Payments & telemetry for unattended retail — South Africa
The future of unattended retail, built in South Africa.
VendBot fits a card machine and a live dashboard to your vending, coffee and unattended-retail sites, built and supported by our own team, rolled out anywhere in South Africa. One terminal takes the sale; one portal tells you what happened.
Card data is stored masked only (scheme and last 4 digits). Pricing is quoted per site — see Get a quote.
A Tuesday, one real site
What the portal actually looks like on an ordinary day
The morning check
Before the first customer taps, the portal already knows what happened overnight. Every machine sends a heartbeat every three minutes, so one that’s gone quiet shows up as offline before anyone has to drive out and look. Power-loss and power-restore events log themselves, and last night’s cash and card sales sit side by side, already reconciled.
The morning check is ten minutes of “what’s off, what needs a visit” — not a spreadsheet built from memory.
A customer taps
The P5L terminal takes a card the way a shop counter does — contactless bank cards, Apple Pay and Google Pay all tap, chip cards dip, and PIN entry happens on the terminal’s touchscreen when the card requires it. Cash sales over MDB run through the same machine and land in the same reconciliation.
If the site’s WiFi drops mid-sale, the terminal switches to cellular and switches back once WiFi is available again — proven in the field, not just on paper.
The restock run
When a restocker arrives, the app on their phone tells them what’s meant to be in each slot. A stepper counts what actually goes in, a photo confirms the shelf, and the machine’s ready for the next customer before they’ve left the site.
Owner, reseller and restocker each get their own view — nobody sees machines that aren’t theirs.
A problem surfaces
A machine drops offline mid-afternoon. It shows up in the portal within minutes, flagged against that machine’s own heartbeat and event history — not discovered when someone happens to walk past it days later.
Whoever calls it in starts the conversation already knowing roughly what happened, instead of guessing from a customer complaint.
App Store and Google Play
The VendBot app
A free companion app for businesses on the VendBot platform. Live sales, machine status, stock levels, restock lists and reports, in your pocket. Sign in with your existing portal login.
Apple, the Apple logo, iPhone and App Store are trademarks of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries and regions. Google Play, the Google Play logo and Android are trademarks of Google LLC.
Every screen can carry your brand
The terminal doesn’t have to say VendBot
The idle, payment and thank-you screens on the same P5L terminal can carry a client’s own logo and colours instead of ours — done in-house, on the existing hardware, in about a morning. Bench-proven on our own unit, including a real card sale — ask what it would look like for your brand.
Beyond vending
What we build this for
None of this is a shelf product you install yourself. Tell us what you’re running and where, and our team integrates it for your site, anywhere in South Africa.
Vending
Standard MDB machines, including ice-cream and fresh-food units, fitted with a terminal and monitored from day one.
Coffee
MDB coffee machines run cashless the same way as vending. Older keypad and button machines are a custom integration — talk to us about yours.
Laundromats
VendBot Pulse brings the same terminal and portal to laundry machines that don’t speak MDB, with a wiring harness matched to your equipment.
Car washes
The same Pulse approach — one terminal as the brain, a harness matched to your equipment.
Arcade & claw machines
Card payment on machines that used to take coins only, run through the same portal as the rest of your fleet.
EV charging
Card payment at your charge points, integrated and scoped per site.
Access control
If it needs a payment or a tap to open, we integrate it — scoped per site.
Branded allowance cards
A card your business issues, with an allowance your team sets and tracks from the portal — not a separate financial account.
We also work in Namibia through a local payments partner, with clients onboarded and paid out in-country. See Namibia & Africa.
What lands in your account
Card sales settle next-day (T+1). The same reconciliation your morning check uses is what shows up in your payout — cash and card, side by side, not two separate stories to untangle at month-end.
Payments are powered by AddPay; VendBot is an AddPay ISO. Card data is stored masked only (scheme and last 4 digits). Onboarding is typically live within 48 hours of document approval, often the same day.
Built in South Africa
Built in South Africa, for South African operators.
Our developers, installers and support team are in South Africa. The people who scope your integration are the people who build it and the people who answer the phone — which is why a new site is usually live within 48 hours of document approval, and why a keypad coffee machine or a laundromat harness is a conversation, not a ticket.
- Local developersBuilt and customised here
- ReliableProven P5L hardware, AddPay rails
- Built in SARolled out anywhere in the country
- Grow togetherSupport in your time zone
Ready when you are
Get a quote for your site
Tell us what you’re running and where. We’ll come back with a plan for your site, not a standard script.