How to Create a VTU Website in Minutes Without Writing Code

You can have a working VTU website without writing a line of code. The site builder walks you through it in five steps. This is the quick path, with the exact clicks, a tour of the admin panel you will use afterwards, and the things worth checking at each stage. For the bigger picture of how a VTU business works, read our longer guide on building a VTU website without coding.

Before you begin

You need a builder account, a business name and a rough idea of the look you want. It also helps to have a logo, but you can add one later. You will also need an account with a vending provider before you can sell anything, though not before you build the site. Each builder account has a limit on how many projects it can hold, so check this if you have created many.

Step 1: Create the project

From your dashboard, click New Project, type a project name and choose VTU Website from the list of templates. Click Create. The same list includes other templates, such as an online store, a blog, a hotel booking site and a verification portal, so make sure you pick the VTU one.

Step 2: Go through the five wizard steps

• Business Info. Your business name, tagline and contact details.
• Appearance. Pick a theme, colours, font and logo. See branding your VTU site for the options.
• Content. The text on your pages.
• Review. Check everything looks right.
• Output. Choose your address and publish.

Some templates have a one-time creation fee. If yours does, you will be asked to pay before you can continue past the first step.

Step 3: Choose your address and publish

On the Output step, choose a subdomain. Use lowercase letters, numbers and hyphens, at least four characters. The page checks that the name is free as you type. Once it is set, it is locked, so choose carefully. Then click Confirm & Publish. Publishing needs all the wizard steps to be saved. Your site goes live at yourname.xpiriatech.com. You can connect your own domain later using our custom domain guide.

Step 4: Switch on the business side

A published site is a shop window with nothing on the shelves. Open VTU Admin from your project and set up the engine, working roughly in this order:

1. Services: turn on what you want to sell, such as airtime, data, cable TV and electricity.
2. Networks and Plans: import the starter catalogue, then set your own prices. See importing networks and plans.
3. Vending API: connect your provider. See connecting a vending API.
4. Payment Gateways: set up wallet funding. See wallet payment gateways.

A tour of the VTU Admin panel

The admin menu is split into five groups. Knowing what lives where saves a lot of hunting later.

• Catalogue is what you sell.
  • Services switches each type of service on or off.
  • Networks holds each network and its settings. Two discounts live here and they are different things: the provider discount is what the provider gives you, used only to work out your profit and never changing what customers pay, while the customer-facing airtime discount lowers what the customer pays while they still receive the full amount on their phone.
  • Categories groups plans on each network so customers can find them.
  • Category Lock hides a category from customers and stops its plans being bought. The change applies instantly, which is handy when a provider has a problem with one kind of plan.
  • Plans are the products and prices. A plan can be routed to a different provider than its network, for example when your main provider does not carry that plan.
• Vending is how orders get delivered. Vending API is where you enter your provider's credentials. API Integrations is for custom provider connections.
• Customers & Payments is the money side. Customers lists your users and their wallets. Import Data lets you bring customers over from a former website using a database dump (.sql) or a JSON export: existing customers are matched by email and updated, new ones are created, and passwords from common platforms are preserved so customers keep their logins. Payment Gateways connects your own gateway accounts so funds settle directly to you. Funding Requests is where manual bank-transfer deposits wait for your approval. Xpiria Biz Settlement shows money collected through your Xpiria Biz virtual account and how to withdraw it to your own bank.
• Engagement is how you talk to customers. Support Chat adds an AI assistant to your live site that answers questions around the clock, and gets more accurate the more information you give it. Chat Bots lets customers check their balance and buy from WhatsApp or Telegram. Settings holds things like funding charges, the referral bonus and the unconfirmed-purchase wait.
• Insights is how you see how it is going. Transactions is every purchase and its status, Statistics shows summary statistics, and Finance Audit shows revenue, cost and profit with all currencies converted to naira.

Step 5: Test before you tell anyone

1. Register as a customer on your own site, using a phone.
2. Fund the wallet with a small real amount.
3. Buy a small amount of airtime or data on each network you sell.
4. Check the result in Insights, then Transactions. Read the expanded row for any purchase that did not succeed; the provider's message usually tells you why. Our guide on transactions and provider responses explains what each status means.
5. Try the unhappy paths too: a wrong phone number, a purchase bigger than the wallet balance, and a network you have not connected a route for.

Your site plan

Each project has a site plan: Free, Premium or Enterprise, which you can see in Settings, then Site Plan. The plans differ in what is switched on: the number of customers you can register, and whether API access, the WhatsApp bot, the Telegram bot, USSD and dropshipping are included. The limits and prices can change, so check the plan screen and the pricing page instead of relying on an old article.

If your site reaches its customer limit, new people who try to register see a message that the site has reached its maximum number of customers on its current plan and should contact the site owner. Existing customers are not affected, but you will lose sign-ups until you upgrade, so keep an eye on the number as you grow.

Common problems at the start

• "Publish" will not work. Publishing needs every wizard step saved. Go back through Business Info, Appearance, Content and Review and save each.
• Customers see no plans. The catalogue is empty until you import the starter catalogue or add plans yourself, and a locked category hides its plans. Check Networks, Plans and Category Lock.
• A purchase fails straight away. If no vending route is connected for that service, the purchase fails before any money moves and the customer is told the service is not available yet. Connect a provider under Vending API.
• Wallet funding does not credit. Check the gateway credentials, and that the webhook address is set in the gateway's own dashboard. The payment guide walks through it.
• You picked the wrong subdomain. It is locked once set. Connect your own domain instead, which you can change later.

What to read next

When you are ready for customers, read your first 100 customers, and take ten minutes with the security checklist before you take real money. You can start now on our VTU solution.