Making the most of your VendingBox, Part 1

So you have made the move to VendingBox, added it to your Facebook Fan page, blog or other pages.

What next?

It's not enough to simply put up your store and expect the sales to come roaring in. Selling on Facebook or your blog is just like any sales initiative. It's necessary to engage customers, attract them through your store and make them aware of the new and exciting offers that are available to them.

In this series of articles, we will look at some of the cool ways you can make the social shopping experience work for you and drives sales.

Create attractive product promotions.

Most online stores advertise their latest products, or items on special offer using banner ads on their sites, or especially designed images.

Luckily VendingBox makes this process extremely easy. Since you can add a specific welcome or Facebook splash image, and choose which products appear first in the VendingBox, making your special offers or latest products front and center couldn't be easier.



First you need to choose which products should appear first in the VendingBox. To do this, find the products by searching for them using the Manage Products option.






Next we add this product to a new category which we will call 'Promotions'. To do this, edit the product and add ' , Promotions' to the category field. Apply the changes. The product has now been added to a new category called 'Promotions'.









To make our new 'Promotions' category the first to appear when the VendingBox opens, we choose Configuration > Start Category as shown here, and then Update the Configuration.



Great. So we can repeat this for each of the products we want to appear in the 'Promotions' category when the VendingBox opens.





Add a promotional welcome image.

Next we supply a welcome image which promotes our latest arrivals. To do this we open the images tab from the Preview menu option and upload a special welcome image.

The result is a welcome image which shows the latest product arrivals, and shows customers the special offers available in the VendingBox.

The VendingBox continues to contain the complete catalog as before, but your promotional offers are now front and center!



Similarly, whenever you have product promotions, new product arrivals or sales on, the Facebook splash screen is an excellent piece of advertising space for you to make customers aware of what is happening.

Give Fans a special discount.

Giving Fans a special discount is another great way to promote your store on Facebook. This is also made very easy with VendingBox. From the configuration screen you can choose how much discount (if any) fans of your page will receive.



Offer free shipping on large orders.

Ok, so this is not a new idea, but this feature is also made easy with VendingBox, and is a great way to attract customers. Again the valuable advertising space of the welcome and splash images can be used to promote offers like free shipping.

In the next part of this series we will look in more depth at some of the cool features of VendingBox. We will see how sharing products makes them available through Facebook search, how to use the google feed submission to promote your products on google shopping areas, and how best to customize your VendingBox so that it fits in well with your own brand.