There’s a new feature coming to eBay this Spring, announced in the Seller Update but largely missed due to the focus on fee changes. As well as the Shopping Basket rolling out across the whole site this summer look out for Product Bundles appearing in the Spring.
The new product bundles will enable you to advertise different products you’re selling and encourage multiple purchases from different listings all from the one item page.
You will be able to offer accessories and add-on sales to your buyers who will more of your items on the site, which will help encourage them to make more purchases. You’ll also be able to offer discounts on accessories offered as a Product Bundle, so where for example you might sell a camera for £250.00 and a lens for £100.00 you might offer the lens when sold at the same time as the camera for £75.00.
It will be easy to set up product bundles with a new tool, which you’ll be able to use through a link in My eBay. You can start and stop at any time and if items in a related listing sell out, then the cross-selling activity will end for this item.
Personally I’m excited about this new tool. Previously I have stopped selling some accessories such as printer network cables, USB cables and parallel printer cables. My competitors are so price competitive that the postage cost simply doesn’t make it worth selling these items at the low margins I’d need to be competitive.
With product bundles though I’ll be able to list the items at a price that makes it economically viable to ship them with free post, and then link them to printers as a bundled product with a hefty discount. That way the chances are they’ll only sell when purchased with a printer which removes the postage cost as they’ll be shipped via a courier with the printer.
Product bundles should produce the same add-on sales that supermarkets achieve by having the sweets next to the checkout. Not everyone will add the additional items to their basket, but even if only one in ten buyers of a Product Bundle purchases an extra item it’ll add a significant amount to average order values and seller’s bottom line profit.
One Response
Do you have any examples of an active product bundle listing? There are supposed to be a limited number in the wild but the listing in the picture doesn’t seem to exist.