With the ever-changing market, the urgent question for every business owner is how to innovate and increase sales. One of the strategies trending in the market right now is bundling, a technique where you offer two or more products or services together at an attractive price.
Selling items in bundles or kits is the best way to incline your customer towards buying your products. When you cross-sell products at a discounted rate, it's easy for consumers to make a decision. They can see that meeting their needs with a single purchase is a great value. This gives you an edge over other sellers and helps you stay ahead of your competition.
Increase your sales margin by cross-selling products
Not all products are compatible with each other, and not all customers want to do a ton of research to find out which combinations will work. Customers who buy several products together often have to wait until after purchasing to see whether the combination they've chosen is actually compatible. If it's not a match, the customer might give a poor review, return the products and even take their business elsewhere.
To avoid unsatisfying purchases, customers rely on sellers to educate them about compatible products. Bundling is a great way to do that. For example, a computer retailer can bundle a laptop with a compatible brand of wireless printer to help buyers who aren't particularly tech-savvy. By choosing the bundle, the customer can make an expert-quality decision without needing to become an expert.
This allows you to cross-sell products that go together well so the buyer can easily make a smart purchasing decision. Analyze your inventory and identify products that can be bundled together to provide maximum value to your customers. Your customers will be impressed, and you will see the increase in the revenue earned per customer.
Keep your dead stock moving
Stocking products that are not selling well is burdensome for any seller. It is crucial to get the stock moving while it can still be useful. In such cases, bundling slow-moving products with fast-selling products for a reasonable price can clear out the sluggish stock and help to offset any losses you might face.
Give your customer room to buy more
Most e-commerce platforms have a minimum purchase threshold for free shipping, which tempts the customer to buy more products so that they can save on shipping costs. Bundling makes a great accompaniment to this approach.
Let's look at a scenario where bundles and free shipping go hand-in-hand. A customer browses through a catalogue of cosmetics and likes a range of products from several brands. She adds a face wash to her cart for $30, plus $10 shipping, which brings her order total to $40. During checkout, she notices that she can get free shipping on orders of $80 and more. When she revisits her order, she notices that she can buy the face wash together with a moisturizer and face cream for $65. Delighted, she adds the combo to her cart instead of the single item, then adds another product to bump her order up to $80 and earn free shipping.
In this bundling scenario, not only is the consumer able to enjoy the perk of free shipping, she also gets more products at a discounted rate, which is a mutually rewarding situation for both her and the seller. Bundling helps you sell more and helps your customers get more for a good price.
Promote new products effortlessly
Promoting a relatively unknown product is easy when you bundle it with an already popular product. The association with a known product helps establish the presence of the new product in the market.
Consider the example of Zylker, a fashion company that creates designer suits. Their suits are already popular and have high order rates, and now they're introducing a new series of speciality bow ties. To promote the new product and increase sales, they decide to bundle a bow tie with each suit and offer the combination to customers at a compelling price. Customers can now look forward to an elegant bow tie to go along with their excellent suit. The customer's positive buying experience translates to higher sales volumes for Zylker.
Accelerate the fulfillment process
When a customer places an order for a few items from an e-commerce platform, the individual vendors take care of each item's packaging, shipping, and after-shipment tracking. This is time-consuming and can make it difficult for the customer to keep track of where their items are. You as a vendor, can observe the customers' ordering patterns and bundle the types of items they most often order together. Now the bundle can be packaged and tracked as a single commodity, expediting the order fulfillment process while at the same time gaining more orders!
A win-win for all
Bundling is a mutually beneficial sale solution for consumers and sellers. Consumers can find solutions to their immediate needs and get a good value on their purchases, while you can efficiently fulfill orders and see an increase in your sales margin with no extra expense.
Great innovations come from a series of experiments. So don’t regret trying new things — regret not trying new things.
Software tools such as Zoho Inventory can help you calculate the number of bundles you can generate with your stock on hand, automatically update the inventory levels for the products in a bundle, store the SKU value for each bundle, generate sales reports, and much more!
653264 492557Hello! Fantastic post! Please when I could see a follow up! 412052
The new bundling feature has major bugs in it, don't use it. It does not correctly calculate the COGS of any bundled item, which means your accounts in Zoho Books will be wrong and your GP margins incorrect. I've raised this with the support team multiple times over the last 2 weeks but it is still not fixed.
Hello Nik, Thank you for your valuable feedback on our new feature. I'm sorry to hear that you have been facing difficulties with respect to the COGS calculation. Our team has been dedicated to fixing this. Please be assured that this put on priority and we will bear good news at the earliest. Thank you for your patience and understanding. Regards, Lakshmi
Being an entrepreneur isn't an easy job at all. This is a great blog which can help to promote growth in every aspect. However there are few topics which are not covered in this article. It could have been more subtle. Fashion bloggers and entrepreneurs can also visit FLAIRTALES (https://www.flairtales.com/) for help.
Hi, Bundling takes accounting stock in consideration for available stock instead of physical stock --> I can not bundle items who are shipped from our facility but not yet been invoiced ( or being shipped but not yet delivered ) ?
Hi. If I want to create a sales order for a bundled SKU, but it will need to be back ordered from suppliers, how do I make the back order break down the bundle into its individual items to purchase? I only seem to be able to create POs of the bundled SKU using the bulk backorder feature, when my suppliers only work in individual component SKUs Thanks
Hi Aiden, Thank you for posting! If you have been purchasing the raw materials from different suppliers, then I'm afraid you will have to create Purchase Orders for them separately. It is not possible to break down the bundled item while back ordering in Zoho Inventory. I will, however, pass your use-case on to my team. If there are any developments on this front, we will surely notify you. Have a great day!Cheers! Lakshmi Zoho Inventory
So how does bundling and stock management work? If I have a product for $35, but three bundled together is $100, do I have to manually manage stock? Or is there a way for Zoho Inventory to automate this?
Hi Luke, Thank you for posting! Yes, in Zoho Inventory you can automate the process of stock management while Bundling. For instance, let's say you are bundling products A and B together in a definite quantity to produce a commodity C. Then the stock level of those individual items automatically decreases everytime you do so, while increasing the quantity of C. And when you delete the bundle that you have created, the stock level of the individual products are again automatically restored. Hope this answers your question. Feel free to reach us for any clarifications. Cheers! Lakshmi