Being a Vending Operator

Being a vending operator today is not an easy affair. Each year there is an increase in the costs of vending equipment, products, gasoline and health insurance. These are some of the reasons why vending operators need to have competitive advantages to stay ahead of the competition. Planet Antares can provide you with a vending program that will give you solution on how you can stay on top of your game.

The marketing challenges are rather obvious. Vending operators all over sell the same products, so if the vending operators compete on price and raise their commissions, profit margins will be jeopardized.
Establishing your brand
As a Planet Antares vending operator, you have to sell on service. Before going ahead to do that, you would need to establish a brand. This will give your vending business a professional look and feel.

Establishing a brand is something that can be done if you have a sizeable Planet Antares vending business. The brand elements would include company logo, brochure, website, truck graphics and employee uniforms. If all these elements coordinate well together, you would establish more credibility as a vending operator and this would thus increase your professional presence in the marketplace.

Both large and small vending operators need cost effective marketing solutions that will differentiate their companies from the competition and ultimately increase account sales. Planet Antares can provide you with these costs effective solutions. That is why it is very important that as a vending operator, you should only associate yourself with reputable vending companies that will provide you with quality vending equipment and all the vending information that you require.

As a vending operator, you need to know the status of vending sales, cash info, stock information and machine health status without having to visit each machine on a route. This is so that you can decrease operating costs and increase your sales. If you are bidding for an account, you would need to convince the location that you will offer a better service that the one that they have. If a location already has the kind of service that you are offering, you would just need to compete with the other vending operators in that location to ensure that your vending machine sell more products. Finding a location that is untapped would be your advantage.

Offering a location a vending service that has technological improvements is one of the best ways of beating out the competition. Having features such as cashless vending will definitely increase sales from your vending machine.

Snack and Beverage Vending Tips

A Planet Antares snack and beverage vending business can be very profitable if your vending machines are well maintained and you are using the right vending program. Below are some few tips that you can use to make your vending business more profitable.

• Spread out your route so that it can bring up your sales average. The more selections that you place in your Planet Antares vending machines, the more the profits that the location will bring in.
• Come up with great ideas of how to avoid paying a percentage of your profits to the location owner. You can make them an offer of free advertising of their business on your other vending machines in other locations. If the locations owner still wants a commission, you can mark your sale price up to cover the commission. This will mean that rather than selling a coke for 50 cents, you should sell it at 55 cents, in order to cover a 10% commission.
• If it is possible, try to vend your sodas for 50 cents and your chips for the same amount. The customers will then be inclined to spend the whole dollar in your Planet Antares vending machine.
• Kids love Mountain Dew, which would make it a money making “sleeper.” Try to always have in your vending machine.
• 24 oz bottles usually cost you much less than 20 oz bottles.
• Try using a toy arrow to pull canned drinks faster from the lanes of a vending machine.
• Using only quarters in your bill changer will only get the whole dollar fed back into your vending machine. A 60 cents candy bar will require a dime, but your quarter’s only change will only be able to buy a soda or chips. Maximize the profits of your Planet Antares vending business whenever it is possible.
• A well maintained vending machine will be used more often than a neglected one. Service your vending machine on a regular basis and change slow moving products to alternatives whenever it is required.
• Change the days of collecting money from your vending machines, because if there is someone that has noticed that has noticed that you collect on one particular day, they can easily rob you of your hard earned money.
• Service the vending machine by yourself until the time that you are comfortable with hiring someone to help you out.
• An attractive looking vending machine will bring in more revenue, since it will have the ability to grab the attention of potential customers.

Increasing Same Location Sales

Vending operators are today facing situations where workplace populations have declined and operating costs continue to increase. Skilled labor is hard to find and competition is always very strong. This is why when you are faced with such a situation, it would be essential for you to sell through every vending machine that is already on location.

If you want to increase the sales volume in your Planet Antares vending business, there are only two ways to do that. This can be done by adding new locations or generating additional traffic in existing locations. The second alternative involves much lower costs, which means that it would have a more dramatic impact on the profit of your Planet Antares vending business. An increase of 1% in same location sales can improve your profitability by 20% or more. This of course applies to an average vending operation.

Most of the costs that are involved in serving an account are fixed. These are vehicle and facilities expense costs, administration costs and so on. This would mean that higher traffic at such an account would only involve the additional product costs, higher commissions payment, sales tax etc.

An industry observer reported that gross profit in vending presently runs at around 52.5% while operating expense averages at less than 25%. They also observed that operating profit has declined to an average 1.69%, which is half of what it was 10 years ago. These figures should encourage you to use the method of generating more dollars from each Planet Antares vending machine at every location without having to increase operating expense to any great extent. The methods that were used years back cannot work the same way today.

Adding new locations to your vending business as a way of increasing sales in your Planet Antares vending business would be costly. The best thing that you can do is to increase the sales in the existing locations. You can add more products in your vending machines or you can add more vending machines in that same location. These are strategies that can be used to increase sales.

A vending business should always be profitable. If it ceases to be profitable, you should look for new ways of increasing your sales. When you do that, make sure that you maximize your profits at all times.