At this stage of a company's growth, create a partnership with a company that can design, develop, test, replicate, and fulfill your orders from start to finish.
CPG.IO's Variety Packs Are The Secret To Help Your Brand Win Online
The online shopping experience is still much like the Wild West. Customers are offered dozens of choices for almost every type of product, which is why eCommerce variety packs and bundles when created correctly, can help your online retail business win more customers online.
Variety Packs & Bundles are Essential on Amazon
Variety Packs and Bundles are essential on Amazon because, at its core, Amazon focuses on value for its customers, though pricing remains one of the most competitive aspects of selling on the platform; leading brands to optimize their product offerings for more value, and can directly lead to a significantly increased return on investment.
Only recently have eCommerce businesses fully understood the benefits bundles and packs can bring to their bottom line.
What is Amazon CRaP?
Amazon CraP is an acronym that stands for Can’t Realize a Profit. The term was first introduced by Amazon’s finance team and identifies products that are unprofitable in the eyes of Amazon.
What Happens When a Product is Labeled as CraP?
When a product is labeled as CRaP by Amazon, your product has become ineligible for promotion. Being ineligible, your product will then be disabled, and unable to utilize AMS (Amazon Marketing Services) or Amazon’s Subscribe and Save program.
The product loses all free advertising that promotes the product on suggested and personalized advertising feeds.
Getting your products CRaPped by Amazon also can have an impact on the negotiations between your organization and Amazon and even lead to Amazon no longer purchasing your products.
What Causes a Product Being Labeled Amazon CRaP?
For a product to be labeled as CRaP (Can’t Realize a Profit) in the eyes of Amazon, several factors combine to lead Amazon to this determination.
Products can be labeled as CRaP due to the:
- Large price variations across e-commerce platforms
- Product package sizes or too expensive to ship
- Amazon identifies that the low cost of an item plus the costs associated with the storage, marketing, and shipping of an item or a class of items has low-profit margins
- Products with high minimum order quantities
- Products with a high volume of returns or recalls
- Short-term expiration dates
- Slow restocking capability by a vendor
- Heavy bulk items
The first 4 of these causes of Amazon CRaP status can be avoided by utilizing bundles, multipacks, eCommerce variety packs & seasonal offerings to not only entice customers to try more of your products, but optimize your sales processes, promote brand loyalty, and save money on inefficient fulfillment practices.
Creating eCommerce Variety Packs & Modifying Your Product Package Sizes
The best solution to avoid these scenarios is to have your organization collaborate with a marketing service that helps your brand research, identify, create, and capitalize on new sales opportunities through eCommerce variety packs, bundles seasonal, and custom product offerings.
Advantages of Creating Variety Packs
Creating eCommerce variety packs, and modifying your product package sizes while streamlining your warehouse processes can directly lead to :
- Increased sales performance
- Higher average order value
- Optimized product packaging
- Reduced costs associated with packaging & shipping
- Broader appeal for other product categories you offer
- Gathering new insights and metrics that help you exploit new opportunities
Planned and implemented correctly, eCommerce variety packs, bundles, seasonal and club exclusive packs allow your brand to tap into potential your brand never knew existed.
Optimizing Your Product Offerings
Like all of the following eCommerce optimization strategies below, eCommerce variety packs transcend all product categories.
Whether your brand manufactures towels, toothpicks, tortilla chips, etc. creating an eCommerce variety pack with different variants of your product can lead to higher average order values, more units sold, and not only more customers but more repeat buyers.
Creating Custom Offers for Products
Product Bundles
What Are Product Bundles?
Product bundles are product offerings created by using multiple single products and combining them into one custom product. Creating product bundles that contain different classes or categories of your products creates several benefits for your direct-to-consumer efforts.
While your brand may rely on different measures of success, creating product bundles not only helps you earn more customers by creating a value-driven product offering to your loyal customers, but it helps your product gain a broader potential appeal to those unfamiliar with your brand.
They also can help to capture sales from customers who have limited exposure to your products - who may not have tried the products from your brand before.
Product bundles, like eCommerce variety packs, help your Brand create a better sense of perceived value from customers.
Multi-Pack Bundles
What are Multi-Pack Bundles?
Multi-Pack Bundles are unique products created using the same product category, however, they typically contain variations of the product or product class.
An example of this would be a company that produces a line of lotions and then subsequently creates a multi-pack offering that contains several styles or scents of its products.
Multi-Packs are a great option for brands due to the increased possibility of a returning customer purchasing a multi-pack for its value, only to discover that they love another product in the pack which leads to follow-up sales and increased customer loyalty.
