Understanding the Different Types of Bundles in Elastic Path Commerce Cloud

Product bundles can be great for enhancing customer experience, speeding up inventory clearance, increasing revenue and average sales and much more. However, many brands oftentimes struggle with maintaining their bundle assortments, which ends up leading to a poor experience for customers and loss in revenue for the brand. Let’s take a look at an example of that happening.

This brand has a membership bundle available. As you can see in the video, the usual annual membership costs $59. However, the bundle allows me to get my membership and a bundle of products at a discounted price.

Therefore, when I click to add the bundle to my bag, you can see my cart loads with 4 items along with my discounted membership. However, you can also see that I can break the bundle and remove items from my cart, while still maintaining the sale price that was offered for the bundle.

So at the end of the day, I can get my membership for $38, instead of the original $59, without even purchasing the full bundle. This is a major loss for brands because essentially, customers can game the system and get access to a sale price without spending more. Bundles with Elastic Path solves these problems. 

So today I will be talking about the two different types of bundles and how you can use them.

Bundles With SKUs Assigned

This type of bundle allows you to assign a SKU and a price to a subset of products. Therefore, this bundle may contain items which may or may not be available for purchase individually, and the price of the bundle will not be dependent on the individual price of the products in the bundle. For example, let’s say you run a computer hardware store and you want to sell a bundle which includes:

• A monitor which costs $200
• A mouse which costs $40
• A keyboard that costs $80
• A 1 year subscription for Photoshop that is not sold individually

So instead of an original calculated price of $320, you can assign all of your products under a single SKU, and set your price for that SKU for let’s say $280. Unlike traditional platforms that allow your bundles to break when shoppers try to remove items from their cart, Elastic Path ensures that all items must be included to get the benefit of the sale price.

These types of bundles are especially used when:

• You don’t want the bundle to be auto calculated and priced at the value of the independent components
• You want to track inventory if you only have a set number of bundles available

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Bundles WITHOUT SKUs Assigned

The second type of bundles are bundles without a SKU assigned. This type of bundle is based on the sum of each component's product pricing. Therefore, each product in the bundle already has an assigned SKU and price established in the catalog and therefore means they can be purchased separately.

However, this bundle allows you to alter the price of each SKU and provide a “sales” price to provide a discount for customers. Therefore, in order to take advantage of the sale price, the customer has to meet all criteria of the bundle – In other words, they have to have all the required SKUs in their basket.

So for example, let’s consider the same scenario before where you own your computer hardware store. Normally:

• A monitor costs $200
• A mouse costs $40
• A keyboard costs $80

But if a shopper adds all 3 to their cart, you can set your bundles rules to allow the customer to get the monitor for $180, the mouse for $30, and the keyboard for $70 for a total of $280.

These types of bundles are especially used when you want to track product inventory individually and have the pricing be autocalculated.

I hope this was helpful in better understanding the different types of bundles we have here at Elastic Path. If you have any questions feel free to reach out to us. In the meantime, checkout with our product innovations page and our product changelog to keep up with what’s new at Elastic Path!