Product bundles are becoming a favorite amongst customers and retailers. Bundles not only offer discounts and convenience to customers, they help retailers increase AOV and speed up sales. There are different product bundle types.
In this blog, we focus on fixed product bundles – one of the most common types of bundles, yet profitable for eCommerce brands. If you want to learn what fixed product bundles are, how to plan fixed bundles for Shopify, how to market and optimize them for profits, and which is the best fixed product bundles app, this blog is for you.
Read on!
What are fixed product bundles?
Fixed product bundles include a set of predetermined products or services sold together as a bundle. The products or services in fixed bundles cannot be changed or customized. Fixed bundle format is commonly used in industries such as Software as a Service, D2C, B2B, retailers selling products and services, etc.
Fixed bundles simply purchase for customers, and offer convenience and price benefits to them. For eCommerce retailers, this bundle type helps increase and speed up sales, increase average order value, and enhance competitiveness. An example of fixed product bundles is McDonalds combo of burger, fries, and coke offered at a discounted rate compared to buying these three items individually.
Here’s another example of a fixed product bundle:
What are the benefits of fixed product bundles?
According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, product bundles can increase profits by up to 30%. In this section, we look at more benefits of fixed bundles and how they impact eCommerce businesses.
1. Streamlined inventory management
With fixed bundles, you can get a sense of demand for particular products and hence forecast and predict your inventory requirements. This helps reduce stockouts, overstocking, and streamlines inventory management. You can use past data and purchase history to forecast inventory needs. Streamlining inventory management can also help reduce warehouse storage costs, and avoid supply chain inefficiencies.
2. Predictable pricing for customers
Creating fixed product bundles helps offer consistent pricing, making it easy for customers to make purchase decisions and purchases. Customers do not spend time evaluating prices of individual products or bundles as they are aware of the fixed pricing. This has benefits — customers build trust in the brand. This also helps build long-term associations between brands and customers.
3. Enhanced customer experience
Fixed product bundles help enhance customer experience in many ways. For instance, customers get to buy bundles that include complementary products or services together, hence they do not need to buy products individually. In a market that is overloaded with options and choices, ensuring easy purchase decision-making is a key factor in driving sales and customer satisfaction.
4. Boost average order value
For online businesses, maintaining AOV is critical in ensuring consistent revenue and profits. That’s another plus point of product fixed bundles. Compared to selling individual products, you can sell a curated selection of products together, increasing the order value. Moreover, bundles are often offered at discounted pricing, which encourages more customers to buy them.
5. Easy marketing and promotion
Instead of marketing and promoting individual products, you can market and promote whole product bundles. This has many benefits – lesser marketing costs, reduced efforts, and a more simplified marketing process. As fixed product bundles offer higher perceived value, it is easy to attract customer attention and drive sales. Use a Shopify bundles app that enables automating marketing and promotion via the app.
How to plan your fixed product bundles?
No matter which industry you belong to and what products you offer, you can come up with an effective fixed bundle for your brand. Follow these steps to get started with setting up a fixed bundle strategy for your Shopify store.
1. Identify products
Different customer segments have specific requirements and preferences. A one-size-fits-all approach may not work when planning fixed product bundles. Hence, one of your first steps should be to put together the right products in different bundles. Here are some strategies to apply when identifying products:
- Create different bundles for different customer segments
- Choose products based on past data, research, and market trends
- Put together high-value products with
Here’s an example:
2. Decide bundle configuration
Planning product fixed bundles is not as simple. To make your bundles a success, you have to think strategically. Here are a few factors to consider:
- The number of products in each bundle
- The specific products in each bundle
- The perceived value of each bundle
- Pricing of each bundle
3. Decide pricing strategies
One of the most critical factors of fixed product bundles is its pricing. If the price does not offer enough value or discounts, customers may not find it attractive. Moreover, your pricing strategy should also be profitable and make business sense. Here are some common pricing strategies for product bundles.
