VendingBox launches sharable Wall-Store.

VendingBox is proud to announce today the launch of one of their most exciting features so far.

Facebook recently modified the real estate value of Fan page tabs, moving them into a column of links at the side. While this may suit Facebook, store owners wishing to drive Fans & friends to their products are finding they have to take extra measures to get those eyes onto their store. This can mean extra links, directions and repeated wall posts drawing attention to the store. It also means Fans & friends need to visit the Fan page itself to see the store.

Most Facebook users spend their time in conversations happening within their own news feeds, or a wall related to something they like. This is the key area for vendors to insert their products and stimulate conversations around offerings.

Today, VendingBox launches its own Wall-Store or 'news feed store' as they are sometimes referred to. When somebody shares a VendingBox product, a compact wall version of the store will appear in their news feed and also in the feeds of their friends. This plays to Facebook's strength as a conversational platform and starts true social commerce. The viral nature of news feed insertion is an excellent source of free advertising.



The store appears with a neat play button, just as if it were a YouTube video. Once the button is clicked, the store opens on the product that was shared, and users can buy right there within the wall! Further, by clicking on the little arrow on the left, the VendingBox opens the full store catalog for browsing.



Vendors with special offers, or items they want to promote can simply share these products to their wall, with a promotional message. Add to this share incentives and fan discounts, and social commerce is truly under way.

VendingBox are expecting this to provide a real boost to Facebook based sales, and a buzz to be created by so many customers seeing this sort of application for the very first time.

See it in action!

There are many examples at the VendingBox Facebook page.

Extend your sales reach to Facebook and beyond with VendingBox.

E-commerce and trend experts the world over are predicting the greatest web trend for 2011 will be the wide-scale adoption of social commerce by both consumers and online merchants.

It is now very easy to create Facebook stores, with many options available from many different store providers. Not only can your customers buy on Facebook, but they can tell their friends, share your products, and create a buzz around your offers. Fan discounts, competitions and Facebook special offers are just some of the tools available to merchants to engage customers and drive sales.

Two way catalog and order synchronization.

However, for the time pressured e-commerce website owner, managing multiple inventory catalogs and ordering systems is not ideal. Merchants want to be able to manage all of their business from their existing systems. Merchants that do not already have a Facebook presence also need advice on how best to take advantage of the significant opportunities that come with social media. What does it mean to have your products social search enabled?

VendingBox is a new software service which allowes existing e-commerce merchants that use the most popular systems like osCommerce, Zen Cart, Magento, CRELoaded, to extend their reach into Facebook and beyond. By providing an easy-to-install plugin, VendingBox automatically provides a Facebook store with two-way product, stock and order synchronization. The plugin will also copy your tax and shipping settings to the Facebook store. This neat feature allows merchants to use their existing e-commerce control panel to run their business.




Brand preservation.

VendingBox provides its own control panel allowing merchants to design every aspect of their Facebook store, from store theme, splash and welcome images, to logos, colors and much more. Merchants can choose whether to place their store directly on the Fan page, or to have a large version available in a Facebook canvas. Store owners can upload images which will greet customers with promotions, latest offers and more.

Customized VendingBox Splash Screens

Campaigns, fans, competitions, creating a buzz.

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.

By carefully chosing which products appear front and center in the VendingBox store, merchants can make sure that the products that greet customers are the ones they believe will drive sales.
Some merchants have been creative by putting special offers and latest promotions onto their splash and welcome screens. This is a create way to promote new products, or advertise competitions.

VendingBox allows you to give specific discounts for Fans, something which creates a great incentive to visitors to your Fan page to 'like' your store.

Social search enabled, share to win.

Imagine if when somebody uses Facebook search your products appear in the results returned directly from Facebook. Since Facebook introduced support for the Open Graph API, it is now possible for merchants to have their product details appear in these results. VendingBox has integrated this feature into their product presentation so that once somebody shares a product from the store, it will appear in Facebook search.

Creative store owners such as Candy Nails are using this feature as part of a competition. When fans share a product, they are entered in a draw to win whichever product they have shared. This is a fantastic way to have customers spread the message about your products. This guarantees a buzz will be created around particular products, and they will then turn up whenever anybody searches Facebook.

