Bundle Your Products Effectively
When you sell products over the Internet, one thing will naturally come with experience – it looks strange, but the customers are not eager to buy small items (I mean the items that are basically cheap). It IS strange, isn’t it. But Why? It should be vice versa, you would say. I should be…but for the Shipping charges.
Well, you see that there are dozens of charges for the transportation and delivery of goods. Just imagine, a small silver fork the user is interested in costs $10 and the total shipping charges for its delivery reach, for instance, $5. It makes 50% the cost of the purchase. I would say it is way too much. And if we take, for example, a kitchen machine worth $100, then $5-delivery makes only 5%. Much more agreeable.
A number of services on the Internet deal with a better scheme. I’m talking about Drop Shipping. Why is it better? Very simple. The transportation and delivery methods are the cheapest. You but the products directly from the manufacturer. Thus you avoid extra expenses with transportation and stocking of the items. If a service has a huge database of wholesale drop shippers, then your task is as simple as it can be: just go there and choose the ones you like.
However, it is impossible to avoid shipping charges completely. You have to pay the manufacturer or the service for the delivery of the ordered items.
As I already mentioned, when the shipping charges make half the price of the product (but it can even be equal or higher than the cost of the item), then the customers get less and less interested in the products you sell.
So, is there any solution? There is one I can give you. Make up sets. What’s that?
By a “set” we mean any collection M into a whole of definite, distinct objects m (which are called the “elements” of M) of our perception or of our thought.
This definition has been given by Georg Cantor. Do you wonder how the so-called “set theory ” can help you? Let me explain.
Let’s assume that you deal in children’s accessories. Let’s take multi-colored markers, for instance. You sell a box of markers of all the imaginable colors to your customer. The box features 100 markers.
The customer who bought your wonderful product comes home and presents it to his/her little son Jimmy. Jimmy is extremely happy and goes round the house trying the new present on all the furniture and wallpaper. He is so happy that he screams and throws the markers all over the place. One week passes and the customer discovers that out of the 100 markers only 80 are present. Jimmy is now extremely upset that he cannot paint the walls with his favorite green and blue markers. So the customer decides to buy him these 2 markers (because the customer clearly remembers that you sell markers at retail). But what does he/she find out? That the cost of one marker is $1 and the cost of shipping is $5. Then if he/she wants two new markers it will cost $7 (when the actual price of items is $2). The customer goes crazy and refuses to buy at such a brutal price.
What do you do? You make a set of the most frequently used 20 colors (I mean 20 markers of different colors) and bundle them together. The price of the bundle is $20 plus the shipping charge it makes $27.
You can even give the bundle a name (i.e. “Scope-for-Imagination set” etc. to attract new customers to the product).
The story is a simplistic one, but there derives a very important conclusion from it:
If you deal with products that time after time need additional accessories or parts you have to make sure that buying these parts is convenient for your customers.
In fact, almost all the products can be bundled, but there are natural bundles (i.e. surgery equipment: you cannot sell a scalpel without bandages). So, before getting down to selling something give a careful to your market strategy.
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