What is Interactive Vending?

How does Intelligent Vending resolve the issue of dead products and idle sales? Along with the capacity to measure and track inventory levels in any machine or group of machines, the knowledge of what is selling along with what is not selling opens up doors never before available to the vending world. 

Imagine looking up inventory and sales on a site before making your refill runs on a weekly basis. You know what is sold out and needs to be restocked before leaving the driveway. Not only can you track sales and inventory to see what is selling and what isn’t moving, you can do it by area as well. 

This is huge given that one product may sell great in a certain area (i.e. near a college campus) while another product sells better near a professional environment. Being able to track that and restock on sales trends is huge and will maximize the profit margin for any operator.

There is only one problem, as new as Intelligent Vending is, it is already outdated. This isn’t too surprising since vending is quickly becoming a technology driven business. Then the question becomes, “What is taking the place of Intelligent Vending and why?”

Enter Interactive Retail Vending. What makes Interactive Retail Vending so much better than Intelligent Vending? Interactive Vending adds an entirely new dimension to vending that has been surprisingly missing from the vending business. 

That is pretty powerful, but doesn’t paint the complete picture for Interactive Retail Vending. It took us a little while to figure out the missing piece of the puzzle until we started doing some research. We said it earlier so hopefully you figured it out by now. When you use a vending machine, what do you do? You stare at the front of it, you look at the payment mechanism and you even peer inside or look at the screen to see what is inside. In fact, on screen driven machines, most people stare intently and look for any type of product description or information on the product. This intent and focus creates one thing – opportunity. 

This is the missing piece and is why the difference between Interactive Retail Vending and Intelligent Vending is a chasm that is just now being crossed. In case you have not figured it out, Advertising is the primary difference. Whether you are displaying ads for other products or you are displaying ads to attract people to your vending products, you have a captive audience and one that has not been saturated to the point of numbness. 

As Interactive Retail Vending begins to take hold, you will see more and more vending companies move to the Interactive Retail model, even the dinosaurs who have been around forever. For now, there are only a handful of vending machine manufacturers with systems capable of handling distributed advertising models. The first to come to market with this type of system is The Venders, a manufacturing company out of Southern California. 

Mark this as a turning point in the vending business and one that will provide a lot of opportunity in what most think of as a stale industry. As vending emerges from the snack and soda stigma it once had, look for some exciting changes in the near future.