What Are Bundle Packages? Advantages and Disadvantages
Every business is always looking for new ways to increase sales. There are many strategies and methods that you can use to try to achieve this goal. However, one of the best, especially if your business is operating online, is to use bundle packages. Unfortunately, this strategy often goes overlooked because business owners either don’t know about it, or they find it hard to implement within their business. In this guide, we will discuss what bundle packages are, why you might want to use them, and how you can quickly get started with them.
What Are Bundle Packages?
Bundle packages, or the act of product bundling, is when a business groups several items and sells them as a single unit. The items within the unit typically complement one another. The goal is to entice customers to buy everything at once rather than each item individually. For example, a beauty supply store may sell a bundle of cosmetics, including foundation, eye-shadow, mascara, and skin cream. Bundle packages are sometimes confused with multi-packs, which are simply multiples of the same item (for example, a six-pack of soda cans).
Bundle packages are especially popular with online retailers. For example, a business that provides online courses could bundle several classes together and sell access to all the materials as a single package. To create bundle packages, you have a few different methods to choose from:
Types of Bundling
Joint Bundling – Joint bundling is when a business combines two or more products to create a bundle. With joint bundling, the items within the bundle are not available for individual purchase, making the bundle the only way to get them.
Leader Bundling – With leader bundling, you combine a popular product with less popular ones. The idea is to use the draw of the popular product to encourage the buying of the less popular products. In this style, you also do not make the individual items available for separate purchase. That way, if the customer wants to get the leader product, they need to get the entire bundle.
Mixed Bundling – Mixed bundling is when a business provides both bundles and individual products. Often the mixed bundle is offered at a discount compared to the cost of the individual items combined. This option provides the customer with a choice of buying the individual product but also offers an incentive to get the bundle.
Advantages of Bundle Packages
Bundling products together can offer you a few advantages. For starters, it can help you sell items that are not performing as well. You can use the popularity of one product to encourage the sale of others that are less well-known.
Bundles can also help you to promote a new product. For example, if your website is now offering a new course, you can bundle it with some related courses to start getting the word out about it. Someone may come to your site having heard good things about your current classes, but when presented with the option to spend a little more and get your past courses plus your new one, they take that opportunity and increase your sales numbers for the new course.
Finally, bundles can also make it easier to track product sales. Rather than tracking the stats for each product, you can track the stats for just one bundle; This makes performing analysis on your sales a little easier, which in turn saves you time.
Disadvantages of Package Bundling
As with any sales strategy, there are some drawbacks. When you create a package bundle, you are creating a more expensive item. Depending on your customer base, they may not be willing to spend that much to get the products inside. For example, your customers may have been okay with spending $100 on each of your online courses but are unable to afford $250 for three courses. You will have to do some customer analysis to help determine if your bundle is something that your customers can afford.
Package bundling can also negatively impact the sales of your more popular products. If you bundle less popular products with your most popular one and raise the price, customers may be unwilling to spend more on your popular product, even if they are getting bonus items. You will have to gauge the popularity of your leader product and decide if it’s strong enough to sustain a bundle.
How to Get Started with Package Bundling
To get started with package bundling, you will first want to analyze your current business. Which products are the most popular and which are the least? Which products make the most sense to bundle together? After compiling the data, you should then figure out what type of bundles you want to offer. Decide if you’re going to use a joint bundling system, a leader bundle, or a mixed bundling system. Keep in mind that you can offer more than one type of bundle in your business, depending on your needs.
Once you have all the details worked out, it’s just a matter of implementation. If you offer courses online, creating a bundle is easy with the right software. Steams Online makes it easy to create custom bundles for your online courses and sell them to your customers. If you’re selling physical products online, you will want to find the right e-commerce software to help you out. For retail stores, it’s just a matter of finding the right packaging to group your items physically.
After creating your bundles, you must track the data.
See how your sales numbers perform following the implementation of the bundle and see if you need to make any changes. For example, you may find that you need to offer a bigger discount on your bundle or that your leader item wasn’t strong enough to carry its own bundle. Make adjustments and keep looking to improve as you go along.
When used correctly, package bundling is a great way to improve sales throughout your business. Hopefully, this guide was able to shed some light on what package bundling is and how you can make use of it. If you have any questions or if you’d like to get started with package bundling for your online courses, please feel free to contact us at any time.
