Behind The Bundles
What shoppers see vs. what ops teams deal with
Bundling should be simple. A complete outfit. A curated gift set. A way to nudge up AOV and create a better customer experience.
While bundling starts as a front-end idea, the impact runs much deeper. Into inventory, forecasting, ERP logic, merchandising workflows, and finance reporting. And when it’s not designed with those systems in mind, it becomes one of the most frustrating operational headaches in the business.
What shoppers see vs. what ops teams deal with
To the customer, it’s just a well-merchandised set.
To the ops team, it’s:
6 SKUs, each with its own size, colour, category, and cost
A discount that has to be logically distributed across those SKUs
Forecasting that breaks unless bundles are unpacked
Manual exceptions in an ERP that never really understood bundling in the first place
And when the customer selects a size that’s out of stock in one item? The whole bundle becomes unsellable. Even if the other five items are sitting in the warehouse.
We’ve seen brands tie themselves in knots
One brand was managing bundles via a spreadsheet with tens of thousands of rows. Every variant, every size, manually mapped. They wanted to automate the logic into their ERP, but the ERP wasn’t the problem. The structure of the bundles was.
Another was selling sets online that had no operational logic or pricing incentive. From a customer point of view, it was a nice layout. Internally? A manually maintained nightmare. No one really knew why they were doing it.
Then there was the brand that treated bundles as a merchandising trick, something that existed on the front end but had no connection to actual inventory or margin tracking. Sales looked good. Forecasting was chaos.
Why bundling becomes a problem
Because it usually starts with the question: How do we make this easier for the customer?
What often doesn’t get asked is: What happens behind the scenes when we do this?
Bundles, sets, kits, whatever you call them, have real implications:
Your ERP probably doesn’t track them as native products
Your merchandisers probably care more about the components than the set
Your reports probably aren’t built to show bundle-level performance
Your tech team probably wasn’t consulted when you started doing it
And the longer the workaround sticks, the harder it is to untangle.
There is no one-size-fits-all answer
Some bundles are pre-packed and shipped as a kit. Others are customisable, built dynamically at checkout. Some brands use them for value. Others for convenience. Some want them reported on. Others don’t.
The important thing is to know which type of bundle you’re building, and whether your systems are actually set up to support it.
For most brands, that means letting bundles live in the front end, where they can remain flexible and easy to update. It means using apps or integrations to manage how discounts apply and how SKUs behave, without hard-coding logic into your ERP. And it means ensuring that your ERP and planning tools are still able to track performance at the component level, so you’re not left guessing what actually sold.
In short: don’t make your ERP do what it was never designed to do.
Final thought
Bundling is not just a merchandising decision. It’s a system-wide commitment. Done right, it creates real value. Done badly, it becomes a layer of complexity that no one owns, but everyone ends up firefighting.
So if you’re building bundles, don’t just ask what the customer will see. Ask what the finance team will report on. What the ops team will forecast. What the merch team will analyse. And whether the tech team will thank you or hate you for it.
That’s where the real bundle logic begins.