Keep selling while the door is locked — any cabinet becomes a vending machine

Yes, and that is the normal case. Our goal is not to sell you a new machine but to turn what you already have into a point of sale: a metal cabinet, a wooden shelf unit with a door, a fridge, a storage locker or a shipping container. We fit the lock, the power and the connectivity, and link the cabinet to the platform that authorises and logs every opening. Most installations need no rebuild of the cabinet, and outdoors we use weatherproof components. Because the investment is typically a fraction of a new vending machine, it pays back at a far lower sales volume — and you are not restricted to products that must fit behind a spiral and survive a drop into a hatch. If your cabinet is genuinely unusual, we look at it before quoting and tell you honestly whether the solution makes sense.

Customers can pay in three ways: by card at the terminal beside the cabinet, in the app, or by scanning a QR code with their phone. All three trigger the same thing — the payment is confirmed and exactly the door whose goods were bought opens. The money lands in your account through your own payment provider, not through us; our job is to wire the terminal and the lock together so that payment and opening are one event rather than two things somebody has to reconcile. Every transaction is tied to a specific cabinet, door and timestamp, so the sales report and the access log are the same row instead of two sources that disagree at month end. There is no cash to collect, count or transport, which removes the most common source of mess as well.

The cabinets are built so that losing connectivity does not make them useless. The locks run on battery power and hold valid access rights even while the connection is temporarily down, so access that was already purchased or already granted keeps working, and the events sync afterwards. Battery level and signal quality are visible on the platform, and a draining battery raises an alert weeks before it becomes a problem — that is the most common reason a self-service cabinet genuinely stops, and the easiest one to prevent. Taking a new payment obviously needs a connection, so during a long outage no new purchases happen; as soon as the link is back, everything continues without intervention. Critical locations can add a backup connection or backup power, so even a long outage does not cost you a selling day.

Because every opening is tied to a specific person, payment and timestamp. Access is granted to one door, for one purchase, and usually within a short window, so a code never circulates or works again next week. If a door is left ajar or a lock fails to seat, the alert comes immediately, not days later. Stock moves with every sale, so if the physical count disagrees with the system, you can see exactly which cabinet and which time window the gap appeared in — shrinkage becomes a traceable fact rather than a hole discovered at month end. For higher-value goods people usually add a camera or a weight sensor, which ties the opening to what physically moved as well. In practice most of the loss disappears simply because anonymous access no longer exists.

Fewer than with a classic vending machine, because the investment per cabinet is far smaller. A classic machine has to earn back the whole price of the machine, which demands heavy footfall and fast turnover. A smart-lock cabinet adds only the lock, power and connectivity to furniture or space you already have, so it often pays back on a handful of sales a day — especially for higher-value goods, or where the alternative was somebody driving over just to open a door. Do not judge the first cabinet on generic numbers: look at how many customers currently fall outside your opening hours and how often somebody travels purely to unlock something. We will put those two figures into your quote, so the decision rests on real numbers rather than assumed ones.