‘Good Things Come in Bundles’

- The Perceptium app that reveals bundle cost, profit margin and profitability

What is a Brightpearl bundle?

Brightpearl bundles are a great way to ‘package up’ products that might be bought together, increasing average order value and differentiating your offer from your competitors.

Using Brightpearl bundles in this way is very popular with retailers and most marketplace and eCommerce channels support the concept of bundles or ‘kit’ sales.

The definition of a Brightpearl bundle is as follows:

1. Each bundle component SKU is a stock controlled item
2. You don’t pre-assemble the components to make a new product
3. You put the components together once an order has been received

You’ll probably sell the bundle component SKU’s separately in their own right, but this isn’t essential to the definition of a bundle component.

For a more detailed explanation use this link to view the Brightpearl training video.

Typically, the incentive for the buyer to purchase the bundle, is that the selling price is less than the sum of the individual items. For example :

So the Brightpearl bundle has its own selling price, which you manage separately from the individual stock controlled items. Equally, the bundle has no cost of its own, it’s a sum of the cost of the components that make it up.

Brightpearl manages stock availability of the components, and also dynamically calculates the availability of each bundle, based on the availability of the components. When you raise an order containing bundles, it attributes the income to the bundle, and the cost to the stock controlled components, which ensures you don’t double count income or cost.

However, this creates two problems with product reporting.

Unclear Product Profitability Reporting

Reporting product income, cost of sale and net profit for each product becomes very challenging. This is because when a product is sold as part of the bundle, the income is attributed to the bundle, but the cost of sale is attributed to the component products.

No visibility of Bundle Cost or Profit Margin

As mentioned previously, bundles have no cost, they are a sum of the cost of the components. This means that you can’t readily ascertain the net margin of a bundle, or track whether the margin has been eroded over time by changes to the cost price of the component parts.

To address these two problems, we’ve created two apps for the Brightpearl platform that you can purchase individually, or, yes, you guessed it, as a bundle!

Bundle Cost Calculator App

This app is pretty straightforward - it does what it says!  We extract your product data from Brightpearl using the Brightpearl API, calculate the cost price x qty for each of the bundle components and post the sum of the bundle composition costs back to Brightpearl.

Once updated, you can either use the Brightpearl Margin Report, or run a Product List to compare your selling price, with the bundle composition cost. Just add a column and add the formula A – B = Net Profit or A-(B/A) = % Margin.

Bundle Apportionment App

Re-distributing the income between bundles and the component SKU’s is a little more challenging. It requires us to modify the income split on each order where one or more bundles has been sold.  The margins are likely to be different between one bundle and another, and we need to recognise and exclude, unrelated items like individual product sales and shipping charges.

Taking our bicycle lights example, the app changes this :

Into this :

Interested?

We’re a Brightpearl Partner, developing customisations, apps and custom reports for the Brightpearl platform.  For more information on these apps, take a look at our App Guide or contact us using the button below.