Purchasing Beacons for Simple In/Out

Simple In/Out has supported automatically updating statuses via Beacons since Apple introduced “iBeacons” all the way back in 2013. Last year, we improved our Beacon system dramatically with more control over in/out statuses, comments, and performance. We’re believers that automatic updates via Beacons have many amazing use cases.

To date, we’ve also sold Beacon hardware directly from simpleinout.com. But, this approach had three downsides.

First, customers weren’t aware of how to change Beacon configurations if they wanted to make adjustments. We’d do the initial programming, but we’d have to walk customers through programming changes after they’ve taken delivery. In rare cases, the customer would ship the Beacons back to us so we could reprogram them.

Second, international shipping took a long time with decreased visibility. We always offered free shipping, and that worked fine for our US customers. Internationally, our free shipping option led to lost orders, orders that would take 30 or more days to arrive, etc.

Third, improved shipping was cost-prohibitive. For customers in Europe, Australia, and the Middle East, improved shipping was often $200 USD or more. That’s a bitter pill to swallow when our average Beacon order was $70 USD. In fact, we’ve been counseling some of our international customers on sourcing Beacon hardware resellers closer to home for a while.

That brings us to today and the news that we’re ceasing Beacon hardware reselling and shifting to third-party resellers. As I mentioned at the top, we still believe in Beacons and will continue to innovate in the automatic update space with Beacons. We are shifting to helping customers find local vendors to purchase the hardware that will work with Simple In/Out.

Our effort begins with our Beacon Hardware Purchasing Guide. This document discusses the requirements for Beacon hardware and lists places to purchase them directly. We’ll be expanding the list of countries and vendors as our customers source them in the future.

The easiest place to purchase is right from Amazon.com.

Second, we’ve ramped up our documentation around programming Beacon hardware. It’s not a difficult process, so we want our Beacon customers to know the process inside and out. We even have a new help video for the visual learners out there.

We love Beacons and our Beacon customers do too. We look forward to supporting and improving Beacon-based automatic updates for years to come.