Suggestive Selling

In this week’s lesson we were asked to read a paper about suggestive selling. I found the article to be really informative, and provided me with some ideas that I want to implement in my own business for the $100 challenge. One of the techniques of suggestive selling is bundling items. When you bundle items you combine related products and offer them to your customers as a package deal that is cheaper than if they purchased the items individually. 

In an effort to get customers to make a larger purchase than they may have originally planned on, I am going to bundle my hot chocolate mix bags for the $100 challenge. Each bag of hot chocolate mix sells for $5. However, if a customer would like to purchase 2 bags I will sell it to them for $8. Any additional bag will also only be $3. I think this is a really smart idea because without it I don’t know that I would get many of my customers to purchase more than one bag of mix. The additional revenue is worth discounting the price of my product by a little.

$100 Challenge Update – Carolyn’s Cocoa Cups

This week I purchased the necessary ingredients to make the first batch of hot chocolate mix. I also started working on making the logo for my business as well as creating the packaging. My original plan was to sell the hot chocolate mix in little plastic treat bags with enough mix in each bag to make three cups of cocoa. However, after giving it some more thought, I realized that my competitors (Swiss Miss, Nestle, Land O’ Lakes) package their hot chocolate mix in single servings. So I purchased small plastic containers that fit one serving size worth of mix in each container. I plan on putting three of these plastic containers in each plastic bag. Deciding to change the packaging costs me an additional $0.20 per bag, but I think this additional cost will be worth it in the end.  I also decided to change the name of my business from Carolyn’s Cocoa to Carolyn’s Cocoa Cups to reflect the change in packaging.