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Bundles, Features and Product Promotion

Products can be promoted through a number of iAPPS features, including bundleing products together for a discount, linking them to cross or up sell or placing them in featured categories, such as top-sellers.

Bundles

A product can be a container for other products in the form of a Bundle. By bundling multiple products, a customer buys one item but receives many.

Bundles have their own Attributes, including:

• Price

• Description

• Products (1 to n number)

• Inventory (the lowest inventory level of any one included product in the Bundle)

For example, a customer might want to purchase a number of complimentary products from an online tool store. In addition to having many drills, drill bits, and drill bit boxes in the store catalog, the merchandising manager understands that having all three items in a Bundle at a discounted price will increase the likelihood of a sale.

He creates a Bundle called “Drill Package Special” that results in a $20 savings over purchasing all of the items separately, and includes the following products.

Bundles can be an effective way to increase the probability of a purchase, and provide incentive for the customer to return to look for other specials.

See Adding a Bundle for more information.

Product Linking

To support the marketing-focused functions of cross-selling and up-selling, products can be linked to other products to form a "product buying hierarchy".

For example, suppose you want to offer a discount on the purchase of a more expensive product. The table below shows how products are linked for effective up-selling.

Products can also be linked to potential accessories in order to cross-sell additional products when adding products to the cart. The next table shows how products are linked for effective cross-selling:

There are two sets of product linking in the example above:

• Vertical product linking supporting similar products of more value.

• Horizontal product linking supporting complimentary products that support a complete purchase.

With product linking in place, marketing promotions can be configured by the marketing manager on the front end.

Product Features

Features are part of ongoing marketing efforts to sell more products by highlighting a product set on a store web page. They are groups of products in special categories. For example, a set of Features highlighted on the main store page might include:

• Manager’s Special
• Top Sellers
• Bargain Basement
• Hot New Products

Multiple sets of named Features can be used at different times and at different places in the store.

• Manager's Special and Bargain Basement features could be a manual list of products, or an entire product category.
• Top Sellers could be a true list of the actual sales volume leaders (by units or revenue). This could be an automatic feature, with some products eliminated at the product definition level. For example, a company selling kitchen supplies might eliminate toothpick sales from the list of top sellers, since the units sold will always be high.
• Similar to Top Sellers, New Products can also be an automatic feature with exception overrides. See the See "Features " section for more information.