Being able to bundle products gives eCommerce merchants a competitive advantage. When you create a unique bundle of your items, you’re the only seller who owns the SKU, which can make a huge difference when selling in marketplaces.
Bundling is a great way to create unique offerings, introduce your customers to new products, and boost your average cart values. All of those factors lead to higher revenue for your business.
However, bundling is a complicated logistics process, made even more challenging when you have poor data systems running your fulfillment. If you aren’t careful, you risk overselling, for example if you don’t reserve the SKUs needed per bundle sold.
So, what is an eCommerce business to do?
How Pipe17 makes kits and bundles painless for ops
Struggling to fulfill bundles because your 3PL, or sales channel like Shopify, can’t handle them? With Pipe17, you can now fully automate kits and bundles across multiple selling and fulfillment channels. It takes the stress off of operations and doesn’t require you change the way you work.
Here’s how it works: when you receive any order, Pipe17 searches your fulfillment locations for available inventory.
When it finds the inventory, Pipe17 dynamically adds the line items to a “Shipping Request”. If your 3PL, or fulfillment application like ShipStation, can handle bundles then you can check the “Preserve Bundles” box and Pipe17 sends the line items as ordered.
However, if you have a fulfillment channel that doesn’t understand bundles, just leave Preserve Bundles unchecked for that location. Pipe17 will automatically “explode” the bundle SKU out into the component items and send the shipping request with the components as line items to your 3PL. When the fulfillment comes back from the channel, Pipe17 will “recompose” the line items back into the bundle to send the shipment confirmation to the selling channel.
Here’s the best part: Pipe17 also manages inventory for both the component items and the bundle SKU.
As you get more inventory for the components, Pipe17 automatically increases the available inventory for your bundle.