Kits (sell several products as one)

A kit is a product that contains other products. A gift box with a bottle of wine and two glasses, a starter set, a bundle of three soaps. You sell it as one item at one price, and Brainerce works out the stock from what's inside.

A kit is priced like any other product: a price, and a sale price if you want one. If you would rather the contents suggested the number, there is a button that works out a percentage off what the parts cost and fills it in for you. Either way the kit ends up with a price of its own that you can see and edit. See Pricing a kit below.

Kits are a product type, like Simple and Variable. A kit has its own product page, its own web address, its own photos and its own SEO, and customers can find it in search and in your categories.

Kits vs bundle offers vs discount rules

These three sound alike and do completely different jobs. Picking the wrong one is the most common mistake here.

A kit is the only one of the three that is a real product. A bundle offer and a discount rule are promotions on top of products you already sell. They have no product page, and customers can't search for them.

Creating a kit

1. Go to Products and click Add product.
2. Set the type to Kit.
3. Fill in the name, photos and description as you would for any product.
4. Type a price in Base Price. It's required before you can save, the same as for a simple product. You can change it later without leaving the contents dialog, so don't agonise over it now.
5. Save, then open the kit and add the products it contains.
6. While you're in the contents, set the price properly. Now that the kit has something in it, the dialog shows what those parts cost and how your price compares. This is the moment to decide the number, or to let Fill in the price work it out from a percentage. See Pricing a kit.

A brand-new kit is empty, and an empty kit cannot be bought. It's saved and you can keep editing it, but customers can't add it to the basket until it has at least one product inside. Add the contents before you tell anyone about it.

An empty kit shows no price on your shop. Not a price of zero, and not the number you typed in Base Price: no price at all. That's deliberate, so an unfinished kit can never be sold for nothing while you're still building it. The price appears once there's something inside.

Choosing what's inside

For each product you add to the kit, set how many of it the kit contains. A kit with two glasses has that glass with a quantity of 2.

If a product you're adding has variants (sizes, colours), you must pick which one the kit includes. A kit contains one specific bottle, not "a bottle in some size", because otherwise there'd be no way to know what to take off the shelf when one sells. If you want to offer a choice, make a separate kit for each option.

⛔ Swapping in a dearer item does not change what the kit charges. The kit goes on charging the number you typed, and you have to update it yourself. The dialog will tell you: the line under the price recalculates as soon as the contents change, so a saving that has shrunk, or turned into a loss, is visible before you close the dialog. See Pricing a kit.

A kit cannot contain another kit. Add the individual products instead.

Pricing a kit

A kit is priced exactly like a simple product: a Price, and an optional Sale price. Both sit in the kit's contents dialog, beside what's inside it, so you can see what the parts cost while you decide what the whole should cost.

Under the price you'll see how the two compare, live as you type:

Saves the customer ₪23.90 · 11.8%. Against ₪202.90, what the contents cost.

That line is the point of the screen. A kit exists to be worth buying as a set, and this is the only place that tells you whether it still is.

Letting the contents suggest a price

Type a percentage in Price it from the contents and press Fill in the price. It works out that much off what the parts cost and writes the result into the Price field.

It fills the number in once, and then lets go. Afterwards the kit has a price of its own like any other product: you can edit it by hand, and repricing something inside the kit will not move it. What does change is the line above, which will show the saving shrinking or turning into a loss.

Watch out: a fixed price doesn't follow its contents

Put a bottle on sale, raise a price, swap one product for a dearer one, and the kit goes on charging exactly what you typed. Nothing warns you by email or on the products table. What you get instead is that comparison line in the contents dialog: open the kit and it tells you immediately whether the price still makes sense, and says "above the contents cost" in amber if the kit has become more expensive than buying the same items separately.

Get in the habit of opening the contents dialog after you change any price, and re-running Fill in the price to restore the saving you meant to offer.

Where did the pricing mode selector go?

Kits used to offer three pricing modes here: a fixed price, "what the contents cost", and "contents, less a discount". Only the fixed price remains in the dashboard, because the other two took the price away from you: neither could be typed, edited, or seen in the products table, and a kit on one of them showed no price anywhere you would think to look.

The percentage did not go away, it became a button. Price it from the contents does the same arithmetic and hands you the answer instead of keeping it.

A kit already on one of those modes keeps working exactly as before. Nothing was migrated behind your back and no prices changed. Open its contents and you will see which mode it is on, plus a Switch to a fixed price button that fills in what the kit charges today. Shoppers see no change; you get the number back.

For a scheduled promotion across many kits at once, "20% off all gift boxes this week", use discount rules rather than editing each kit. Rules have start and end dates, priorities and conditions; a price typed here has none of those and has to be typed back afterwards.

