A supermarket that was earlier providing E-ticketing top-up services has now discontinued the service as it says it gives very little return for a lot of effort put into the running of the system.
The manager of the supermarket Sunil Chand has told Fijivillage that they get only 1.5% of all the E-ticketing sales, for example, a purchase of $5000 worth of top-up into their system gets them returns of only $75.
Chand says they had to make an advanced cheque before Vodafone would come to top up the system.
He says he had to assign two cashiers to man the E-ticketing system, and a $75 dollar return was not sufficient to pay for even one cashier’s wages.
Chand also says that they had kept the E-ticketing service in the supermarket’s cosmetics department, and since then sales in the cosmetic department had dropped because the counters were always crowded by E-ticket top-up customers.
He says the supermarket had previously earned 45 percent of overall earnings from the cosmetics department.
We have posed questions to Vodafone on what they are doing to ensure that they have E-transport top-up machines in all shops, supermarkets and other outlets that are selling mobile phone recharge cards.
We have also asked whether they will increase the 1.5% return to retailers.
