement delivers. Then have a look at ours.

We would be glad to have the conversation.

A Better EFTPOS Deal Ahead Of The Surcharge Ban

From 1 October, card surcharging ends.

For retailers who currently pass card costs on to customers, that is a real change to the maths. The cost does not disappear. It moves onto your side of the ledger.

We have been working on this for members.

newsXpress has negotiated a new EFTPOS arrangement designed to reduce what members pay to accept card payments. What each store saves will depend on its card mix, its transaction volumes and what it pays today, so we are happy to sit down with any member and work through their own numbers.

There is one point we want to make plainly.

newsXpress retains no margin from this arrangement. None. Every bit of the benefit flows through to the member.

That was a deliberate decision. It would have been easy to take a clip. Plenty of groups do. We took the view that the whole purpose of negotiating as a group is to give members buying power they could not access alone. Skimming from that would undercut the point.

Payments are one of those costs that drift. A rate gets set when the terminal is installed and then nobody looks at it again for years. Meanwhile the market moves. Many retailers are paying more than they need to and have no easy way to tell.

The surcharge ban makes this worth attention now rather than later. Once you are absorbing the cost yourself, the rate you pay goes straight to your bottom line.

A few sensible steps before October.

Check what you are actually paying, all in. That means the merchant service fee, terminal rental and any monthly charges, not just the headline rate. Look at your card mix, since debit and credit behave differently and the balance varies a lot between stores.

Review any surcharging signage, menus and online checkout wording so nothing is left in place after 30 September. Little things get missed. A sticker on a terminal. A line on a website checkout page.

Then take a proper look at whether your current arrangement is still competitive. If it has not been reviewed in a few years, it probably is not.

Members can talk to our head office team about the newsXpress arrangement and what it would mean for their store.

This is the kind of work that is not glamorous. It does not make for an exciting shop floor. It simply leaves more money in the business at the end of each month, which is its own reward.

If you are a newsagent weighing up your options for the year ahead, we would be glad to talk.

See Exactly What Each Part Of Your Retail Shop Floor Earns

Most retailers know their total sales. Fewer know what each part of the shop floor actually earns.

That gap costs money quietly, year after year.

We have expanded our business performance analysis service for newsXpress members. The earlier version was useful. This one goes considerably deeper.

It works from two inputs. Accurate sales data from the business. And a space allocation map of the shop floor, showing how much room each department and category occupies.

Put those together and the picture changes.

You can see turnover per square metre. You can see gross profit per square metre, which is the number that really matters. You can see which departments are carrying the store and which are being carried.

The results often surprise people.

A department that looks busy can be a modest earner. A small fixture tucked near the counter can out-earn a whole wall. Stock that feels essential sometimes turns out to be habit rather than performance. And a category that has been squeezed into a corner is sometimes asking for more room.

None of that is a criticism of anyone’s instincts. Shop floors evolve over years. Space gets allocated for reasons that made sense at the time and were never revisited. A supplier pushed for a stand. A category was hot for a season. A fixture was bought and had to go somewhere. It is completely normal, and almost every store has some of it.

What the analysis does is make it visible. Once you can see it, you can act on it.

The recommendations that follow are practical. Where to give space. Where to take it back. What to trial. What sequence to do it in, so the store is not disrupted all at once.

We also look at the relationship between space and gross profit rather than space and sales alone. Turnover can flatter a category. A high volume department on thin margin can occupy prime floor while a quieter, better margin category sits out of sight. Gross profit per square metre sorts that out quickly.

And we keep it grounded. Any change has to work with the staff you have, the fixtures you own and the stock already on order. Advice that ignores those things is not advice, it is a wish list.

The service is free for members. It is built on the latest retail strategic insights and on real performance data from stores like theirs, not on general advice pulled from a textbook.

We think this is what a marketing group is for. Buying support matters. So does helping a member get more from the four walls they already pay rent on.

Space is the one resource a retailer cannot buy more of easily. Making it work harder is usually the fastest available lift in profitability.

If you would like to know what your shop floor is really earning, that conversation is open to you.