Make your fans and followers your sales force, with Share & Earn!

It's the holy grail of viral marketing, and now you can do it easily and quickly with VendingBox.

In this article we see how to use your VendingBox to turn your fans and followers into a sales force, and have them promote your products throughout the social networking space.

VendingBox has introduced a powerful new feature which allows you to offer anybody that shares or tweets a product, to receive a percentage of the sales that are generated whenever a friend makes a purchase from your store.
Because the VendingBox is published directly into the news feeds for fans and followers, this dramatically increases the attention that shared products and stores will receive.

Traditional social commerce incentives like fan discounts encourage loyalty, and help to increse social reach. While this is valuable, having a new fan or follower does not guarantee any new attention for your products.

By providing sales commission as a tangible incentive, you now have the opportunity to engage in true sales crowd-sourcing.

How does it work?

1. Decide how much to offer.
Decide what percentage of sales commission to offer social users that promote your products.

2. Pick a product and share it to your wall.
Share a promotional or new product from your VendingBox for fans and followers to notice.This step is important since it is first the entry point for the VendingBox into the social news streams. If you have 5,000 fans or followers, they will all be notified and could potentially earn sales commission by sending your store to their friends.
 
   For you, the vendor, that's it!
 
3. Fans and followers, promote your store themselves.
When the social user hovers over the share / tweet button in the VendingBox, they are shown how much they can receive if sales are generated by sharing / tweeting the product.

4. VendingBox tracks the shares / tweets.
VendingBox has the ability to matches the commission to the social user, and records when sales are made.

5. Sales are made, users can track their commission.
Once a sale is made the social user is notified by email, and they can view their commission history in the VendingBox administration system.

How do the payments work?
The Vendor pays VendingBox fee plus any share comission due to social users.
If you set a 5% sales commission, add the VendingBox fee of 2.9% and it comes to 7.9%

Social users that are due commission, can request payouts from VendingBox once their commission has been paid by the Vendor.

Why not give it a whirl?

Just login to your VendingBox account and set a social sales commission rate, share or tweet a product and see how it goes!

Tips:
The VendingBox in-conversation store works best when there is a cool promotional offer, or new product arrival.
It pays to make the detail interesting for social users.

Announce the sales commission initiative on your wall, or through twitter so that users know what is happening straight away.

Give VendingBox feedback on the scheme. Let us know how it is working for you!

Get into the conversation! Get your fans and followers working for you!

How to add all of your Products to Google Products Search service.

This is probably one of the most underestimated features in the suite of social reach tools that VendingBox offers – and it's completely free to use. 

Merchants can submit their full product list to the Google Product Search database in literally just a few clicks.  Simply sign into your account and go through the steps as directed under Manage Products > Google Shopping.   It takes just two minutes!

What is Google Products Search?

Google Product Search is a free facility provided by Google to help shoppers find and buy products from anywhere on the web.  As a merchant, you can submit your all of you products to Google Product Search listings in one go, allowing shoppers to quickly and easily find any of your products and your website.

  

How to add your products to Google Product Search using VendingBox...

1.  Log in and go to Manage products > Google Shopping...  Fill in the details as required.
Note: Avoid using Ltd., GmbH, and other such localized titling features - Google does not permit these.  

2. Your account will sometimes go into a processing queue at Google, but in most cases, if you refresh after say 10 seconds the account and the details relating to it, will be displayed when you click on reload...

3. Click on reload and the following should appear.  Note that you have an account with Google, you must now submit your product list.  Do this by simply clicking on the countries you wish to have your products found in, and click 'Create feed'.

4.   You will then be asked to tick the boxes to ensure that you comply with the terms of use as set out by Google.   Once ticked, click Create feed.

5. Now that you have created a feed, the details relating to it will be displayed as shown below.  It will initially say that your feed was set to Google for processing, but generally, this occurs happens quickly, and on refreshing a minute or two later, your feed will be displayed as active.

6.  An active feed is listed as below.

Please note, that only one Google ‘Account’ creation is possible in each VendingBox ‘account’.  However, a ‘feed’ can be created using this account for some or all of the countries for which Google has enabled the service.

Please contact us at  support@vendingbox.net should you have any questions or if you need assistance.