How To Choose A Snack Vending Machine
By Mike Corbin, Thu Dec 8th

Snack vending machines come in all shapes and sizes. Some aresmall enough to hang on a wall and some are the full size floormodels like the one I had. Some are electronic that you pluginto an electric wall socket. Some are manually operated thatdon't require any electricity at all.

There are snack vending machines that offer user's the chanceto buy a coffee right out of the same machine, while others canvend soda and other cold beverages. There is snack vendingmachines that do all three! That's right, these machines offercustomers the chance to buy coffee, cold beverages and snackproducts out of the same machine.

I've seen a snack vending machine that sells cigarettes.

I've seen a snack vending machine that sells hockey cards.

I've also seen a snack vending machine that sell bus passes toaccess the local transit system.

And I've even seen a demo where one of my local distributorsshowed me how he could vend a can of three (3 ) tennis balls outof a snack vending machine! That actually impressed me.

So what does this all mean and how do you choose the right kindof snack vending machine?

You need to have as much flexibility with your snack machine aspossible. I wanted my machines to be able to have maximumflexibility to sell my customers whatever they wanted (withinreason and legal parameters) and I needed to have the machinethat was capable of doing that.

This meant I needed...

Pricing flexibility. I needed to be able to raise or lower myprices according to my supplier costs or customer demands. Thatmeant I needed to have snack vending machines that gave me thatoption without any additional equipment upgrades. That meantmechanical was out, you just don't have the kind of pricingflexibility with mechanical as you do with electronic. Withelectronic you can raise or lower prices of individualselections and do that within seconds. With a mechanical snackvending machine you might have a customer stand in front of yourmachine with a pocket full of coins but your mechanical machinecan't sell her anything because it isn't configured to acceptcertain coins.

Payment options. All my snack vending machines came with builtin capabilities to add payment options. I could have added abill acceptor if I wanted to. This may have boosted sales if thecustomer had bills in her pocket instead of coins. Some machinesmay allow you to add credit card or smart card capabilities.

Product options. Have you seen the Pringles chips businessopportunity? How about the Campbell’s soup business opportunity?There are others and in my view Pringles chips are good productsas is Campbell's soup, but the business opportunity is garbage.

For $100 at the time I owned my business I could have purchasedan add-on to install that would have given me the ability tosell cans of Campbell’s soup if I wanted to. I would have had tosell a lot of soup to pay for it though. Plus when the Pringleschip business opportunity was going around I bought a coil forone of my snack vending machines that allowed me to sell thatproduct. For $20 at the time I was selling the same thing thoseso-called " Pringles Vending Machines " were doing!

A lot of people lost a lot of money buying into those so-calledbusiness opportunities. I know because I saw the machines forsale months after I saw those so called business opportunitiesadvertised.

The bottom line with snack vending machines is that they can beextremely versatile. You can sell a lot of different types ofproducts other than just snacks. The ability to change yourprices quickly and easily are vital and the option of installingadditional payment capabilities is also a necessity.

Don't limit your options when you purchase snack vendingmachines. At some point in your business you may want to sell ahigher cost item(s) and there is a good chance that snackvending machines may be able to do that for you.

About the author:Mike Corbin's website http://no-vending-secrets.com challenges would beentrepreneur's to think about vending differently and avoid thevending business opportunity scams entirely!