- Offer a fixed discount on the entire bundle
- Apply value pricing strategy that highlights the value of the bundle
- Keep adjusting pricing strategies based on the market and product pricing
Also read: Best Pricing Strategies For Ecommerce Product Bundles on Shopify
4. Assess customer preference
Customer preferences and market trends keep changing. And hence, it’s important to ensure that your product bundles remain relevant to market needs and trends. Here’s how you can ensure it:
- Continuously assess market trends and customer preferences
- Conduct customer surveys to understand what customers want
- Keep an eye on market trends and be flexible enough to adapt to changes
Best practices for managing fixed product bundles
1. Monitor and review bundle performance
Tracking and monitoring the performance of your product fixed bundles is critical as it gives you an understanding of sales, customer satisfaction, and whether you need to address any gaps. Here are some key performance indicators (KPIs) you must monitor:
- Monitor which bundles are selling more and which are selling less
- Monitor customer feedback and sentiment on your fixed product bundles
- Review the profit margin on the bundles so you can optimize your pricing strategies to ensure more profitability
2. Adjust bundles based on trends
To stay relevant to customers and in the market, you must ensure you’re changing your product fixed bundles based on trends. Here are three trends you must monitor:
- Customer preferences and needs change based on market trends. Hence, keep an eye on customer behavior, ask for feedback, and adjust your bundles based on their needs
- To stay competitive in the market, you must keep an eye on what your competitors are offering in their product bundles
- Monitor seasonal trends, the larger market trends, and products that are in high demand to adjust your bundles from time to time
3. Ensure inventory and pricing management
Inventory and pricing are two of the most critical factors for fixed product bundles. You cannot change products in fixed bundles, hence it is important to ensure you have enough stock of products to fulfill sales. Here are a few things you can do:
- Manage product inventory to ensure there are no stockouts
- Change pricing of product bundles based on price changes of products to ensure profitability and value to customers
- Use a Shopify product bundling app to notify about diminishing inventory to avoid stockouts
4. Highlight and promote bundles
Even if you’ve created the best bundles in the market, unless and until consumers know about them, your bundling strategy won’t succeed. That is why promoting and marketing your bundles is important. Here’s how you can do it:
- Promote and highlight your fixed product bundles on your website and landing pages
- Create targeted and personalized email campaigns to promote bundles
- Apply cross-selling and upselling strategies across channels such as social media, messaging, etc.
Tracking and optimizing your fixed product bundles
To ensure success of your fixed bundles on Shopify, continuously tracking and optimizing is a must. This will ensure that your fixed bundles are relevant to customers and you’re able to satisfy customers. Here are a few things you can do:
- Monitor key metrics such as the number of sales, the number of conversions, customer feedback, return rate, drop in sales from previous periods, etc. monitoring these will help you determine where adjustments are needed
- Once you collect data from key metrics, look for insights that can help you optimize bundles. For instance, identify high-selling product bundles and use these as benchmarks to optimize other bundles. Similarly, you can identify bundles that are not performing well and make adjustments of products and pricing to drive more sales
- One of the best strategies is testing different product fixed bundle configurations and pricing. You could try A/B testing to see which bundles are performing better. For pricing, you could try strategies such as premium pricing, added discounts, reducing discounts, etc.
Get started with fixed product bundles for your Shopify store
Offering fixed product bundles is a great way to attract customer interest and increase AOV. However, there are a lot of aspects to consider and manage. From planning and identifying products for the bundles to pricing and marketing them correctly.
To help you streamlining your fixed product bundles, we have Appstle Bundles. It is a comprehensive Shopify product bundles app that enables different types of bundles, such as mix and match bundles, Buy One Get One, frequently bought together, custom bundle builder, etc.
Moreover, Appstle Bundles App also offers features such as volume discount, tiered discount, fast upsell, among others. If you’re looking to launch fixed product bundles on your Shopify store, explore Appstle.
