Adding products and setting prices

Set your catalog up properly once and every machine afterwards is a few minutes of work. Set it up carelessly and you will be fixing names and prices for a year.

Categories first, then products

Create your categories before you create products. Categories are what the customer sees on the screen, and they are the difference between a machine someone can buy from in ten seconds and one they give up on.

Keep the list short — most machines do well with somewhere between three and six categories. Name them the way a customer would think, not the way a wholesaler would: "Drinks" rather than "Beverage SKUs".

Adding a product

1. Create the product in your catalog with its name, image and price.
2. Use the real product name as a customer would recognize it. Abbreviations that make sense to you at 6am do not make sense to a customer.
3. Upload a clean image on a plain background. The screen is the entire shopfront — a dark, cluttered or stretched photo measurably costs you sales.
4. Assign the product to a category.
5. Assign it to the lanes it occupies, and enter the quantity you physically loaded.

Pricing

Price against what is nearby, not against what you paid. A machine is competing with the store down the street and with the customer deciding they can wait — not with your cost sheet.

• Check what the same item costs within a few minutes' walk, and price with the convenience premium your location actually justifies. A machine in a gym at 9pm justifies more than one in an office across from a supermarket.
• Round to prices that read cleanly on a screen. Odd amounts look like a mistake.
• Where the machine takes cash, awkward prices mean awkward change. Card-only machines are free of this constraint.
• Change one thing at a time and give it two weeks. If you change price and position together you learn nothing.

Keeping prices consistent

Decide early whether you price per machine or per route. Per-route pricing is far less work and much easier to reason about; per-machine pricing earns more in genuinely different locations. Most operators end up with a standard price list and a handful of deliberate exceptions, which is a good place to be.