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Product bundling is a tried-and-tested sales strategy to increase average order value (AOV) and boost sales. It’s a cross-selling technique that encourages customers to purchase related items in one go, offering them convenience and potential savings.
Cross-selling and upselling increase revenue by as much as 30%. As FBA sellers, you can enjoy the benefits of product bundles with Amazon’s product bundling feature. This guide discusses Amazon’s product bundling policies and how you can create effective bundles.
An Amazon product bundle contains two or more complementary items sold in one listing with its own unique ASIN. Each item in the bundle can be purchased separately, but for convenience purposes, they’ve been gathered into one bundle.
There are millions of products listed on Amazon and a simple search of one item can generate thousands of results. By offering product bundles, Amazon makes it easy for shoppers to purchase everything they need with one click.
Bundles are also often priced at a discount to encourage conversions.
For example, Frito-Lay offers a 40-pack bundle featuring its best-selling classic snacks from chips to cookies and crackers. It’s a great way to sell items in bulk and ensure customers get something for everyone.
It also pushes customers to spend more as they believe they’re getting a huge discount buying in bulk versus purchasing each item separately.
At first glance, bundles, multipacks, and kits look alike. After all, they’re composed of several items purchased as a whole. But these three are different.
Multipacks are multiple units of the same item in one package. Consumers buy them for the convenience and cost savings of purchasing in bulk. Meanwhile, bundles are different items in one package.
For example, this listing for Funyuns Onion Flavored Rings is a multipack because you can buy 40 or 64 pieces of the same item. It’s different from the Frito-Lay bundle above, which contained several different snacks.
Kits are multiple complementary items packed as a single offer. The items in the kit can’t be purchased individually. With bundles, you can look for the product listing of each item in the bundle and purchase them separately.
For example, this Boba Bubble Pearl Tea Kit is composed of different milk tea items that you can’t purchase individually. In contrast, each snack in the Frito-Lay bundle above has a unique ASIN and can be purchased separately.
Product bundling isn’t a fad. It’s a simple and smart sales strategy that has worked for centuries. Here’s why you should create Amazon product bundles:
By offering bundles, you’re encouraging customers to spend more on your store. This increases their average order value. In the Frito-Lay bundle example above, instead of selling $2 or $3 snacks, the company can immediately sell $20 to $30 bundles, which leads to higher sales.
With bundling, you leverage the power of cross-selling and upselling. You encourage customers to spend more by exploring additional products that they wouldn’t discover if they bought individually. It’s a win-win situation because you get increased sales while customers enjoy convenience and value-added offers.
To encourage customers to try its various chocolate flavors, Hu Chocolates offers sampler sets that combine different flavors in one pack.
Bundling helps you reduce fees and offer products at a higher price point. These are two factors that lead to higher profits.
By selling items under one listing, you enjoy fewer listing fees, referral fees, and other associated costs. Meanwhile, customers perceive a higher value for the bundled item so they’re willing to pay a premium for it.
This is especially true if you create personalized packs like the brand Cravebox, an Amazon store that curates various snacks depending on the season and the occasion.
Winning the Buy Box isn’t always a guarantee, especially if you’re selling a highly popular and competitive item. But when you create a product bundle with that item, then you have a unique product offering with little to zero competitors.
You also eliminate the pricing war where you’re constantly fighting for the cheapest price just to be seen by customers. Without a price war, you can command your own pricing strategy based on convenience and overall value.
If your bundles are hard to source and replicate, then fewer sellers will offer the same bundles, which strengthens your market position.
Bodum sells coffee makers and accessories. By bundling a coffee grinder with a French press, they’ve created a convenient bundle that sets them apart from other similar stores.
By bundling products, you’re creating more offers without actually adding new products. Every time you mix and match existing items, you’re giving customers more and better choices. Those who need certain combinations can choose from your existing bundles instead of looking for complementary products elsewhere.
nCamp offers a convenient five-piece camping bundle that combines its best-selling essentials in one listing. Campers who are looking for a camping stove can enjoy extras like a coffee maker and bamboo cutting board that they’d also need.
When you create a product bundle, you create a new listing where you can control all aspects. You choose the most flattering photos, write the best titles and product descriptions, and optimize everything so customers see it.
By controlling the listing, you can draw more people to it, which leads to more sales.
Amazon’s quantity limits control how much inventory space your goods can occupy in the FBA warehouse. When products aren’t moving, you’re wasting precious storage space and risk incurring storage fees.
By bundling slow-moving items with fast-moving ones, you can quickly free up inventory space and lower inventory costs. You can also prevent the risk of throwing away dead stocks. However, be careful of bundling unappealing dead stock with best sellers because they can have an adverse effect of reducing the appeal of the good item.
While there are benefits, there are also drawbacks to creating product bundles. Knowing these disadvantages will help you create measures to overcome or avoid them.
When creating bundles, you have to think of custom packaging to bring everything together. You also have to buy a UPC for each bundle and find complementary items that make the bundle appealing.
If you’re considering buying wholesale items and then reselling them as bundles, you’d have to create multiple wholesale accounts with different brands. You also need to secure licenses, as needed, and resale certificates.
Since a product bundle is a new listing, it doesn’t inherit the attributes of the individual products. That means your bundle listing needs to gather its own product reviews and ratings. You can’t leverage the reviews of a popular listing.
You also need to create your own product titles and descriptions and make sure they’re optimized for search engines. If you decide to change a bundle’s component, you must delete the entire bundle and start from scratch.
