Product bundles offered in online stores have a positive impact on customer loyalty and sales development. They are one of many possible scenarios for using personalization to successfully shape your customer journey. In this article, you will learn what is behind this use case and how you can use product bundles profitably in practice.
What is a product bundle?
A product bundle consists of two or more products that are related to each other or to the customer. For example, a vacuum cleaner and the matching vacuum cleaner bag, a set of perfume and shower gel, or a book combined with an audio download from a Disney movie. Customers are offered these products in a bundle because they are often clicked on or bought together in the online store.
By displaying the product bundle, online customers can save time when searching for products as well as money, because retailers often provide the bundle with a discount to create an incentive to buy.
In turn, online retailers benefit from a higher number of purchased products and can actively manage other success metrics as well. For example, if you combine a high-frequency product with a high-margin item, you optimize purchase frequency as well as revenue. And the shortened product search on the part of your customers has a positive influence on the rate of shopping cart abandonment in online stores.
The idea of product bundles is not new. Brick-and-mortar retailers have always used this tool to create new purchase incentives. The advantage in online retailing is that these bundle offers can be designed in a more personalized way to respond better to customers’ current interests. This is exactly what AIR Personalization does: Our artificial intelligence in the form of self-learning algorithms automatically calculates meaningful product bundles for your customers in real time.
What types of product bundles are there?
AIR Personalization software offers different recommendation logic that the retailer can choose between. A/B testing can be used to determine which recommendation logic will work among your customer base.
A frequently used recommendation logic for product bundles is the “Ordered Together” recommendation type. This means that products that are often purchased together by other customers are recommended. Our artificial intelligence-based pricing software calculates the recommendations in real time based on the purchases of all users.
But other recommendation logic, such as suggesting products that have often been clicked together with the product currently in view, or combining them with a product from a wish list, can also be useful. Furthermore, retailers can choose the recommendation logic that links the selection of combined items to the sales price of the viewed product or a defined price range. Retailers can also exclude certain categories for a product bundle, if it is difficult to discount certain brands or product categories (e.g. books with fixed book prices). AIR Personalization provides you with various options across a wide variety of recommendation logics.
How do you use product bundles in practice?
A popular placement for product bundles is the item detail page. Here, customers take a closer look at the product they want and register the offer for a product bundle that creates added value for them.
For example, Thalia uses product bundles on the product detail page in addition to personalized recommendations. In this example, various Lego building sets are combined with each other:
At the Würth Group, customers can find product bundles to match the product displayed, in this case a cordless angle grinder together with a cordless hammer drill:
But it is also worthwhile to place product bundles in other places, such as in the shopping cart or in the personalized newsletter for customers.
And even in B2B trade, online retailers can use product bundles to create incentives to buy. Buyers usually know exactly what they are looking for and see real added value in additionally offered accessories or spare parts: grinding wheels for angle grinders, paint rollers combined with scraper grids, or dowels in different sizes combined as a bundle.
Are you interested in integrating product bundles in your online store? Feel free to contact me!
