People experience products in different ways. When it comes to ecommerce orders, that also means experiencing different ways to order products within the same website. 

There are so many SKUs out there that sometimes an online shopper can be lost in the abyss of product pages forever, even if they do have an idea of what they’re looking for. Since you, as an ecommerce business, want to win out their attention in the competitive market, why not appeal to them by making shopping for multiple items easy? Better yet, why not save your brand time and money while your customers save on time and stress? Cue the wonders of kitting services!

What is Ecommerce Kitting?

Kitting Is the process of combining two or more related items into one ecommerce order bundle. However, instead of this being a package with multiple SKUs inside, the bundle counts as one SKU. 

From the ecommerce customer perspective, kitting is convenient because they don’t have to waste time browsing multiple options online to make or complete a set. Having the bundles premade saves time and effort (shampoo and conditioner, dress shoes and leather polish, cookie dough with decorative sprinkles and frosting, and so on).

From an ecommerce business perspective, kitting allows brands to streamline their operations. A third-party logistics provider like ShipMonk can help online retailers keep costs and resources down with kitting. How? By having items pre-bundled online, picking and packing times go down because items slotted in your fulfillment center space may already be categorized in groupings. These pre-established bundles also mean less looking around for outlier items to put into a package. 

Also, when we think about cost, instead of sending out assorted items separately, your ecommerce business can save on packaging and shipping by having items bundled together. Kitting could even potentially save ecommerce businesses additional time and money if items are bundled together at the manufacturer. 

Types of Kitting

Ready-to-Go Sets: If your ecommerce business is looking to maximize convenience and speed internally and for your ecommerce customers, bundling sets is a great way to do that. Maybe shoppers are looking to place an ecommerce order for a cheese lover—bundled online options like a set including wine, cheese knives, and cutting board saves your buyer from having to browse around the website through a large quantity of SKUs for ideas on how to complete a gift with their own selections. On the other hand, maybe you’re shopping for yourself and there’s a sale on socks—buy five and get the sixth free. If there is already a bundle available, your customers won’t have to waste a bunch of time clicking on different product pages to complete their ecommerce orders. 

Basically, having these sets means rather than searching through individual product pages customers can find what they’re looking for a lot faster. From clothes to kitchen knife sets, from snacks to stationary, having options in your online store where customers can bundle products into a single pre-suggested ecommerce order makes the shopping experience so much easier. All the while it makes your brand’s ability to simultaneously offer a smoother customer experience AND upsell easier. 

Subscription Boxes: If you have customers that utilize your products frequently, then subscription boxes are an ideal form of kitting. We’re talking about food subscription services, supplements, books, clothes, coffee, cosmetics; any number of ecommerce businesses out there have product lines that can work in subscription box format, and some (like certain food and meal prep brands) actually need subscriptions to survive. 

With subscription boxes, your ecommerce customers continuously enjoy items from your brand without constantly having to go back online and place a reorder. They save time and effort; meanwhile your ecommerce business has more longer-term, consistent return customers and sales figures. 

Your subscription box service could be geared toward specific products your clientele desires (like their favorite types of coffee, a specific face cream, their protein powder of choice) OR it could be linked to a general desire (like if customers have a fantasy book subscription service—they’re not subscribing for specific books, but rather new reads within their favored genre). 

Pre-assembled Products: Your third-party logistics provider can take care of kitting in some cases, but if you want to streamline your operations past your 3PL’s already-amazing order fulfillment efficiency, kitting can be done at the manufacturing and wholesale level. What that means is that Instead of having customers try to shop for the individual components that would make up a theoretical desired end product, your ecommerce business offers a “build to order” option that lets customers craft their end product before it has even been created, that way they are getting exactly what they want from the smallest piece to the hugest part. 

An example of this could be ordering a custom car. If you want something special past whatever Lexus, Toyota, etc. has on the showroom floor, some car companies will let you build your dream vehicle so it is produced to specifications on the factory floor. 

Ecommerce Kitting Benefits

In general, kitting has the ability to boost sales for your ecommerce business, increase efficiency for you and your customer, and save money for your brand. But let’s go more granular!

Reduced Fulfillment Costs

ShipMonk is a third-party logistics provider that offers competitive, customized services with reasonable fees to match your needs. That being said, when you outsource order fulfillment operations, you have to consider the cost of picking, packing, and shipping out every ecommerce order. By utilizing kitting, you can save time and money because you are no longer paying people to seek out miscellaneous items that happened to be ordered together, or utilizing packaging and shipping for different portions of one ecommerce order. Things are already set up as sets, and that means fewer materials and resources to get your order fulfillment done.

