Learning Center | 5 Minute Read
Kitting also called product bundling, is the process in which usually separate but related items are grouped, packaged and sold together as an individual item.
The stock availability of a kit or a product bundle is determined by the stock availability of its components:
Typically, when a kit item is sold, the inventory system will automatically deduct the components’ inventory.
Kitting is a great tool for retailers, wholesalers, and manufacturers to increase sales. Here are a few ways businesses benefit from kitting:
Kitting requires little selling creativity; the only thing it requires is an inventory management system that can support it, which we will discuss more in detail below. Now let’s take a look at some real-life examples of kitting.
Here are a few different types of product bundles seen in eCommerce:
Packaged-ready-to-Order Sets
Packaged and ready-to-order sets are great for customers to choose in set quantities, colors, or mix. Customers can order the choice they want without having to put it together which allows for a better sales experience and faster sales cycle. Plus businesses can add discounts on sets to encourage larger sales.
Subscription Boxes
The subscription market is growing tremendously these days — especially food products like sports drinks, supplements, coffee and beauty products. Subscription boxes are a great way to sell a single package with multiple products. Subscription boxes are a service of convenience to the customers because they get their order in a timely manner without having to manage future orders and businesses get a repeat buyer.
Assembled Products
Kitting is used widely to track parts inventory and reorders in manufacturing and wholesale operations. Build to order or manufacture to order is a type of kitting process. It allows you to provide better service and more options to your customers. For example, if you are selling furniture that is built upon customer order, you are stocking individual parts and then assembling the parts when purchased. As a result, you can offer your customer more choices because you can mix and match your parts to create a combination of products.
Custom or personalized Items
Similar to the custom furniture example above, custom or personalized items can be considered assembled products from an inventory perspective. If you are making custom and personalized furniture, kitting will help you track all the materials involved in making the final product. For example, if you are selling a custom chair with custom material used to engrave the chair, this would be defined as kitting if both the chair and the custom material were individual stock items in your inventory platform.
Now that you have learned about the benefits of product bundles and some real-life examples, let us see how you can implement them in Brahmin Solutions.
If you sell beer as an individual bottle as well as in multiples (Pack of 6, Pack of 12 of beer) or you sell a mix of beers (a beer variety pack), you can easily do that by creating a variant kit. With kit variants, Brahmin will automatically calculate the QTY on Hand and Available based on the components available. As component quantities reduce the kit quantities will reduce automatically and you won’t oversell.
