Selling individual products in today’s market is not enough. The key to success is to get as many products in front of shoppers as possible. You’ll need to find innovative ways to list your products and diversify your catalog to entice today’s marketplace-savvy consumers, and kitting is one of those solutions.
What Is a Kit?
A kit is often defined as a virtual product created from one or more real products. Kits allow you to expand your product assortment without consuming warehouse space. In Jazva, kits can come in the form of bundles or shadow listings.
Kits are smart and creative ways to boost sales and win customers, but managing them manually is time-consuming and can lead to inventory errors.
Managing a high-volume of virtual products is impossible without the listing flexibility of a robust inventory management system. You need a solution that can easily manage these virtual listings while maintaining inventory accuracy.
Why Bundling Matters When Selling on Marketplaces
Online marketplaces can be tough when you sell individual products amidst a sea of competitors. The price wars on Amazon alone could lead to lower margins if you’re not careful about repricing.
Bundling, on the other hand, is an effective marketing strategy when selling on online marketplaces. It allows you to group products together with adjusted price points, granting you more ways to experiment with product promotions and discounts.
In Jazva, a bundle is a type of kit comprised of several items from your inventory. Bundling allows you to combine multiple quantities of the same item, or group a diverse range of items to be sold as a single product SKU. Since bundles don’t hold stock, Jazva will automatically adjust the bundle’s availability based on the availability of the kit components.
Bundles let you sell unique combinations that are not sold by competitors. You can earn great return with very little investment and effort if you have the right automation software. For instance, while your warehouse might carry only 7,000 SKUs, with virtual kits, you could sell more than 100,000 SKUs!
Building Effective Bundling Strategies
Bundling not only boosts sales; it also enriches the customer experience. It’s about creating meaningful combinations and assembling complex parts into a single product that ultimately bring great value for the customer.
Add-ons and gift bundles not only expand your product assortment, but also help your customers make faster purchasing decisions. To stay competitive as an online retailer, you’ll need to ensure that your customers find the exact products they need in the fastest time possible.
Multi-pack bundling is also appealing for customers who want to save more by purchasing a higher quantity of that item in one bundle. Having different purchasing options is important to the customer experience.
By offering more buying options with varying discounts, you enable customers to select bundles that suit their specific needs. You might also build a better sales ranking and win more customers if your competitors do not sell those combinations.
Similarly, bundling enables you to move out slow or excess inventory by combining slow sellers with best sellers. This lets you clear out inventory while giving shoppers more buying options.
How to Take Advantage of Shadow Listings
Jazva lets you assign multiple product profiles to the same product while ensuring that your inventory is in sync and accurate. Your original SKU may have one profile, while the other virtual SKUs can have different Product IDs, descriptions, titles and images.
We call this a shadow listing, a type of kit that “shadows” an actual product. This means that its inventory count is tied to the real product, even when it appears as a separate listing on the same marketplace.
Shadow listings offer innovative ways to list products on marketplaces. For instance, Amazon and eBay allow only a single SKU to be listed once, under one category. By creating shadow listings, virtual copies of the same product can be listed in several categories.
Virtual SKUs and the Need for Inventory Control
Creating and managing hundreds of thousands of virtual SKUs is a huge undertaking. You need intelligent automation. Furthermore, having good reporting on sales and inventory will enable you to identify best sellers from worst sellers, so you can see the movement of stock. This information is crucial when creating bundles, making sure you combine the right items.
With Jazva, you can create and manage an infinite amount of virtual kits, including bundles and shadow listings. The inventory of each kit component is managed independently, giving you the flexibility to sell products as kits or individual products based on demand.