Candy nails are pioneering share incentives.

Bring your store to your customers.

Facebook is just one of the places that potential customers spend their time. If you run a blog or any other website where potential customers might be lurking, there is an opportunity to engage. Since VendingBox is completely mobile, it can be tucked away on almost any web page or blog. By providing a neat store tab widget that appears on the side of the page, it can be opened or dismissed easily by visitors. This is another great way to move your store to where the action is, instead of waiting for customers to come to your store. The widget is installed by pasting a few lines of code into any page. How cool is that?

If you run an osCommerce, Zen Cart, Magento or CRELoaded store, and would like to get your Facebook campaign going, VendingBox might just be the perfect solution. It takes no more than a few minutes to launch your store, there are no set up, product or license fees, so there's no risk in trying it out.

Website: http://www.vendingbox.net
Facebook: http://facebook.com/VendingBox

Selling digital downloads using VendingBox

As well as physical products, VendingBox supports the sale of digital products. Merchants can upload and sell eBooks, music, software or any digital product from their storefronts. Adding digital products to your store is very similar to adding other products. The following steps show how.


To begin, log into your account.

Under “Manage Products” Click “Add Products” in the submenu.

Add all the details of your digital download as the form suggests - fill in the fields, “Title”, “Price” and click on “browse” to upload an image of your product.

Enter a good description about your product in the description box at the bottom.

Above the product description field, tick the box “Is this a digital download?”.

Once the tick-box is checked, scroll down and click “Apply Details”.

A new link will appear beside the digital download tick-box , which you can use to upload your digital product.

Follow the instructions that appear. You will be asked to define if your product is a book or a music file - tick as appropriate. "Browse" for the file you wish to upload to your store for sale. Click "Apply", and upload your product file.

Once your file has been successfully uploaded to the server the message below will appear.

Your digital product has been listed and is now available for sale.

(N.B. Ensure your product is "active" in your "Product list" in order for it to display on your storefront. Or, click on "Preview" to see if it is active.)

Tips:

If your individual digital product entry has any variations you will be able to provide a separate file for each variation. E.g. Language versions, template titles, music formats, to name a few. Simply add each variation to the table shown below.

Any variations made available for an individual product are chosen by the customers during the checkout process.

How do customers purchase your digital product?


After a customer purchases digital products from your VendingBox at checkout, they are returned to a page containing links to each of the digital downloads. These links expire after 24 hours.


The customer also receives an email containing a temporary link, so they can download later at their leisure.


We recommend creating zip files for your digital products, which include instructions, licensing information etc.

If your product has any variations you will be able to provide a file for each variation. Any variations made available for an individual product are chosen by the customers during the checkout process.

How to add VendingBox store to your blog.

In this article I’m going to show you how to add a store to your Blog… let's just start with Blogger.com as it is the most widely used…

Aim:
To place a widget style Store tab on the right hand side of your blog site… Just like the one on this blog, on the right… give our sample store a click now, so you can get an idea of how it will present itself… and click the tab once more to make it close again…

Part I – Create your Widget code and define how it will appear.

1) Go to www.vendingbox.net and sign in to your account…

2) You will have arrived on the “Preview” page, on the “Preview” tab.

3) Click on the tab at the top that says “Widget”.

4) In here you will see the screen shown below – Click into the field that says ‘Widget text’ and specify what word you would like the side-tab widget to display when it is visible on your blog. e.g. “STORE”, or “PRODUCTS” or otherwise…




5) Consider also if you would like to make your VendingBox appear in a specific size by changing the number of pixels wide and long you wish it to be.

6) Once your happy with your choices, click “Generate Widget Code”.

7) Your widget will instantly appear as a widget on the current screen, acting as a preview of what it will look like when you place it on your blog.

8) Make sure you are happy with how it appears and make changes as required.

9) Leave this page open for now – we’ll come back here shortly to pick up the code we need later…. Open up another browser so you can navigate to your Blog site.


Part II – Add the Store Widget to your Blog.

1) Go to you Blog, sign in, and go to the ‘Dashboard’ where you configure and update your blog etc… In this “Manage Blogs” panel you will see a link named “Design” – click on it. In here you will be able to Add and Arrange Page Elements.

