Feeling and Filling your Vending Machine
As excited as you probably have after you successfully ordered your vending machine and wanted to start your business right away, another thing comes to mind. Yes, refilling the machine. Questions like: “will filling the vending machine be hard to do by myself?” or “do I need some help to fill the machine?” have clouded your mind upon entering this small business of yours. The vending machine itself is quite simple as it sounds, although it may not look like it. Through this article, we will have you all covered. Don’t worry, we got your back.
Feel the vending machine terms
Okay, so you have your machine. Your business identity is all over the vending machine, you have your account connected, everything is just right in its place. But if you consider this vending machine business in a long run, you might want to start learning a term or two about specific parts of your vending machine. To start, the machine itself visually has two sides, left and right. The left side is where you can see the products, whether via digital screen or through the glass. The right side is the tech behind this whole vending machine is about and/or where you store the banknotes if you have the analogue one. We will take some steps to understand them.
First, we have shelves, or trays. These refer to the horizontal sections inside the machine, can hardly miss them from outside, unless you have the machine with the digital screen. The tray can be pulled out and has a safety lock to keep the tray from slipping down. Even if you have the whole tray filled with your goods (especially the heavier ones like PET bottles and cans) it is not as heavy as you think it will be. You will not have cramps from pulling these trays, that’s a promise.
On these trays, you will see the spirals that hold together your goods. Coils or spirals, usually in columns, also work to rotate your goods and to vend them. One spiral can hold around 5-10 products per column and one tray may have 6-10 spirals. Do the math, you probably have a lot of products to be put there (but not your personal problems, please keep them away from the machine). These spirals have different sizes, but you can always customize them to fit in your products. Some are larger in size that can hold small bags of crisps, some have smaller loops that can fit as small as beauty products.
Below the visual glass, we can see the collection slot where usually labelled with the word ‘push’ on top of the hinged plastic lid. You might want to clean it once in a while, though. Also, if you have the machine with the vertical elevator inside, you can have it checked to see if there are any problems.
Now this part is where it gets trickier: the technology behind this machine. Let’s be honest, it gets quite boring when we talk about these, right? Generally, most of our vending machines have their own ‘minds’, they can store both your digital payments and banknotes, and the small touchscreen can also display short videos or images for your branding purposes. Well, it isn’t called a smart vending machine for nothing, is it?
Refilling vending machine 101
Up until this part, you get to know your vending machine better. People start buying and your machine is almost empty. Now you become curious as to how you refill your products in there. Fret not, it is not that complicated, probably not much complicated as your relationship with that one date you ghosted.
You stand before your vending machine, and you have the products you want to refill with, what now? To commence the refilling process, you unlock the metal knob on the right side of the machine. The right door will be pulled out at ease and the left door can also be pulled open.
From there, you can start to flick the safety lock on each side of the tray you want to fill, where it will easily slide down to the front, tilting a small angle (don’t worry it will not fall onto your face). On these empty rows of spirals, you can start putting your products accordingly, one by one. A pro tip: it is better to place heavier products on the lower trays, and start to put the lighter ones on top. It is advisable, but not limited to, as each tray can quite hold itself in a technological manner. But nonetheless, you probably have a drop test prior to this refilling process.
After you refill each spiral, each row and each tray, don’t forget to lock the machine. Push the door tight and turn the metal knob back. The last step is, you have to update your inventories on the touchscreen on the right side of the machine. Then you also update the CMS just to sync the machine and to be precise on the numbers. It is an important step not to be skipped, so make sure everything is matched both on the screen and the app.
Final remarks
The vending machine is now ready to be back for business! Not only now you understand your money-making machine better, you also get to refill them at ease. Owning a business now should not be as hard as it used to be. You can constantly check your inventories from your personal device with a matter of clicks and the business can still run while you lounge at home.
Should you need visual assistance on how to refill the vending machine, hop along to Smartven’s Instagram page and we got you covered with our informative posts and videos. The specific post on refilling vending machine can be found on our reels.
If you are reading this and have been wanting to own your personalized vending machine, you can check our website for inquiries or click the button below to quickly schedule your free consultation with our team. We hope to see you soon!
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