Just because you’ve created a great and value-laden bundle doesn’t mean your customers see it that way. There’s a huge risk that they won’t like the bundle and will prefer to order individual items instead.
If you’re storing pre-packaged bundles and they’re not moving as fast as individual items, you can get into a tricky inventory situation. Individual stocks may run out, but you can have aging bundled stocks. Thorough inventory monitoring and efficient inventory management are key to avoiding this situation.
Product bundles are subject to Amazon’s Policies and Guidelines just like everything you do and sell on the platform. Knowing these guidelines and following them will ensure that your bundles don’t get delisted and penalized.
FBA Sellers with their own brand can take advantage of Amazon’s Virtual Product Bundles (VPB) program. Under this program, you can access a tool that lets you quickly create bundles with multiple ASINs.
You can bundle two to five complementary ASINs and sell them from a single product page. You don’t need to package these items together since Amazon FBA will ship these complementary items from your existing FBA inventory.
To be eligible, you must meet the following requirements:
To create the bundle, follow these steps:
You can always edit the title, description, price, and bullet points after publishing the listing. However, the main item and the products inside the bundle can’t be edited once saved.
If you’re not a brand owner but you want to sell product bundles, you can always create wholesale bundles. First, you’d need to identify a best-selling Amazon product and open a wholesale account with a manufacturer.
Once you have your account, you can start reselling their items on Amazon. Since there are many sellers already reselling individual wholesale items, you can get creative and create wholesale bundles. This way, you have a standalone listing that has zero competition for the buy box.
You can also set your own price without worrying that another seller will undercut you. You’d be surprised that customers are willing to pay for the convenience of buying a bundled pack.
To further help you become successful at product bundling, here are several best practices you can follow:
Conduct thorough market research to understand your target audience's preferences, pain points, and buying behaviors. Read product reviews to discover how customers use a main product and ask what other items can complement it.
Check the Q&A of a product listing and the Frequently Bought Together section. These areas are a gold mine for discovering potential product pairings.
If you’re selling knives, a quick look at the “Frequently bought together” section shows that most people who buy knives also buy a knife sharpening set. That’s an obvious bundle you can create.
Meanwhile, if you’re selling chopping boards, it’s a novel idea to bundle them with mixing bowls. But looking at the frequently bought together section shows that it’s a common combination shoppers purchase.
You should put yourself in the customer’s shoes and ask questions about the product’s purpose and how they’ll use it. Knowing your customer will help you come up with bundles that can’t be easily copied.
Select products that naturally complement each other and add value when bundled together. They must solve a real problem and not just earn you the Buy Box. Ensure that the bundle has a clear value proposition for customers.
When you nail the right product combinations, customers will naturally see its benefits and purchase the bundle.
Determine the pricing strategy for your bundle, considering factors like the cost of goods, perceived value, and competitive pricing. Offer a discount compared to purchasing the items separately to incentivize bundle purchases.
Consider the costs of additional packaging, returns, shipping, and inventory. All of your costs must be accounted for together with the discount you’d offer for the bundle. One useful strategy is to pair high-margin items with low-margin ones. This ensures that any extra costs don’t eat up your profits.
Continuously monitor the performance of your product bundles and gather feedback from customers. Use this data to make adjustments and improvements to your bundling strategy over time. If a bundle stops performing, consider replacing it and making a new one.
Just like individual items, you should continuously optimize the product listing of your bundle. Refine the title and description and use keywords to ensure they’re picked up in search. Even if you have a unique bundle, you’re still competing with multiple other product bundles.
Lead your bundle title with the highest-priced item since customers perceive this as the most valuable item. Amazon recommends following this title formula:
It’s recommended to include the word BUNDLE in the product title so customers know what they’re getting. However, not all sellers use this practice. Instead, they clearly outline the contents of the bundle in the product title.
Blink doesn’t include the word “bundle” in the title, but it’s clear that customers are getting 4 outdoor Blink cameras plus a wired floodlight camera and a video doorbell.
Give customers the complete contents of your bundles by enumerating the items in the product description. You should include complete details like model number, color, and size. Ensure the main image contains all the items in the bundle and not any representative pictures.
This Canon camera bundle clearly states what’s included in the bundle. It lists all the items as pictured, including accessories like the digital cleaning cloth, dust blower, and cleaning pen.
Running an Amazon store is easier with the right tools in place. For instance, you don’t have to manually look for profitable products that you can buy wholesale or retail for a nice profit. Tactical Arbitrage, one of Threecolts’ leading Amazon tools, lets you find profitable wholesale deals and uses in-depth sales velocity analysis so you can easily source best-selling products.
You can also use a repricing tool like SmartRepricer to safely automate your Amazon pricing so you can always win the Buy Box on your products. Even if another seller attempts to copy your bundles, you can remain ahead by maintaining competitive pricing.
Product bundles are a great way to increase your sales and grow your Amazon business. Some sellers have even built their Amazon store by exclusively selling bundles. By following best practices and using the right tools, you can master the art of product bundling and have a profitable Amazon enterprise.
Browse through and read our other blog posts that are data-driven insights with our very own proprietary data and learn more on Mother's Day trends and best practices, Easter sales, price elasticity of demand, Amazon FBA fee changes, Amazon product title optimization, winter seasonal products, Amazon end of year sales, Valentine’s Day trends and best Amazon fulfillment centers by location and throughput.
