Their communication depends on the signal thru the customer's phone, so if the machine is in a location with poor cell service there is not much you can do about it. I have not been successful with the few I installed and plan to replace them with regular card readers at some point, but other operators seem to do OK with them. The low price may be old stock getting cleared out because it is not selling.

Good morning! Something seems to have changed for the better, it is loading correctly today. On this laptop I use Firefox for the forum and this is where I had the problem. Thanks for looking into it and for taking such great care of the forum, we appreciate you!

For a lot of locations, you can start with 1 vend per employee per week as a rough average, and adjust from there for type of business, competition, worker composition, outside traffic, etc... a place with 10 employees would be hard pressed to support any machine. I usually want to see 30 or 40 employees minimum to even think about placing machines. There are exceptions, of course. One of my best producing machines is a full service car wash with only about a dozen employees, but they work in the Florida sun all day with no other options close, and the customers waiting for their cars also buy a good bit of product.

Is it me, or is it the new google banner ad? The page seems to reformat into twice as wide as the screen and some elements overlap....

Upgrades required depend on the control board in the machine. Some can be upgraded with a new Eprom chip, or a flash upgrade, and others may require a new board. I have been installing some of the InOne boards in my snack machines to bring them up to cashless and so far have been very happy with the process and the product. Costs will of course vary depending on the type and extent of the upgrade. I can have Dixie Narco S II D boards upgraded fairly cheaply (less than 50 if my memory serves); to upgrade to an InOne board for a USI Snack will be around 300 for the parts kit.

Gate error could be an internal accept gate motor or jam. I have several 4000's but I upgrade to MEI 7000's every chance I get. I price shop on EBay for good deals, I know a lot of people here won't buy from EBay but so far I have had no serious problems....

With a 3 position door switch, pulling it out is the same as closing the door so the machine will go into sales mode. Allows you to test the machine with the door open.

The type of location is important, a blue collar factory or physical type work environment will usually do better than a white collar office, so a smaller number of employees is OK as long as they stay on location. A service business where most of the employees are on the road all day may not do very well. Any other available outlets within a short distance (C-store, etc) will depress your sales to some extent. The the other hand, an office with no other options can do very well. Single work shift or multiple shifts, etc. Note that some locations will have played the game before and will lie about employee counts to get you to service them. Count cars in the parking lot, etc to help verify stats. If a location says it has 40 employees but the parking lot only has 10 spaces, warning!! Like Randymire said, snacks are different than drinks, you have to consider that smaller locations will usually generate more stale snacks that have to be thrown away for a dead loss. Can drinks generally have long shelf life except for diet drinks, so it's easier to keep a good stock in the machine without having stales. With small accounts having sufficient service intervals is important to serving them at a profit.

As far as I know they only have the one shim... give Royal tech support a call at 800-931-9214 is the sure way to get the info...

It has a fire every few years???? OK then.... well, if you do replace the machines when they reopen you might look into some limited type of coverage for that location only. The good news is that it will take them a while to rebuild so you don't have to run out and buy machines today, you can start saving towards the goal. Are you able to get bottler machines at all? That might be a way to go that would reduce your upfront cost and your loss exposure, use bottler drink machines and just buy a snack machine....

If "card" refers to the credit card reader then "master" could refer to the telemeter or transmitter. If it refers to the control boards then it could be a communication error between the main and satellite board. Those are just guesses. There are a few european operators on here who hopefully will pop in and give you some help, most of us are US based and I am not seeing any components in your photos that are familiar to me. Good luck!

I have the red bull 12's in a royal 650 with a shim, and they vend OK. the stack looks funny because they are so narrow, but it works even when full. The shim for royals is a metal piece that hangs down over the rotor to narrow the gap and prevent jams. This is an older machine with individual column motors and a solid rotor, the newer ones with chain drives are probably no-go like LA said.

Like CC said, if only one selection is malfunctioning like this, it may be a bad sold out switch or a loose wire connection on that selection. If all of them are having the issue, a loose wiring harness connection would be my first thought. Look at how the sold out switches physically operate and make sure the bad selections have room for the switches to move. Sorry to see you get bogged down by an overpriced bizopp, I hope you can pull thru and make a go of vending in spite of this expensive start!

If you are using stack vendors I would stick to YooHoo in cans. It can be a good seller all day long but still fits your "morning beverage" category, and has a shelf life of about 12 months.

The error light will not clear until an amount of coin has run thru it successfully after cleaning, it is based on accept rate average. If you test with coins and it is accepting them again you can disregard the light. It should go out by the next machine service.