Smiths News is the UK’s leading newspaper and magazine wholesaler. We operate 58 distribution centres throughout England and Wales and handle over 59 million newspapers and magazines every week for 30,000 retail customers –delivering to each one within a three-hour time window every morning.

We allocate newspapers and magazines using information from publishers and retailers

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We are the best news wholesaler in the UK . We are consistently ranked number one in many industry categories. Customer satisfaction is a priority and retailers rate our overall service at 7.5 out of 10.

 

Why stock newspapers and magazines?  

 

Newspapers and magazines have fixed cover prices and high margins – making them a successful category. They are supported by publisher-funded advertising campaigns and can be an effective footfall driver for other impulse purchases, bringing customers into your store. You should stock them because they have:

 

  • Attractive margins
  • Full sale or return
  • Wide choice for all shoppers High household penetration
  • Strong frequency of purchase
  • Strong consumer loyalty

 

The service we provide

We offer the following core services to retailers:

 

  • Deliveries: Daily delivery of newspapers and magazines to agreed delivery times
  • SOR: Sale  or return facility across the majority of titles
  • Order management: A centralised allocation process that sees your order volumes being managed with reference to customer and publisher information
  • Returns collection: Six-day per week returns collections (newspapers) and four-days per week returns collection (magazines)
  • Returns processing: Daily processing to ensure prompt credit and that customers benefit from improved cashflow  
  • Returns recall: Supporting you with management of returns through provision of a title recall paperwork
  • Customer paperwork: To support you in managing the daily and weekly category management procedures  
  • Customer service: Daily customer service teams on-call to help you, system supported customer query management solution, centralised escalation through our customer careline team
  • Online support: Connect2U is our easy-to-use website designed for retailers and available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year
     

Service enhancements  

Our core service is enhanced by the following elements:  

 

  • EPoS based solutions: For those retailers who can supply a daily EPoS feed, we offer sales based replenishment, fulfilment and forecast recall notes
  • Key performance indicators (KPIs): We operate and measure KPI s across all of our operational locations. Actual performance against KPI targets are automated across the business and information relating to our overall performance is available at on the latest news and market insight tab, that can be accessed from the home page
  • Customer service: www.connect2u.co.uk our online website especially for retailers
  • Get shop development support from our team of Territory Managers
  • EPoS brokerage in partnership with Reposs, providing the best systems for our retailers
  • Premier Club, our newspaper and magazine promotions club