How Kitting Can Create Efficiency and Drastically Reduce Costs in Your Ecommerce Store
If you are running an eCommerce business, you might understand how invaluable it is to optimize your operational efficiency. Kitting might be what you need to achieve exactly that. When you incorporate kitting in your competitive strategy, it becomes easier to meet individual customer's needs, especially during the holiday season.?
Clients are looking to find a more convenient way of picking gifts, saving money, and time. Kitting can be an invaluable way of offloading inventory while appealing to clients and keeping their loyalty.
What is product kitting? If you have ever bought an entertainment system, you might have an idea of kitting. Instead of purchasing individual components-the TV set, speakers, woofer, and the DVD Player, you might have bought the whole system. Kitting involves grouping related items, parts, and components together as a single SKU.?
Let’s look at why you need kitting.
Benefits of Kitting in Your Business
If your sales are dwindling, kitting might be the ticket. When you offer clients the option to purchase kits, you encourage them to buy in bulk. Their reward is a quantity discount. Your gain is bulk sales and reduced shipping expenses.?
Kitting can help you:
Kitting can reduce packaging and distribution costs
Sometimes, you can cut your distribution costs drastically by utilizing kitting. You can achieve this in many ways. However, begin by analyzing your customer's buying behaviors. Kitting is more appropriate for products or items customers often buy together or in bundles.
For instance, if your business deals in office supplies, you might notice a buying habits pattern. Maybe customers often order a stapler, a legal pad, a paper punch, and a staple remover together. You can preassemble all the items in readiness for ordering and shipment as one unit.
Consider a scenario where you ship individual items separately. You’ll need a wrapper, box, or label for each item. You’ll also need sufficient infill for each item to avoid denting, chipping, or breaking during shipment. Such factors can significantly increase your order fulfillment costs.
Kitting also makes the order weigh less, and it lowers pick-and-pack expenses.
kitting saves time and offers convenience to clients.
During a busy holiday season, kitting can be a massive relief to buyers who have limited time for shopping. For instance, if your regular client needs a range of bath products, bundling them in a kit saves them time. Your business expertise will help you include all the essential items in the kit. Your client can then click only once, making it easy for them to order.
You can offer kits of products in pre-set colors, quantities, and mixes. It often makes a beautiful gift set.?
For instance, a buyer might want to give a brilliant gift to his aunt. She adores knitting, but he doesn’t have a clue about knitting. He knows green is her favorite color. This information can help him buy his aunt one of your lovely green sweater kits, offering him convenience. Your expert advice can also help him make the right choice.?
Kitting helps to offload slow-moving inventory.
Kitting is an excellent way of getting rid of slow-moving stock. Just add any products you need to offload into a kit with fast-moving complementary or related goods and watch the inventory disappear.
You can also assemble seasonal kits for special periods like holiday seasons. For such scenarios, offer a discount on the kit, which entices customers to go with the bundle rather than buying individual items.
If you need customers to try a new product, kitting is invaluable. Bundle popular products with the one you need to introduce to your buyers. It is the most comfortable and cheapest method of introducing something new to your patrons.
You can save on labor and space using kitting.
Kitting makes your warehouse look streamlined and organized. When you implement it properly, you drastically reduce the need to generate much space-consuming SKUs.
For instance, when your employees need to assemble an order, kitting reduces the stress of locating all the necessities. They're located in one place and not scattered all over your warehouse. You can use the created space for other vital operations.
The organized working environment saves space, increases efficiencies, and helps lower labor costs. It also reduces cases of workplace accidents. Moreover, the created space eliminates the need to undertake expensive workplace expansion projects. All this saves you money.??
Products that often need kitting
If you haven’t started implementing kitting in your eCommerce business, you can begin your kitting journey with products that include:
Types of kitting
If you’re planning to add kitting to your business, you need to know the right way to implement it. Here are the standard methods of kitting used today.?
Packed-to-order sets
Some clients love the opportunity to select their preferred pre-packed sets. You can buddle products of different colors, quantities, or mix. Clients can order their preferred kits without having to assemble them personally. It makes buying more convenient, faster, and straightforward.?
You can add a discount on larger kits to entice clients to purchase large quantities.
领英推荐
Subscription boxes
The market for subscription boxes has grown tremendously in the recent past. A subscription box is a single package containing various products that you deliver to clients often at regular intervals. You can allow your clients to customize the kit or surprise them with your selection.
This method of selling kits can be a goldmine once you get a significant number of monthly subscribers. It gives your business a steady flow of income.
Assembled products
Kitting can also be invaluable for large items. For instance, you can ship a product like a bike in individual parts bundled together as a single kit.
If you have insufficient workers or equipment to sell pre-assembled items, selling individual parts to form the whole product can be helpful in a single kit.
You can use kitting to offer your clients the option of buying different versions of the same item.?
For example, you can propose two kits: one containing standard parts, and another having upgraded features. It enables you to appeal to clients of diverse demographics.
Personalized items
Sometimes, it is more logical to run an on-demand kitting. If you are making customized furniture, such as a chair, with engraved, personalized materials, you can consider the service as a personalized kit. This kitting method also helps you track each material used.
Whether you implement on-demand kitting or pre-pack kitting, you can automate frequent material or product combinations. It significantly cuts down your order fulfillment service expenses.
Gift sets
If your company sends branded gifts to patrons, kitting can help you put them together. For instance, if you need to send an Easter “thank you” to several contacts, product bundling can be instrumental. Your sales team can order what the contacts want, and utilize kitting with a touch of class—for instance, gift-wrap the bundle nicely and include branded tissue paper—to wow the recipient.
Kitting management techniques for eCommerce operations
If you can manage your inventory correctly, it is easy to achieve success in order fulfillment. An efficiently managed store needs to have all the necessities for kitting. You need all parts of the kit in the inventory to assemble a full kit ready for shipment.
Kitting makes it easy to combine packing processes with inventory tracking. You can manage to kit in three main ways:
In-house kitting
If your company is still small, implementing kitting processes by yourself can be the best option. It gives you more control over operations and service quality. You’ll know the exact quantity of resources needed to fulfill orders, and you also work at your own pace.?
Moreover, when you outsource kitting processes to 3PLs, they might insist on using their packaging. You can lose contact with your clients.
The best thing about in-house kitting is that you acquire hands-on experience. Even if you have to use a 3PL for your kitting needs, later on, you’ll know what your company needs to thrive.
Third-party fulfillment center
In-house kitting might work well for small firms. However, it can be time-consuming, expensive, and distracting. Your business can develop at a speed where it can’t keep up with its kitting needs. Here are some reasons you might need to outsource your product kitting needs to a third party fulfillment center:?
Producers and manufacturers
You can specialize in products from the same producer or manufacturer if they can kit your items. Most manufactures provide custom boxes, wraps, and labels at no added cost.
Tips for improving customer satisfaction using kitting
Do you need help with kitting?
Hook Logistics offers excellent kitting services, with no confusing fees or surprise charges, as part of our fulfillment services. Our E-Commerce fulfillment services include:?
Call +1 978 961 3273 or email [email protected] to get in touch with our kitting experts. We will answer your kitting questions and help you find the best fulfillment solutions that can address your unique needs.?