Limited Time & Seasonal Product Bundles
While the Christmas season is one of the most popular eCommerce holidays for CPGs & other direct-to-consumer retailers, companies can capitalize on opportunities throughout the year with advanced holiday planning, and limited-time & seasonal product promotions that capture time-sensitive, interest-driven sales.
Utilizing product, keyword & audience research, brands can create focused product offerings to capitalize on “in-season time”.
What is In-Season Time?
In-season time refers to past product sales performance compared with the historical trends of peak and lowest sales activity.
For example, in a consumer commodity such as hot chocolate, sales activity begins to sharply increase by late August into early September, while sales activity declines significantly by February/March.
Understanding the Seasonality and Projecting Sales Performance for Your Products
More people drink hot chocolate in the colder winter months than during the hotter months. While some observations on the seasonality of products are easy to define, capitalizing on in-season time with value-driven seasonal product lines, bundles & eCommerce variety packs creates added value for the consumer at the very time they’re looking to purchase them.
eCommerce Club & Joint Product Line Ventures
With more brands than ever before creating their direct-to-consumer websites and seller efforts, brands have also taken forward-thinking steps to promote brand loyalty with limited, welcome, and one-off online product exclusive kits.
From collaboration on limited-time products with influencers to branded customer loyalty club initiatives, eCommerce businesses can bring a lasting impression on their customers through beautifully conceived and crafted temporary and permanent product lines combined with custom packaging and joining efforts with other brands to create a product with mass appeal.
Goals for Your eCommerce Variety Pack Initiatives
Whether you’re launching your first, or one-hundredth product, the goals remain the same.
- Gather feedback, survey, and test
- Creating a customized product experience for consumers with content that aligns with brand positioning and the creation of visual and verbal communication to shape the product and consumer journey
- Gain insights from product performance while learning to enhance the consumer’s experience
- A heightened ability to gauge consumer interest (with/without purchase)
- Build a community of engaged consumers that willingly share feedback, for both your current brand, products, projects, and future initiatives
- Fulfill your sales goals through an increase in your return on investment through optimized sales processes
The key to success though weighs on several factors - if skipped, inefficiently created, or omitted, can create a spiraling effect that leads to degradation of sales.
Enhancing Your On & Off-Page eCommerce Efforts
Before we discuss the options you have on your custom product offerings, it’s important to stress that the customer’s journey begins on your website.
Having a great-looking website isn’t the only part of the equation; having engaging content, imagery, and videos coupled with brand-elevating social media efforts are also huge factors
In other articles, we’ll explore more online eCommerce marketing, warehouse & fulfillment initiatives that help brands succeed online.
Price & Product Performance Research and Analysis
If you don’t know who your consumer is or what your competitors are doing in regards to their product, pricing, and promotion efforts, eCommerce variety packs and other bundling initiatives that aren’t optimized for success from the beginning hampers your efforts
Before you begin any product selling initiatives, researching and understanding the price, sales, and competitor offerings is crucial to understanding the efforts that must be made to compete in your product’s sector.
Custom Product Packaging & Shipping Containers
Creating a wonderful experience for your customer sets you apart from your competition.
With more brands than ever before competing in overlapping and saturated markets, successful direct-to-consumer brands are winning because of their attention to detail in their custom products and buying experience.
For more information on how CPGIO can help differentiate your brand from competitors and how we could help fulfill your product orders contact us to learn more.
Innovations in the Packaging Processes by D2C Brands
Your customer’s journey with your brand doesn’t stop when they pay for your product, it ends when it arrives directly at their doorstep.
Secondary packaging, both on the outside and in, has become a wonderful new opportunity to communicate with customers. Part of a delightful experience is not only a frustration-free package but also intuitive instructions and friendly messaging. Adding the aspect of personalized friendly messaging assists with building a lasting relationship with your Brand’s customers.
Emphasizing secure but frustration-free packaging coupled with a custom design, and a neat and organized arrangement of your products gives an added layer of satisfaction with the attention to detail that goes into them.
Cold Chain eCommerce Variety Packs & Product Bundles
Cold and frozen food has an added layer of challenges due to the methods of cooling and the availability to ship large quantities of dry ice by air.
Having a fulfillment partner that’s centrally located in your delivery range allows you to create cold chain eCommerce variety packs you otherwise wouldn’t have access to.
Pack Configurations
Whether you’re adding multiple of the same product or adding variations from different product classes, creating the perfect combination of products relies on a multitude of factors including weight, dimensions, and fragility combined with the insights gained from product class performance research.
Again, this is another area where working with a company that specializes in variety packs and custom packaging can help you through ‘the learning curve.