Increased Average Order Value (AOV)

Customers like convenience. When you eliminate the need for them to click around aimlessly on your website to find the right combination of items, or even go into the store if you have a brick and mortar location, you are offering a greater chance at customer satisfaction. 

Kitting allows your ecommerce business to provide customers with max convenience on items they want, and items may not have even known they wanted. In the process, they are spending more without as much hesitation or second-guessing that could occur if they have all that extra time to think things over while browsing. You take the guesswork out, which means they more easily, and more happily commit to bigger ecommerce orders.

Promotional Tool

Even if you’re an established brand, it can be difficult to get customers to try a new product. If you’re a small or medium size ecommerce business, that challenge goes up exponentially even when you are dealing with returning clientele. Kitting is a great way to promote and sell new products. By bundling recently released products with time-tested fan favorites and bestsellers, you have the opportunity to get online shoppers to more willingly try something new. 

Inventory Cleanser

In the same vein as using kitting as a promotional tool, bundling more-popular items with less-popular merchandise that has been around for a while can increase stagnant sales on the latter while helping you unload slower-moving SKUs. This not only means a boost in profits on less successful stock, it means you can clear inventory space in your order fulfillment center, perhaps to even ultimately discontinue a product or replace it with a newer model once you’ve gotten rid of the older merch.

Holiday Helper

Ecommerce businesses may be under a lot of pressure during the holidays, but so are shoppers. Kitting makes it simpler for them to order gifts and it makes the picking, packaging, and shipping of those gifts more condensed for you and your third-party logistics provider. 

Even if your brand doesn’t offer kitting services regularly, your brand may want to consider this time and cost saver around peak season specifically so customers can craft the perfect presents. Because, frankly, some people are worth more than a single item in your life. If we go back to one of our earlier examples, your favorite Uncle Dennis deserves more than a bottle of wine; he deserves the whole charcuterie experience, and kitting accomplishes that with less stress for you and your customers via single ecommerce orders.

Personal Flair

In the competitive ecommerce landscape, brands need to do whatever they can to stand out to customers, and create a fulfilling experience so they return and buy again. Not all kits are built the same, so while offering bundles provides online shoppers with saved time when making an ecommerce order, variety within bundles allows them to add their own personal flair. 

For instance, buyers can choose between red and white wine; they can choose between several cheese knives that are offered based on whatever your website recommendation engine churns out after the first choice, then you can select between five styles of cutting board. All in all, allowing variety and personalized options within the bundling process still gives buyers the desirable time save of shopping around your website for ideal matches, but it also puts the power of personalization in their hands, which makes the ecommerce order all the more special because it’s all the more theirs. 

How Do Kitting Services Work within a Fulfillment Center?

Third-party logistics providers exist to lighten and optimize the load for ecommerce businesses. At ShipMonk, for example, we’ve perfected “stress less, grow more” omnichannel order fulfillment services so that our clientele don’t have to worry about the nitty gritty of their ecommerce orders. If you want a peek behind the scenes at how we handle the kitting process at our state-of-the-art facilities, it goes a little something like this.

1.) Our third-party logistics experts pick the individual items in the kit.

2.) The team assembles the kit at a staging area where they become one whole SKU.

3.) All individual items are scanned and then packed in one package (or as few packages as possible).

4.) The new SKU for the bundle is created and accounted for in an ecommerce business’s inventory, updated in real-time with our advanced third-party logistics software.

5.) The kit is scanned, shipping labels are adhered, and the package is sent out!

Kitting Services through a Third-Party Logistics Provider

ShipMonk has mastered all the ins and outs of order fulfillment and the ecommerce supply chain so you don’t have to. One of the many effective and efficient solutions we offer ecommerce businesses is the ability to complete kitting orders. With our advanced automation and a team renowned for 99.9% accuracy and 4X faster pick times than the industry average, your bundles will always be in good hands. 

Ecommerce Kitting Services in Summation

Kitting services can help increase profit, move new or old merchandise, save customers time, enhance the customer experience, and save ecommerce businesses time and money in the order fulfillment process. That’s a lot of benefits for the simple act of bundling items together under single SKUs.

The thing is, that bundling is only simple if your brand has a reliable and efficient third-party logistics provider to manage your ecommerce orders and perform kitting services for you. While ShipMonk does not specialize in every single kind of kitting, we do offer kitting services as one of our many ecommerce business solutions. And we offer it with our own perfect bundle of expert staff, amazing software, and advanced shipping solutions. 

Want to learn more? Who are we kitting, of course you do! Contact us to learn how our third-party logistics team can benefit you and your brand.