Combining multiple products into a single item package
I have a requirement to sell products as a single package. Like a package holiday that might include flights, hotel and car hire.
Although these products would all have their own prices it is important that only a single price for the entire package is displayed in the basket.
Package holiday to New York.....$799 Total.....$799
and not
Return flight to New York.....$400 3* Hotel.....$300 Car hire.....$99 Total.....$799
Of course the package has a number of variables that can change. They may wish to upgrade the class of hotel from 3* to 4*, perhaps add some extra nights or add an additional person and the price of the package would have to be altered accordingly.
This requirement seems pretty specialist and bespoke to me but I wonder if uCommerce can be configured to behave in this way?
You have two options: The ultimate flexible gambit (tm) or the super simple solution (tm also :)).
There are four components to your bundle:
1) The individual bundled items. I would create the separate products first and then another product, which is the "bundle product". On the "bundle product" related the individual products using related products and a relationship type called "bundle". With this in place you basically have a product and a list of bundled items. Set the price to 0 on the "bundle product".
2) Adding the entire bundle to the basket in one go (optional), On your product page detect the "product bundle" by looking at the definition of the product or a custom property and have the "add to basket" button add all the individual products of the bundle. When you add the products you need to set a custom property on the individual order lines to indicated that they're part of the bundle - you'll need that for step four :)
3) Separate price on the entire bundle. Marketing Foundation has built in support for discounts on bundles. Add the constituent parts of the bundle in a single campaign item and do an order level discount, which matches the price you want for the bundle. This will give you dynamic pricing based on the bundle.
4) Display the bundle as one in the basket (optional). Look for the custom order property, which identifies a single product bundle and hide order lines which are not the "product bundle" and display only the "product bundle" itself.
You need to put in some work to get the flexibility you want, but you can definitely do it.
The super simple solution (tm) is to just add a single product with variants for the choices you want, but that won't give you quite the flexibility in setting up different combos so you'll have to decide how many combos you'll have and how much time the client will spend setting it up vs. the time you spend cooking up the ultimate flexible gambit (tm).
The Ultimate Gambit works in principle but I've run into some problems.
Setting the award to "amount off order total" or "amount off order line total" works as long as the customer only buys 1 bundle. Buying 2 or more results in only a single discount being applied.
Setting the awars to "percentage off order line" handles the problem of multiple bundles being purchased but if a customer buys a bundle and then 5x one of the constituents each item gets the percentage taken of the price resulting in a lower than expected price.
Which version are you running. There were some fixes added to 2.1 to change some of this behavior, but I will test your specific scenario with the latest release to see for myself. Thanks for reporting it.
Trouble is that the built-in awards don't know what the individual order lines go together, i.e. line A and B go together, but only for similar quantities. The solution is to build an award type which matches the behavior you want: Specifically the award in this case would look for full bundles and apply the configured amount across the bundle or bundles if there are multiples.
Another way to is to split the actual bundles on separate orders lines. The reason that you're getting discounts assigned to the "extra" items is that they're on an order line, which gets awarded by Marketing Foundation. You could do a bundle order line if you just want to target that and ensure that the bundles end up there. Individual items would get their own order lines thus ensuring that bundle discounts on get award for full bundles and not the extra items.
Combining multiple products into a single item package
I have a requirement to sell products as a single package.
Like a package holiday that might include flights, hotel and car hire.
Although these products would all have their own prices it is important that only a single price for the entire package is displayed in the basket.
Package holiday to New York.....$799
Total.....$799
and not
Return flight to New York.....$400
3* Hotel.....$300
Car hire.....$99
Total.....$799
Of course the package has a number of variables that can change.
They may wish to upgrade the class of hotel from 3* to 4*, perhaps add some extra nights or add an additional person and the price of the package would have to be altered accordingly.
This requirement seems pretty specialist and bespoke to me but I wonder if uCommerce can be configured to behave in this way?
Regards,
Matt
Hi Matt,
You have two options: The ultimate flexible gambit (tm) or the super simple solution (tm also :)).
There are four components to your bundle:
1) The individual bundled items. I would create the separate products first and then another product, which is the "bundle product". On the "bundle product" related the individual products using related products and a relationship type called "bundle". With this in place you basically have a product and a list of bundled items. Set the price to 0 on the "bundle product".
2) Adding the entire bundle to the basket in one go (optional), On your product page detect the "product bundle" by looking at the definition of the product or a custom property and have the "add to basket" button add all the individual products of the bundle. When you add the products you need to set a custom property on the individual order lines to indicated that they're part of the bundle - you'll need that for step four :)
3) Separate price on the entire bundle. Marketing Foundation has built in support for discounts on bundles. Add the constituent parts of the bundle in a single campaign item and do an order level discount, which matches the price you want for the bundle. This will give you dynamic pricing based on the bundle.
4) Display the bundle as one in the basket (optional). Look for the custom order property, which identifies a single product bundle and hide order lines which are not the "product bundle" and display only the "product bundle" itself.
You need to put in some work to get the flexibility you want, but you can definitely do it.
The super simple solution (tm) is to just add a single product with variants for the choices you want, but that won't give you quite the flexibility in setting up different combos so you'll have to decide how many combos you'll have and how much time the client will spend setting it up vs. the time you spend cooking up the ultimate flexible gambit (tm).
Hope this helps :)
Involved but I think Ultimate flexible gambit (tm) is definately the way to go for my project.
Marketing Foundation is in version 2.0, when will that be available do you think?
Regards,
Matt
We're releasing 2.0 at Codegarden 11 June 15. Prerelease 3 was just released if you want to have a play with it.
The Ultimate Gambit works in principle but I've run into some problems.
Setting the award to "amount off order total" or "amount off order line total" works as long as the customer only buys 1 bundle. Buying 2 or more results in only a single discount being applied.
Setting the awars to "percentage off order line" handles the problem of multiple bundles being purchased but if a customer buys a bundle and then 5x one of the constituents each item gets the percentage taken of the price resulting in a lower than expected price.
Regards,
Matt
Hi Matt,
Which version are you running. There were some fixes added to 2.1 to change some of this behavior, but I will test your specific scenario with the latest release to see for myself. Thanks for reporting it.
Hi Soren,
We're running uCommerce version 2.0.5.0.
Thanks,
Matt
Trouble is that the built-in awards don't know what the individual order lines go together, i.e. line A and B go together, but only for similar quantities. The solution is to build an award type which matches the behavior you want: Specifically the award in this case would look for full bundles and apply the configured amount across the bundle or bundles if there are multiples.
Another way to is to split the actual bundles on separate orders lines. The reason that you're getting discounts assigned to the "extra" items is that they're on an order line, which gets awarded by Marketing Foundation. You could do a bundle order line if you just want to target that and ensure that the bundles end up there. Individual items would get their own order lines thus ensuring that bundle discounts on get award for full bundles and not the extra items.
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