Shortfill e-liquids may confuse new vapers – make the transition easier
In Europe and the United Kingdom, the Tobacco Products Directive (TPD) establishes a legal framework for the vaping industry and sets certain limitations on acceptable packaging and manufacturing standards for e-liquids with nicotine. One of the limitations put forth in the TPD is that a bottle of e-liquid with nicotine can be no more than 10 ml in size. The benefit for those buying ecigs in the UK is that the small size of e-liquid bottles may help to reduce calls to poison control centers if accidents occur. A drawback, though, is that for people who use sub-ohm vaping equipment, 10 ml of e-liquid simply isn’t a significant size. For many people, in fact, 10 ml isn’t even enough e-liquid for a full day of vaping. That’s why shortfill e-liquids exist.
For any vape shop in the UK, shortfill e-liquids are an important profit source and can lead to future sales of high-end vaping equipment. If you’re a vape shop owner in the UK, it’s likely that some of your customers have avoided buying top-tier vaping devices and tanks because they don’t want to go through even more little bottles of e-liquid. It’s also likely that some of your customers are already using sub-ohm vaping devices and have avoided buying shortfill e-liquids because they don’t understand the point of buying nicotine-free e-liquid.
Don’t laugh; there was also a time in which you were unaware of what shortfill e-liquids were. It’s your job to educate your customers and help them make the right purchases for their needs. In this article, we’ll provide a few simple tips that can help you make shortfill e-liquids as simple and painless as possible for your customers.
Note to US vape shop owners: On the surface, an article about shortfill e-liquids may not seem like it would be useful to you. The UK shortfill bottle trend is a good reminder, though, that you always have an opportunity to do great things in the vaping business if you think outside the box a little. Shortfill e-liquid bottles were developed as a way to give customers what they wanted – big bottles of e-liquid – without violating the law. How might a little outside-the-box thinking help you do a better job of serving your customers?
Display a Poster in Your Vape Shop
Consider placing a helpful poster near the shortfill e-liquids in your vape shop. The poster should describe what shortfill e-liquids are and explain that, to use those e-liquids, customers will need to purchase nicotine shots and combine the two. The poster should also have a chart explaining how many nicotine shots customers need to add for each bottle size to achieve final nicotine strengths of 3 and 6 mg. Even for customers who already understand what shortfill e-liquids are, it’s still easy for confusion to develop when it comes to figuring out the correct number of nicotine shots to buy. Your poster should eliminate that confusion and make the buying process easy.
Display Shortfill E-Liquid in a Prominent Place
You may not have as much space in your vape shop as you’d like, but it’s still worthwhile to make the room necessary to put your shortfill e-liquids in a prominent place. If you want to sell more shortfill bottles, make sure that your customers know about them. If you really have difficulty selling the shortfill e-liquids in your stock, consider holding a promotion to drum up some attention. For example, you could price your shortfill e-liquids significantly lower for a while to generate a little bit of hype. You could offer a free bottle of shortfill e-liquid to anyone buying an advanced vaping device or tank. Once you’ve created a little bit of hype, your e-liquids will practically sell themelves.
Include Nicotine Shots With Shortfill E-Liquids
If you really want to eliminate any possibility of confusion with shortfill e-liquids, bundle each shortfill bottle with the correct number of nicotine shots to achieve a final nicotine strength of 3 mg. Build the cost of the nicotine shots into your prices for the shortfill e-liquids. Many online vape shops have begun including nicotine shots with shortfill e-liquids, and customers have responded very positively because the free nicotine shots remove the guesswork from the process of buying shortfill e-liquids. It may also be worthwhile to print handouts and give them to customers who are buying shortfill e-liquids for the first time. The handouts can explain how to get a bottle of e-liquid open and instruct customers on the importance of shaking shortfill bottles periodically to keep the ingredients mixed.
Add an Article to Your Website
Some of the customers who visit your vape shop may visit your website first to look at your product listings. It may therefore be helpful to add an article about shortfill e-liquids to your website. It takes only a few minutes to write a short article explaining what shortfill e-liquids are, why they exist and how to use them. Adding an article about shortfill e-liquids to your website may also help you attract traffic from search engines when people search for information about where they can buy shortfill e-liquids locally.
Offer a Bottle Opening Tool
One of the most inconvenient aspects of shortfill e-liquid is the fact that e-liquid bottle tops can be incredibly difficult to remove. It’s necessary for e-liquid bottles to have tight tops because, if they didn’t, bottles would pop open when people tried to fill their tanks! Some companies are now making simple tools that pry off e-liquid bottle tops in the same way that bottle openers remove bottle caps. If you have customers who are on the fence about buying shortfill e-liquids – or have stopped buying them – because of spillage or because the bottle tops are too difficult to remove, a shortfill bottle opening tool is the perfect accessory to offer those customers.
Mention Shortfill E-Liquids to Your Customers
If you have customers who stop in almost daily to buy huge quantities of 10 ml e-liquid bottles, it’s probably safe to say that those customers are using sub-ohm vaping equipment and are going through their e-liquids rapidly. Train your staff members to recognize when that’s the case and recommend shortfill e-liquids instead. Some vapers buy nothing but 10 ml e-liquid bottles because they don’t want to go through the hassle of adding nicotine shots to each bottle. There are still plenty of people out there, though, who don’t yet know that shortfill e-liquids exist. A 30-second conversation resolves that problem easily.
Jason Artman is the owner and author of eCig One. A professional freelance writer and SEO consultant with more than a decade of experience, Jason works with vaping companies around the world to increase their targeted web traffic and improve their revenue.