Both the on-premise version of SAP Commerce, along with SAP Commerce Cloud, contain a bundling module with helpful features.
These were specifically designed to address the needs of businesses that market and sell digital products and services, as opposed to or in addition to physical goods and services. The focus of the solution is to enable organizations to build and sell configurable product bundles and packages.
What is a Product Bundle?
A product bundle/package is a combination of different products that are sold as a whole. The bundled items can be tangible products, services, or contract items. A package has a superordinate product that bundles the package components and is typically composed of various relationships at different hierarchy levels. A bundle can be composed of both standard and configurable products.
Product packages are used to combine different products into a package that is designed to meet certain customer requirements. Using product packages provides the following benefits:
- Different products can be combined based on specified rules.
- Packages can contain optional components, as well as alternative components.
- Products can be offered as whole but processed via different follow-up processes (e.g., contracts, sales orders, and service orders).
- Products can have special prices when offered within a package.
The option for bundles is available in the backoffice as of version 6.X and available in the legacy Product Cockpit. When a version of SAP Commerce that contains bundling (e.g., SAP Commerce, telco and media accelerator or SAP Commerce, B2C accelerator) is installed, the option for bundles is available as another perspective in the legacy Product Cockpit, in addition to the previously described product and catalog perspectives.
The module also features guided selling functionality, conditional availability of certain products depending on already selected items, and flexible product pricing depending on package contents. The following figure shows an example of the bundles view from the legacy Product Cockpit.
How to Bundle
In the legacy Product Cockpit, click Bundling on the left side in the navigation area. A bundle consists of the following information:
Basic Information
As shown below, this includes information like the ID, name, description, version, parent template, and approval status. If the component is a child template, a parent template would be shown here.
Bundle Template Components
As shown below, this is where child templates can be included by selecting an existing reference or adding a new item by selecting from the dropdown after clicking the Add Reference button next to the entry field.
Selection Criteria and Dependencies
As shown in the next figure, the bundle section criteria define how many products a customer can or must choose in this bundle component and whether the selection is to be made automatically. By configuring required components, dependencies can be defined for this component.
Component Product Set
The next figure displays how these products are available to customers in the selected component. Depending on the bundle component’s selection criteria, either these products are automatically added to the cart, or a subset of all available products can be chosen by the customer when building the bundle.
Product Price & Disable Rules
As shown below, here the user can create conditional discounts for products purchased in bundles or set up disable rules to prevent customers from purchasing certain combinations of products.
To add conditions for prices, the user can click Add Condition as shown in the figure above, opening a screen (first figure below) to add conditions to the pricing of the bundle. To disable specific rules for products, the user can click Add Rule, opening a screen (second figure below) in which rules can be applied to disable rules for specific bundle templates.
Bundles can be added by clicking Add Bundle in the browser area. A pop-up will appear to create the bundle, as shown below.
Conclusion
Bundling is an important tool for businesses that sell multiple products or formats of the same product. With the SAP Commerce Cloud pillar of SAP Customer Experience, you can easily implement a bundle option to your product catalog. (Need more help with creating product categories? Read this.) This blog showed you how to do so in a handful of easy steps. What kinds of products might you bundle to help increase sales?
Editor’s note: This post has been adapted from a section of the book SAP Commerce Cloud: Commerce with SAP C/4HANA by Seema Vishnoi, Sietse Verhoog, and Drew Messinger-Michaels.
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