admin_fortress | Jul 22, 2020
Published in Marketplace News
Virtual Product Bundles are the latest addition to Amazon’s product listing offerings. This feature allows you to pair 2-5 ASINs together in one listing for the sake of convenience, promotion, exclusivity, or curation.
- Convenience: Bundle up items that your customers may already be purchasing together. Peanut butter and jelly, frying pans and spatulas, phone cases and screen protectors, coloring books and crayons… the possibilities here are endless!
- Promotion: Encourage cross-selling and avoid complicated promotions by discounting your bundles! You are not required to provide a discount on your bundles, but this will inevitably make the bundle a more attractive option for your customers’ shopping carts.
- Exclusivity: Make certain products only available via virtual product bundle.
- Curation: Provide an enhanced shopping experience for your Amazon audience. Perhaps a customer is in-market environmentally-friendly metal straws; this may mean they’re interested in reusable silverware for their lunch bag.
This is an incredible opportunity for sellers that want to pair up ASINs for sale but don’t have the resources to physically package them together. Additionally, if you’re bundling Product A and Product B, the inventory comes from Product A and Product B respectively; you don’t have to gamble and sacrifice single unit inventory that you would have by bundling physically.
A few quick facts about Virtual Bundles:
- To create bundles, you must be (1) a brand owner and (2) fulfill orders via FBA, or Fulfilled By Amazon.
- There are a few product types that can not be bundled, including gift cards, renewed or used ASINs, and digital products (e.g. Kindle books and music downloads).
- While up to 25 units can be bundled together, only up to 5 ASINs can be bundled. For example, you can bundle 25 pairs of socks in 5 different colors, but you couldn’t bundle 25 pairs of socks in 25 different colors, as each color would have its own ASIN.
There are also a few drawbacks and complicated bits of Virtual Bundles that should be considered as a part of your business strategy before creating:
- Sales data from virtual bundles are attributed to the individual products of the bundle, but regular reporting will not indicate that sales came from bundles. However, a bundle performance report is emailed weekly to the default recipient for more information on how your bundle is selling.
- Virtual Bundles must be created one-by-one within the Virtual Bundle dashboard. Bulk uploading bundles is not an existing feature.
- As of July 2020, bundles can only be advertised via Sponsored Brands. Regular Sponsored Brands has positions at top of search, bottom of search, and on product pages. Video Sponsored Brands has positions within search results. Take advantage of these placements.
- Bundle prices do not automatically adjust when/if the prices of the individual products change. Because Buy-Box eligibility is removed when the bundle price exceeds that of the individual products, this is important to monitor closely.
- The category where your bundle can be discovered is determined by the main component’s category. The main component is determined in the bundle creation process and is the main ASIN you’re promoting. Given our example above, bundling a phone case and a screen protector means selecting the phone case as your main component would land the bundle in the Basic Cases or Cases, Holsters & Sleeves category. However, if the screen protector were the main component, the bundle would be found in the Screen Protectors category. Think about how to best secure discoverability of your bundle and the category where customers are most likely to convert.
- The creative elements of a bundle can be edited after creation (title, bullets, etc). Once the main component is chosen, it can not be changed.
- Customers can partially return bundles. If the bundle was discounted, they will receive a prorated refund.
While there are a few hurdles that come along with Virtual Bundling, the program remains an impressive tool for increasing cart size and encouraging discovery of your product line. For more information regarding Virtual Bundles and best practices, contact our rockstar accounts team at [email protected].