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Pack Size Optimization
Most CPG goods need to be optimized from a pack size perspective to offer consumers value. Shipping one unit just isn't feasible for online sales sometimes.
Optimizing your pack sizes for all your products including variety packs and bundles helps your brand reduce costs with optimized shipping processes.
Custom Packaging Development & The Difficulties of a Brand to Do it All
Every business is different of course, and the order fulfillment processes between them are even more varied.
Some businesses fulfill their orders in-house, while others partner with an experienced eCommerce distributor that fulfills their orders across multiple channels while utilizing FBA for Amazon-specific selling.
Growing Your Capabilities Successfully
While some businesses may fulfill their orders in-house and have fewer barriers to the creation and fulfillment of eCommerce variety packs, at this stage of a company's growth, creating a partnership with a company that can design, develop, test, replicate, and fulfills your orders from start to finish.
We, at CPGIO, would love to hear more about your order fulfillment goals – contact us now to get the conversation started
An Example of the Variety Packaging Development Process
To give you an idea of the entire process of one brand’s packaging development process, below, we show you the multiple areas of development that need to be achieved to create a successful product initiative.
Creating a successful eCommerce variety pack can include:
- Sourcing Carton Supplier
- Finalize Print Specs
- Finalize Dieline: carton & sender card
- Design Development & Early Sample
- Early Ship Test
- Production Artwork
- Comp Development
- Print Approval
- Print Run
- Product Delivery
While you may have a warehouse and a marketing team, understanding the steps necessary and coordinating your efforts is key to reaching a successful variety & bundle kit launch.
Creating Successful Campaigns for Your Variety Packs, Bundles & Seasonal Product Offerings
The most important aspect of launching your product is people know about the product.
Having a complete plan in place to launch your product to complement your on & off-page brand marketing and search engine optimization efforts pay literal dividends.
Integrating eCommerce Variety Packs & Bundles to Your Website and Your Marketing Efforts
While there are several steps to creating eCommerce variety packs themselves, there’s also a tremendous amount of effort that goes into creating a product launch that builds anticipation, garners attention, and can lead to amazing results.
This leads us to discuss the marketing efforts involved in creating a successful variety pack launch.
Successful marketing efforts for your variety pack launch include:
- Sampling Program
- Pre-Populating Reviews
- Influencer Promotion
- Initiating Express Payment
- Shop Emails & Promotional Campaigns
- Ad Campaigns
- SEO Metadata
- Creation of Social Media Specific Content
- Product Videos
- Site Speed Check
- UAT w/ship test
- Sell-out/Close Landing Page
- Pre-Live Landing Page
- Site Banner Go-live & Removal
- Packaging Site Go-live
- D2C Site Close
Having the right team to guide you through the entire variety pack creation and marketing process can create a seamless experience for sustained performance over your other products.
A Partner in the Fulfillment Process for Your eCommerce Variety Packs & Bundles
CPG.IO’s founding team has deep roots in the supply chain, distribution, and the CPG industry, and we’ve built all of our services around the idea that once your goods are kept with us, we can add value and optimize everywhere needed.
When you enlist CPG.IO as a distributor, you’ll quickly understand the value of being able to work with a unified provider.
Winning More Sales Online
Frustration-free packaging is the aim for our top-performing customers. It's a huge part of the overall customer experience and one of our main focuses.
With CPG.IO, your unique products are met with innovative recommendations and solutions that make your packages secure, products intact, easy to open, and a pleasant experience.
Adding SKUs to your website, Amazon, Wal-Mart and other eCommerce platforms is a huge part of our brand's strategies. Unfortunately, pallets of products aren’t always ready to ship as kits.
It may involve unpacking and repacking, adding a new type of packaging, or even recycling portions of your current packs. However, this is where CPG.IO outshines all of our competition and is your one-stop shop for all of your custom eCommerce and order fulfillment needs.
To speak with us more about variety packs, kits, seasonal/promotional offerings, expanding your brand’s online presence, or other topics, move to our website and start the conversation with us by clicking here.
Custom primary and secondary packaging design, prototyping, and engineering services.
When your brand needs to explore variety packs, bundles, and seasonal kits for your eCommerce solutions, needed to explore solutions, CPG.IO has the expertise to quickly research and implement viable solutions for kitting and bundling your products with an emphasis on frustration-free packaging and an experience meant elegance and simplicity.
Contact us today for a free brand analysis and demonstration to learn how CPG.IO creates, optimizes, and expands your online presence through the optimized warehouse, marketing, and product processes.
Contact us today for a free brand analysis and demonstration to learn how CPG.IO creates, optimizes, and expands your online presence through the optimized warehouse, marketing, and product processes.
