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Speaker: I sprinkled a couple ones that are less traditional, kind of funky… The next
one is VendaSnack… This is really cool, it’s an online vending machine. Their target
market is people that work… I don’t want to call it cubicle life, but people who work
in traditional offices. A lot of offices have done away with vending machines, either because
they were too old, decrepit, or it didn’t fit into the branding. What’s really cool
is VendaSnack took the concept of vending machine, brought it on with free shipping…
you can get your coworkers together, on a Monday morning snack. You can then go ahead
and select a few items that you and your team want to enjoy throughout the week, the next
day they arrive. And now you can have snacks for the week.
They took a traditional model, and they moved it online. They created a wow factor. They
also figured out what a specific niche was, they knew the people that worked at companies,
were the ones who tended to use vending machines more than anyone else. They created an experience
around it. It looks like a vending machine, except it’s on a dot com, rather than a
traditional brick and mortar vending machine. These guys are totally thinking outside the
box, with someone people know, and like, and understand, put a web 2.0 twist onto it.
Andrew: What are we trying to teach with this website? Specifically, what can the person
who’s listening to us right now, who’s trying to grow his or her business, what can
they learn from this and bring back to their site?
Speaker: They took something that is very familiar, a vending machine. There’s tons
of ideas and features like that. They simply added a new twist to it. In terms of the barriers
to entry, or the friction a customer would need in order to convert from someone who’s
just exploring their site, to a paying customer, it’s almost frictionless. It’s $24, there’s
no shipping, it’s not really a big, life-changing decision. What I like most is the fact that
they could’ve presented this in a number of ways, but by presenting it in a way that
people are already familiar with, i.e. in a vending machine-type format, all of a sudden,
it’s familiar to you. You may not have been to the site, but you recognize right away
what it is…
Andrew: The big take-away from this, and the reason we’re showing this is, we want e-commerce
founders and builders to think about how they can present their products in a way that people
are already familiar with. Instead of saying, “we’re selling snacks,” think about
a vending machine as the analogy you’re going to use.
Speaker: Rather than just putting a bunch of snacks on some generic website, they took
a concept and moved it to the online sphere. Very smart, they’re doing very well. Not
to mention, it’s really a cool idea.
Andrew: Can you think of another way we can extend this analogy, or find a physical world
analogy for an online product sale?
Speaker: One of the things we’re going to talk about, is a cookbook in particular, later
on in the show… But in terms of a cookbook, you buy cookbooks for people, and often what
you do, you go into the bookstore, you browse and peruse, you find something, like a cookbook
that talks about Moms on the go, you go ahead and you buy it for a Mom you know… We’ve
been seeing a lot of sites, particularly in the cookbook realm, and they ask three or
four different questions when you get to the site, like, “who are you buying this for,
are they a stay-at-home mom, are they a retired dad,” and by doing that, they push you towards
different models.
It’s very cool to have the same shopping experience in an online format. What VendaSnack
has done is try to create the same sort of energy and feel, that you can invoke in a
more brick and mortar format.