2) Now you will see a layout and various elements. Find any one of them that is labelled “HTML/JavaScript” and click on it.

3) You will now see a space into which you must “Paste” the Widget code, available from the Widget tab in VendingBox that you configured in ‘Part I’.

4) To do this, simply highlight the ‘Widget code’ from your VendingBox browser using your mouse, right click and choose “Copy” – then go to the Blogger Design control panel, right click and “Paste” the code into the Panel you opened up for ‘HTML/JavaScript’ code.



5) Once you see it in place, click “Save”. It will save and close.

6) Towards the top right you will see another “Save” button that you must click.

7) Click “View Blog” and you will now see your VendingBox widget tab appear on your blog.

Just like the one on this page!

Note too that you can add our store widget to any web platform that supports Javascript. Just ensure that the Widget Code used is within opening and closing HTML 'body' tags.


Don’t forget to inform your followers, friends and fans of your new development and promote and drive traffic to your Blog-store by way of promotions and the social sharing tools available to you in VendingBox.

Drop us a line any time with your site, store and page details for custom advice on how you can drive traffic and get more attention from customers by using VendingBox’s many built-in SEO and promotional tools.

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.

Branding and Customizing your store.

In this short tutorial we will show you how to fully customize the look and feel of your store.

This article covers:

• How to change the colors of your VendingBox to match your pages and brand.
• How to add logo images to brand the store and splash pages.

All of the customizing options can be found under Preview.  You will see the two tabs relevant to this guide: 'Preview' and 'Images'.  Browse though them to familiarize, and remember to scroll down in each tab to see all the options available.




Applying your color scheme and layouts.

Color Settings

Click on the color boxes under “Color Settings”.  A palette is provided in each case allowing you to choose the various colors that can be customized.  If you know the color 'code' your brand uses you can copy and paste this here also.  Consider the text colors you choose, which allow best visibility of the text, by using suitable background colors.

The illustration below shows the various elements of your VendingBox that you can customize to your own liking.  Use the “Preview Color Scheme” to apply and proof changes you’ve made. 

When you are happy with a scheme you have chosen, click “Save Settings”

TIP: Choose a color scheme that matches you website and your logo.  You may wish to include your logo on your store, and it is aesthetically best when the colors complement each other.

Grid View Settings

Under "Grid View Settings" you can have your products display in a tiled format.  Some merchants prefer this display format.   What type of products you are selling will generally dictate what type of display format works best.  Try changing the settings and sizes to see what works best for your store, categories and products.

Height and Width

Set the height and width of your VendingBox here. These settings will only apply to the small version of your VendingBox.   Ensure you preview the effects of changes to these settings in the final environment you are diplaying your VendingBox, and that your Vendingbox is sized correctly to your requirements.  (N.B. Generally, the default size works well for most pages - this feature is utilized by developers who wish to customize exactly how they want their VendingBox to appear in Webpages or Facebook)

Adding your logo and brand graphics to your VendingBox

Go to the "Images" tab.  In here you can add a number of graphics features to your store.  In each case, simply browse for the image you wish to use, ensuring the specified sizes are used, and then check the tickbox and save.


Top-left Logo - This allows you to add what is probably to most important aspect of your brand.  Ensure your color scheme matches the logo for a more professional and aesthetically pleasing look.


Grid View Logo - This image or logo is the image that will be present int he top 'center' of your VendingBox.  If you chose not to have the left categories menu show on your store (which is possible under the Grid View Settings > Open in Wide Mode), this space provides you with a place to display your logo.

Welcome Image - You can upload a welcome image for your store here. Customers will see this image rather than a random sample of products when the cart first opens.

Facebook Splash Image - This image appears as the 'gate' image when users access your store via your Facebook page.  This image should be 520x400 png, jpg or gif file. Make sure to indicate that the user should "Click to Enter", or "Open", so that they know how to open the VendingBox.

Follow the instructions as displayed.  Ensure your images and features are sized correctly and that the image file type is that specified.

For free assistance with graphics, customization, logo creation, color schemes and more, please do not hesitate to contact us at support@vendingbox.net