What’s the one thing that your customers love while shopping? Getting a good deal.

How do you give it to them? With product bundling.

Product bundles offer value to both shoppers and retailers. Amazon Virtual Product Bundle Program is a powerful tool to increase your revenue per sale. With this post, I want to give you a heads-up about the ‘Amazon Virtual Product Bundle,’ how it works, and how to use it to increase your orders and sales.

Here’s what you’ll learn in this guide:

1. What is Amazon Virtual Product Bundle Program?
2. Why virtual bundles should be an integral part of your broader Amazon strategy?
3. Why you should consider virtual product bundling?
4. Eligibility & Requirements
5. How to set up your product bundle?
6. The benefits of a Virtual FBA Product Bundle
7. How can we help?

Let’s get started.

What is Amazon Virtual Product Bundle Program?

The Virtual Product Bundles tool allows you to create product bundles with multiple ASINs. You can bundle two to five complementary ASINs and sell them from a single product detail page. With the help of this tool, brand owners can offer product bundles without packaging them together or changing the FBA inbound inventory.

For example, if you are selling an ‘electric guitar’ as one ASIN and ‘tuner’ as another ASIN, the Virtual Product Bundles tool allows you to create a bundle of both the items under one ASIN and sell this deal. When a customer orders your product bundle from the product details page, Amazon ships these two items from your inventory. You don’t need to pack the products together.

Why virtual bundles should be an integral part of your broader Amazon strategy:

Attract Frugal Customers:

Shoppers love a good deal. If the prices of your products are well known and a discount is available, virtual bundles can help thrifty shoppers find their products at a discounted rate. By offering multiple items in an easy-to-purchase bundle with a stellar discount, shoppers can purchase essential products economically and efficiently – no coupon code needed.

Cross-sell to Promote New Products:

Aside from order and sales increases, virtual bundles can also boost your brand awareness and visibility. You can effectively increase your digital share of Amazon’s shelf space and launch new products by bundling them with top-selling items or products that complement one another. Consider making your best-sellers the highlights of your bundles to show customers additional product offerings.

Minimal Effort Required:

With virtual bundles, excess inventory and poor IPI scores can become things of the past. Since bundles are created without the inconvenience of physically packaging products together, you won’t have to modify your inbound FBA inventory or purchase additional UPCs. Bundles come with individual SKUs, which can be viewed in the Manage Inventory section of Seller Central.

WHY YOU SHOULD CONSIDER VIRTUAL PRODUCT BUNDLING

Bundling your best-selling products with other complementing offers helps increase your brand awareness and visibility. This smart strategy provides a huge potential for your Amazon business.

Here are some more benefits of doing product bundling:

1. Competitive advantage– Amazon product bundles are featured in Amazon’s Buy Box so they get more exposure.
2. Higher profitability– For items under FBA, Amazon deducts fulfillment fees from one item, bringing higher profit margins.
3. Help sell slow-moving inventory– Want to liquidate certain products? Bundle them with the more popular ones.
4. Added value for customers: Bundling improves the customer shopping experience since all the products are on one page. Product bundles can also be priced lower than the items sold individually.

Eligibility & Requirements

Amazon’s virtual product bundle program is currently available to brand owners. It identifies the sellers who meet the criteria. To be eligible:

1. You need to be a brand-registered seller, and the ASINs must belong to your brand.
2. ASINs need to have active FBA inventory in the ‘New’ condition.
3. You cannot add gift cards, digital items like music, videos, and books, and renewed/used ASINs in a virtual bundle.
4. You can create product bundles only in the Amazon US store.

Note: Amazon says that the tool works well with Chrome or Firefox. Currently, the ‘Make it a Bundle’ widget is available for desktops only. It does not show on the mobile app.

How to set up your product bundle?

1. Log in to the Amazon Seller Central. Go to the Product Bundle
2. Choose from your brand-registered products, select two to five ASINs that you want to bundle.
3. You can upload up to 9 images for the listing. The component products you have entered in the previous step will automatically populate the images, so you can add these for the 8 images. However, it’s suggested to upload an original image for the main image of the listing. This image should depict the entire bundle.
4. Now, enter the bundle’s title, description, and price. The title field has a maximum limit of 200 Product bundles that can be priced lower than or equal to the sum of the total prices of the components in the bundle. If the price you offer is more than the sum of the bundle’s individual items, then your bundle will lose the Buy Box eligibility. As a seller, you need to track the price changes and update the bundle price if there are any changes in the components’ prices.
5. The ‘Bundled Price’ section tells you how much discount you are giving from the total price.
6. Finally, you want to enter the description, bullet points, and SKU for the product.

Note: You can edit the title, description, price, images, and bullet points after creating the listing. However, the main component, products that make up the bundle, and the bundle’s SKU cannot be edited once saved. As part of your listing, it’s vital to use relevant and high-volume keywords as they drive the right traffic to your listings. Consequently, the right traffic allows you to convert into more sales.

Benefits of Creating Amazon Product Bundles

Creating attractive and practical product bundles is expected to:

1. Increase both the number of sales and your average order value
2. Encourage Amazon shoppers to spend or buy more.
3. Speed up inventory clearance
4. Improve cross-selling and repeat orders
5. Appeal to a more price-sensitive online market who are always looking for more value for their money
6. Provide online shoppers the convenience of purchasing related products without the need to search for them on Amazon
7. Enhance the Amazon customer experience. Bundling allows buyers to save time when shopping, anticipate the customer’s condition by suggesting complementary products to go with their primary purchase and add more value to their hard-earned money.

Disadvantages

This is a great feature – but it’s only available to those companies who are in the Brand Registry. And, the only way to get on that is to have an official Trademark. This means only large companies who can afford to Trademark their brands can be in Amazon’s Brand Registry. This is very frustrating! a small company will never be able to get all the benefits given to large companies who are in the Brand Registry. I also on Amazon Handmade they don’t have this kind of functionality for Handmade Sellers.

 Conclusion

It’s still nascent to say if the Amazon virtual bundle program is a game-changer but it’s a much-needed tool for FBA sellers at the moment. Ensure your product bundles create value for customers – the higher the value, the better the order rate.

How Can We Help? 

Bundling products is a smart strategy – But here’s the catch

Product bundling is pervasive in most of the niches. It works well with many products. All you need to do is pick the right products to bundle.

But there are scenarios where customers value individual products more than bundles.

Let me explain this with an example – 

Let’s say, you are selling a video game console and a DVD game as a bundle along with the option to buy each product individually (called mixed bundling). Then the mixed bundling increases your orders at a significant rate.

On the other hand, if the bundle you provided is the only option for your customers (pure bundling), then chances are high that the orders will drop. (Needless to say, Amazon allows product bundles with existing individual ASINs.) So this is something you might want to keep in mind when you are selling off Amazon.

Why is this?

Customers know that they can put off buying and wait for a better deal. They might wait for the prices to drop or look for a (similar) competitor’s product at similar prices. In a way, you’re either competing with yourself over time or you are losing your sale to a competitor.

This is true, especially for price-sensitive customers.

Therefore, it’s important to give flexibility to your shoppers.

Amazon’s Virtual Product Bundles may not be for everybody. But if you think you are eligible, it is worth exploring virtual bundling for your products to encourage online shoppers to spend more to increase your sales volume and average order value. Just make sure you know the profitability of every product bundle you create.

If you need help setting your Virtual Product Bundles up, we at eComManagers can help you set up your Virtual Product Bundles. Just reach out to eComManagers, and we will be more than happy to schedule a meeting with you.