Why Consider Custom Kitting for Your E-Commerce Business?

How Your E-Commerce Business Can Benefit from Custom Kitting Services

7 min read
close-up of woman specialist scanning products

With springtime holidays on the horizon, it’s not surprising that a lot of e-commerce stores are planning their discounts, special product offerings, and bundles to prepare for new sales. Specific trends like subscription boxes have also risen in popularity in past years, specifically for occasions like this, where customized buying and shipping can really drive sales.

8 Benefits of Custom Kitting for Your E-Commerce Business

We understand that smaller online companies and growing businesses may find these options a little overwhelming when first beginning. Let’s be clear: Advanced customization and kitting are not beyond your reach – especially with the right third-party fulfillment service that can help take care of the details. Here’s why kitting and packaging options can make a difference.

1. Custom Packaging is Perfect for Gifts on Special Occasions

When ordering gifts online, customers are impressed with anything beyond the basic brown box. Taking a little bit of time to customize a box with your brand’s colors and logo can actually be a big selling point when the unboxing moment finally arrives.

This is even more applicable when it comes to special occasions, where you may want to offer limited-time packaging that marks the event, like Easter-friendly decoration, special messages for Mother’s Day, and similar offerings. Third-party fulfillment can help manage the extra complexity involved: Let us manage the new materials and packaging requirements so your business can focus on sales.

2. Kitting Services to Enable Special Bundle Deals

Kitting refers to picking individual products or components and combining them into a single order/package for the customer. This becomes important for everything from limited-time deals like, “Buy this vase, receive two scented candles free!” to “Our special Mother’s Day subscription box will send your mom a curated collection of delicious treats every month.” Any type of personalized or bundled ordering will require advanced kitting services beyond typical packaging.

Small businesses can find kitting and fulfillment challenging because it requires significant micromanagement of individual pieces when an order is placed. Fulfillment centers, on the other hand, are well-versed in automatic inventory management, swift picking to get bundles together fast, and efficient packaging once the kit is assembled. That allows e-commerce sites to offer these deals without worrying about making mistakes or falling behind on orders. However, it’s important to keep a close eye on inventory levels so that you know how many bundles are currently possible and whether re-ordering will be necessary.

3. Letting Customers Pick Their Own Assortments

This is a popular approach for selling products like flower bouquets, cosmetics, treats, and small décor items: Allow online shoppers to pick and choose what options they like for themselves or as a gift, then automatically bundle them together in a single assortment. This can require even more customized kitting options and is generally only possible when detailed kitting procedures are already in place, and software can easily manage many different individual SKUs automatically when a customer makes an order. That efficiency that third-party centers offer also helps keep costs down compared to how much time and labor it would cost the business to handle it in-house.

4. Better Shipping Times and Guarantees

All this automation and picking technology comes with another innate benefit: Faster shipping times. Today’s online customers can be particularly demanding when it comes to shipping options, especially when they are seeing so many choices for free shipping, two-day shipping, and other offers. With such an efficient kitting process, your business doesn’t need to worry about the extra customization adding any more time to the shipping process, so shipping offers can stay the same. In fact, kitting and bundling often saving on space and time during the shipping process when managed by an efficient warehouse!

Holidays and special events are also a good time to consider special shipping deals, like free shipping over a certain amount or free shipping for particular holiday-related bundles. We will be happy to help you examine the specific costs involved and how to maintain profit margins while still giving customers the shipping they want.

5. Reducing Human Error

We mentioned that assigning individual SKUs makes it easy to rapidly pick and form kits. These automated tracking methods are also helpful in reducing human error, which can become a significant issue as bundles grow more complex. Additionally, businesses can easily check what individual items are available when offering bundle choices or putting together subscription boxes – and that brings us to another important point…

6. Planning Your Options Well Ahead of Time

With a third-party fulfillment center handling customization and kitting, e-commerce brands find it much easier to confidently make their plans ahead of time. That can include designing specific packaging to celebrate a holiday, or planning what products to bundle for a seasonal offering, and making sure the right inventory is well-stocked. Sometimes these decisions can take weeks or months of design and planning, so it’s important that companies can count on kitting and customization.

7. Making Customization a Year-Round Capability

Were your holiday bundles a huge success? Third-party kitting services allow businesses to easily extend their subscriptions, bundles, and customized assortments to a year-round offering if demand is high. This allows for a more versatile sales strategy so an e-commerce site can quickly respond to sales trends or customer response, shifting to offerings that will yield the most profit.

8. More Opportunities for Personalized Outreach

When customers purchase a customized order, that gives your marketing team valuable information: If your business is working on personalized communication with customers to help improve outreach or retention, then you automatically have order information to break the ice. Personalized emails, for example, can mention the unique bundle that the customer purchased and ask if it was what they were looking for.

How to Get Started with Custom Kitting

Talk to us! Sherpack is happy to set you up with a guide to help explain our services, take a look at your budget, and work out a plan that allows your online store to offer everything you have in mind. We offer a wide variety of customization and kitting options for companies like yours: Contact us today to learn more and start the process.