eCommerce’s secret weapon against coronavirus: Product bundling

Many businesses are finding it harder than ever to sell products, even items they’d normally consider best-sellers. This pandemic has fundamentally changed the way people spend their money.

Because consumers have less cash in their pockets, as well as fewer opportunities to spend it, retailers are having to get creative. If you lack creativity, have a look at some of our ideas for dealing with lock-down here.

The high street has been hit hardest by quarantines and lockdowns, but many e-commerce businesses have also seen a downturn in sales of certain products. In these cases, it’s not necessarily the lockdowns that are responsible. Many shoppers now have less disposable income, so they’re being forced to become more frugal. This means that many non-essential items have become much harder to sell.

Given the nature of the current crisis, essential supplies are still selling well. Many retailers have seen a big increase in the number of customers now shopping online, and quarantine measures have played a big part in driving this change.

Pharmacies have found themselves particularly well-positioned to sell online during the pandemic. In 2019, the e-pharmacy market was forecast to reach $107 billion by 2025. It’s unclear how coronavirus will affect the industry’s trajectory in the long run, but for the time being, customer numbers are still at an all-time high.

To get around the issue of reduced demand for certain products, many pharmacies in the e-commerce space have started to get creative with their promotions. In particular, it’s product bundles which are helping drive customer engagement and shift those hard-to-sell items.

Bundling less popular items with best sellers gives retailers a way to move excess stock. These lower-demand products can be included in bundles as free gift items, or bundled with similar products for the chance to receive a discount on your cart total.

Online games distributor Steam has used bundle deals as one of its key promotional techniques for a long time. All it takes is a decent bundle discount for customers to buy additional products they wouldn’t usually consider.

As we’ve all seen, quarantines have driven a huge increase in demand for certain products. There are the obvious ones like toilet paper, which has been practically unobtainable in lots of shops for the past month. Not to mention other popular items like hand sanitizer, disposable gloves and various shapes and sizes of long-shelf-life foods.

But some recent best sellers are much more surprising. Take bread machines, for example, which econsultancy lists as the number two best-selling item throughout March 2020, up 670% from March last year. Then there’s home exercise equipment which has also seen a sharp rise in demand alongside comfortable loungewear.

With some well-targeted promotions and smart bundle campaigns, there are plenty of opportunities for e-commerce retailers to shift their less-popular products. All it takes is having a good promotion infrastructure in place to reach your audiences and react to their demand based on real-time shopping trends. 

Product bundling is just one of many promotion services that Talon.One offers clients as part of it’s Promotion Engine that can help you deal with the challenges of running a profitable business.

Book a free demo with us and we’ll show you how to set up use cases that are unique to your business.