The Best Way To Increase Average Order Volume on Amazon

In today's tip, I'll show you how to use Amazon Virtual Bundles so that you can

• Maximize the real estate of your products on the Amazon product detail page - decreasing the likelihood of customers leaving your page and going to your competitors
• Increase your average order value (AOV) - increasing your total revenue in the long run.

With an attractive curated virtual bundle section, you're pushing the Sponsored Products section like "Customers frequently viewed", "4 stars and above" and "Products related to this item" lower, giving your more real estate right below your product.

Why Is Increasing AOV On Amazon So Difficult?

Increasing Average Order Value on Amazon is one of the harder levers to pull because you’re limited to what you can customize on Amazon vs your own ecommerce website. You cannot:

• Create an order minimum for “free shipping” - something I like to do to encourage customers to add just one more product
• Upsell or cross-sell complementary products - buy a snowboard and offer goggles at a discount with a pop-up or on a cart page
• Sell a higher-priced item right below the fold, i.e. "People also viewed" or "Other similar items"
• Lastly, provide bundles - we'll digger deeper in just a moment. 

Physical Bundles vs Virtual Bundles

There is something you can do to increase both AOV and real estate on Amazon and that is leveraging Virtual Bundles.

Virtual bundles are 2-5 products from your catalog that are sold as one bundle, typically at a discount. These products are not physically packaged together but are sold as if they are bundled together.

You don't need a new UPC.

You don't need to ship in additional inventory.  If you have product A and product B at Amazon, that's good enough. 

Basically, Amazon will pick-pack those items separately and ships them as a bundle.

Let's compare this to physical bundles.

Physical bundles require you to physically bundle two or more products together.

New UPC.

Physically ship the new units to Amazon.

Takes up additional space at the fulfillment center and ties up inventory.

Here’s the beautiful part of creating virtual bundles… you can mix and match multiple products that are already existing at the Amazon fulfillment center. Baseball glove with baseball. Baseball glove with a baseball bat. Baseball glove with batting gloves without creating a new listing and UPC.

Do you see the beauty of this?

Setting Up Your First Virtual Bundle

Here’s another great thing about virtual bundles. You can combine variations from your listing together.

To create an Amazon virtual bundle go to https://sellercentral.amazon.com/bundles/create/ref=xx_vb_dnav_xx, follow these steps:

1. Select the two or more products you want to include in your virtual bundle. The first product you choose is where the bundle is appear. The virtual bundle will not appear on the other products.
2. Select your images.
3. Set the title, bullet points, description and SKU for your virtual bundle: Make sure to include relevant keywords.  The price for your virtual bundle, cheaper than if they were to buy those items separately.

Submit and that’s all you need to do to create a virtual bundle on Amazon.

Stepping Up Your Game With Virtual Bundles

1. Take it one step further, download your Category Listing Report and optimize your backend listing.
2. Put some advertising behind it. 
3. Pair up best sellers with new items to get traction.
4. If you do this right, you'll start seeing your products in the "Frequently Bought Together" section.

With this new feature, you can offer your customers a convenient and cost-effective way to purchase your products without the need to physically bundle them together.