“How can we get more efficient in our fulfillment process,” is a common request from our clients. Every client wants to sell more, but still keep operational expenses under control. Operational costs are driven by picking an item from a shelf, putting it in a box, and shipping. We often forget that upstream processes impact our downstream fulfillment. The most common solution is variety packs and rightsizing.
Variety Packs are Great for Increasing Revenue
In the world of Amazon Seller Central, variety packs and multipacks are where it’s at for some brands. Shelf-stable food items are often great for a variety pack strategy.
Variety packs allow brands and sellers to create a set of products that are cost-effective to bundle and ship while still delivering on target margins. If you want to learn how, check our post on why you need variety packs for Amazon.
With many brands starting their eCommerce strategies on Amazon, they often want to leverage their variety packs on their standalone eCommerce shop. Shopify, in particular, is the platform we see the most frequently in our client base. What brands do not always think of is how to successfully implement or scale a variety pack strategy to their eCommerce platform.
Why does this matter? To put it simply, complexity can be an immense problem. Many of the brands we serve have product lines that come in 6 flavors. They often want to sell as many combinations of 3-packs possible. Inevitably, the first thing they ask is how can we provide our customers the ability to order any custom 3-pack of any combination of flavors and somehow compete with the 3-pack price point on Amazon? It’s a logical question, but scaling can be a challenge.
The Challenge of Custom Three Packs From a Fulfillment Team
If you have 6 products and want to provide your customers with any combination of those 6, you will quickly realize that there are 216 possible combinations of custom 3-packs. Can you imagine managing a Shopify or WooCommerce Catalog with 216 possible 3-pack listings? No thanks, that would be extremely painful and inefficient to manage.
From a warehouse and fulfillment perspective, if you have to stock 216 different custom 3 packs on the shelf to keep up with the high demand of same-day shipping, this creates additional work to manage your 3-pack inventory. The majority of your sales will likely be driven by a handful of 3-pack varieties. This can lead to a lot of wasted time managing SKUs that just don’t perform.
When your business grows, and you need to ship hundreds or thousands of orders a day, this type of setup can become a bottleneck.
A Shopify Solution that Allows Consumer Variety, Increase Revenue, and Fulfillment Efficiency
Discounted volume pricing is a great way to increase revenue while making fulfillment efficient. Instead of trying to create an eCommerce catalog with a pile of 3-pack SKUs, allow your consumers to build their own 3-packs. Give your consumers the options. For example, let them select 3 different flavors and give them a volume discount.
Your customers will be able to get a competitive 3-pack price with this type of approach.
Orders, in this case, will be made up of 3 individual items. That means warehouse staff can quickly pick and pack the order from the individual units. It also means your warehouse manages a simplified item catalog. This may be obvious, but it saves a huge amount of time and effort for your warehouse team over the alternative of having to manage and plan for a wide set of 3-pack SKUs.
Booster App Can Help
We have found that Booster’s Discounted Pricing app is perfect for driving more revenue. In full disclosure, we have no relationship with Booster. What we do have, are relationships with several brands using the app, and they’ve been very happy with the results.
The Discounted Price app will allow you to set up rules for pricing breaks based on the quantities ordered. This will allow your customer to choose any custom 3-pack they want. Since they are buying in volume, you can also give them a great price. An added bonus, your fulfillment team will get a simple order without the complexity of having to manage a crazy catalog. That means your customer is happy, and your warehouse team is happy. The best part is your fulfillment and inventory management process do not need to change. That sounds like a win for everyone.
