Planet Antares

Inputs to make your vending business work. A special insight on Planet Antares Vending solutions

Tuesday, April 29, 2008

How To Develop A Winning Vending Business

If you want to start a great business and considering vending opportunity for the same, there are several things that need to be kept in mind. Firstly, you would have to decide on the type of vending machine that you want, the location of your vending machines and the number of machines that you will be able to operate.

Planet Antares offers great vending machines as well as a vending program that can help you get started in this field. Here are some steps that you need to follow when beginning with a vending business:

a. Call up locations like hospitals, universities, businesses and schools in your area and ask them if they have any vending machines in their premises and if yes, if they are happy with the service and commission that they are getting.

This will allow you to know whether you have found a potential location for your Planet Antares vending business or not. Meet the owner of the premises and try to convince him that you can do better than the previous vending operator.

b. Avoid buying coffee, fresh food and ice cream vending machines unless you are also supplying a snack and beverage vending machine to the same location. The most profitable vending machines to buy are snack and beverage vending machines such as provided by Planet Antares Inc.

c. Focus on purchase of good quality vending machines and be careful to inspect the features of the equipment before buying it. This is especially important in case of refurbished or used vending machines.

d. Consider joining the National Automatic Merchandising Association (NAMA), a neutral industry trade association.

e. Subscribe to the vending industry’s leading trade magazines that carry a lot of information about the vending business.

The success of your vending business depends on research and sheer hard work. This should always be kept in mind when you are establishing a vending business. These steps can enable you to develop a good vending business.

Friday, April 18, 2008

Obtaining And Retaining Vending Business Customers

There are important similarities between the operations of a machine shop and a full line vending machine business. Both of them depend heavily upon expensive capital equipment that seems to last forever. For any business, growth and customer satisfaction are really important.

Commonly, Planet Antares vending operators associate growth with the acquisition of new locations. Firstly, they will hire expensive salespeople to seek out new customers and alos they would be prepared to invest substantial sums and take additional debt to pay for the new state-of-art machines to equip the new account. Moreover, the vending operators sit back and look at their existing customers as cash cows.

Remember that your vending machines will last long only if the vending equipment is maintained in a proper manner.

The average vending operator keeps worrying about the competition offering his locations the same deals with new equipment that he is offering or even better deals. All this can be a worthless exercise as there are too many vending operators sitting on warehouses full of older equipment that they have taken from locations they have lost to aggressive competitors. The cost of acquiring or preserving a location can never be too high.

You should understand that the existing customers are more valuable than the future customers. With existing customers, you have already dealt with the cost of obtaining and equipping the customer and enjoy a certain level of credibility with them, based upon the quality of product and service offered by you.

New vending equipment can provide benefits for the Planet Antares vending operator as well as the location. It also requires fewer service calls. Higher capacity vending machines produce lower route labor and vehicle expenses for the operators. In the end, this will result in higher sales for the Planet Antares vending business.

Monday, April 14, 2008

How To Profit From Vending Machine Rentals

A large number of people have established successful vending businesses by starting with rented vending machines. Everyone may not have the capital for investing in new or used vending machines. There may also be people who are not sure about the potential of vending business and want to try it with as little cost involvement as possible. In such circumstances, rented vending equipment is the best option. Store owners and businesses are usually offering vending machines on rent.

To setup a vending business as a long term venture, you will have to make enough profits that enable you to buy your own vending machines in the future. Initially, you can begin with rented vending machines. However, this doesn’t mean that you need to settle for any kind of vending machine available in the market. It is imperative to go for quality vending machines like Planet Antares equipment only. Basically, you want your business to be profitable, be it with new or rented vending machines. So, renting Planet Antares vending machines can be highly profitable for you.

With the boom in vending industry, the demand for vending machines is quite high. However, vending machine rentals can be found almost everywhere. All that needs to be done is to get in touch with the right people that can provide you with quality vending machines. Vending machines are rented by shops and business offices alike for their customers and employees refreshment as well additional income. This means that you can use rented vending machines as a tool for making extra income.

Make sure that your rented vending machines are placed in the right locations and have the right products for meeting customer demand. These products must be popular, branded items to ensure continuous sales and profits. If a product becomes slow in performance, you need to switch it with something new. It’s always best to stick to branded products. You must also observe your vending machine sales pattern to discern which products are to be included or not in the product mix for your vending route.

If you have installed software to do this task, it will not be an issue. Otherwise, you will need to hire someone to supervise the product sales and observe the trends in order to place only winning product selections in the Planet Antares vending machines.

Renting of vending machines can be extremely profitable, if you have the right vending machines and the right products in them. The most important thing for any business is to generate good returns.