The beauty of a Byte fridge's digitally-displayed pricing (as opposed to physical price tags) is that you have the ability to update product pricing and push out discounts in real time. Discounts unlock a wide range of possibility as to how you use the Byte Technology platform.
With discounts and coupons you can:
- Allow locations to subsidize food
- Enable locations to purchase coupons as rewards for employees
- Promote the service at a new location
- Encourage lapsed customers to purchase again
- Minimize spoilage
The list goes on and is only limited by your creativity.
In this post, I'll dive into the two main areas of discounting. First, we'll look at what discount functionality can be leveraged through the Byte Technology platform. Second, we'll look at how you can package this feature up to make your business more money or save you money.
Discounts on the Byte Platform
Standard Discount: A standard discount can be either a dollar or percent off applied to different combinations of stores, products, or product categories and can recur on certain days or hours of the day.
Happy Hour Discount: A happy hour discount is a time-based discount. Similar to a standard discount, it can be either dollar or percent off and apply to different combinations of stores, products, or product categories. A happy hour discount can also be set up to be recurring.
Shelf Life Discount: This type of discount is unique to the Byte platform and is quite powerful for managing spoilage. The shelf life discount applies either a dollar or percent off discount to products that meet set requirements on the number of shelf life days and days left to expiration. For instance, let's consider a salad has a shelf life of 5 days and has been in the Byte fridge for 4 days. I can set up a shelf life discount to apply 50% off to any salad that is expected to expire in one day or less. This helps me incentivize my customers to buy the salad, instead of having to remove it as spoilage.
Coupons: After a transaction, the Byte fridge menu displays a screen where the customer can input their email for a receipt and input a coupon code. Coupons can be set up to be either dollar or percent off, and can be set up in a way that they only apply to certain stores, products, or product categories. Coupons can be set to be one time use, or multi use. For instance, you can set up a multi-use coupon FIRSTTRY to promote and incentivize use at a new location.
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Using Discounts to Benefit Your Business
The most obvious use case for discounting is to clear through products that are slow to sell. We reviewed one example above using the Shelf Life Discount to do just that. Why discount product that is about to expire? If a salad retails at $10.00 and costs you $5.00, then a spoiled salad costs your business $5.00 and brings in no revenue. Using the Shelf Life Discount gives you the opportunity to bring in revenue against a product that was otherwise about to spoil - even if you're only able to cover your costs, that's a benefit to your business.
But what if you could use this incredible functionality to drive additional revenue for your business?
Byte's most successful clients do this well. When selling into a location, a great question to always ask is if the location is interested in subsidizing any of the food being sold. What is a subsidy? It is when the location pays a portion of the price of the food in order to reduce the price for their employees. For instance, if a workplace chooses subsidize the food by 40% then the price of all items is reduced by 40% for the employees, and the business will be billed for that 40% at the end of the month based on what is purchased.
Why would a workplace want to subsidize food? For a myriad of reasons - to promote wellness of their team, to support a positive culture, to boost employee productivity.
We've seen a wide range of subsidies be sponsored by locations, including:
- Time of Day: A manufacturing plant chose to subsidize all food by 30% between the hours of 7p-3a in order to support the graveyard shift.
- Day of Week: A workplace in the retail industry sponsors a 50% off subsidy on Fridays as a way to boost employee morale and reward employees.
- Better for You Options: A technology company subsidizes all salads by 50% to encourage employees to make healthier eating choices, thereby promoting wellness at work.
Another way to increase sales to the locations you serve is to offer coupons for sale. Locations use coupons to hand out to new employees and as a reward for star performers. The benefit to you is that you're able to sell a bundle of coupons, collect payment up front, and ultimately encourage even more use of your Byte fridge.
This article touches on just a handful of ways discounts and coupons can be used to boost your business. If you're interested in learning more, we'd love to talk.