Stock: kits don't have their own

A kit has no stock number of its own, and you can't type one. This is deliberate, and it's the part merchants ask about most.

Stock comes from the contents. The price is yours. The number of kits you can sell is worked out from what's inside and you can never type it. The price is the opposite: you set it, and it stays where you put it until you change it. See Pricing a kit.

How many kits you can sell is worked out from what's inside. If a gift box needs one bottle and two glasses, and you have 10 bottles and 6 glasses, you can sell 3 kits, because the glasses run out first.

That means:

• Selling a kit takes the contents off the shelf, not the kit.
• Selling a bottle on its own reduces how many kits you can sell.
• If any product inside runs out, the kit shows as out of stock, even if everything else is in stock.
• You'll see the same product's stock going down from two directions. That's correct, because there's only one shelf.

Tax on a kit

If the things inside a kit are taxed at different rates, the kit's price is split between them in proportion and each part is taxed at its own rate. A kit containing a zero-rated item and a standard-rated item is not taxed at one blended rate, and your tax report shows the correct amount under each rate.

Any tax class set on the kit product itself is not used when the kit sells. The contents decide the tax.

The contents' own prices are what decides the split: whatever the kit charges is divided between them in the same proportion as their own prices. Whether those prices also decide what the kit charges is a separate question, and it depends on the pricing mode. On Fixed price they don't, and the kit goes on charging the number you typed. On What the contents cost and Contents, less a discount they do. See Pricing a kit.

Refunds and returns

You can refund part of a kit. When you do, the products that came back go onto the shelf individually, and the kit doesn't reappear as a kit. If a customer keeps the wine and returns the glasses, you get the glasses back and the wine stays sold.

The order keeps a record of what each item inside the kit was charged, after any discount on the order, so you can see what a single item in the kit was worth rather than guessing from today's prices. You still type the refund amount yourself, as you do for any refund.

Check the amount if your prices include tax. The per-item figure recorded on the order is the price before tax when your store adds tax at checkout, so refunding exactly that figure gives the customer back less than they paid. Add the tax back on, or refund the whole line.

What kits don't do

Worth knowing before you plan around them:

• Customers can't build their own kit. You decide what's inside. There is no "pick any 3" box for shoppers.
• A kit can't contain another kit.
• A kit can't have variants. No "small gift box / large gift box" on one kit product. Make two kits instead.
• You can't type a stock number for a kit. It always comes from the contents, whichever pricing mode the kit is on.
• You can't set a price per contents slot. A component is included at its own selling price, and you can't override that price just for this kit. What you can do is pick a pricing mode: fixed, contents, or contents less a percentage. See Pricing a kit.
• You can't mix modes across one kit. One kit is priced one way, all of it.
• A kit's price doesn't follow a discount rule or a coupon on its contents. The contents-based modes follow a component's own price and sale price, not promotions that apply at the cart.
• Kits are not sent to Google or Meta shopping feeds. The products inside are sent as normal; the kit itself is not listed yet.
• A kit can't be added to a manual order you create in the dashboard yet. Add the individual products instead.
• A kit doesn't survive a CSV export and re-import. The export file does carry columns for the pricing mode and for what's inside, which makes it look like a round trip should work. It doesn't: no import reads those columns. Bring the same file back in and the kit returns as an ordinary simple product, priced at whatever the price column held, with nothing inside it and no warning that anything was lost. Export a kit for reporting, not as a backup you plan to restore from, and build kits on the product page. See Import products from a CSV.

Changing a kit later

You can change what's inside a kit whenever you like. Changes affect future orders only. Orders already placed keep a record of exactly what was in the kit when it was bought, so refunds and picking lists stay correct even if you change the recipe afterwards.

Whether changing the contents changes the price depends on the pricing mode. Check the mode before you edit the recipe:

• Fixed price: it does not. Swapping a $10 item for a $30 one leaves the kit selling at the old price, and taking an item out doesn't make it any cheaper. Update the kit's Base Price in the same visit, otherwise the new recipe goes on selling at the price the old one had. The same is true when a component's own price changes without you touching the kit at all.
• What the contents cost and Contents, less a discount: it does, and immediately. Adding a $30 item raises the kit price by $30 the next time anyone loads the page, and there is nothing to update by hand. That is the point of those modes, but it does mean a careless edit reprices a live product, so change the recipe when you're happy for the price to move with it.

See Pricing a kit for how to check and change the mode.

You can't delete a product that's currently inside a kit. Take it out of the kit first, then delete it. The error names the kits the product is in, so you know exactly where to look.

The same goes for a single variation. If a kit contains one specific variation, say the 500ml bottle rather than the bottle in general, that variation can't be deleted while the kit holds it.

Deleting several at once is all or nothing. Select twenty products where one of them sits inside a kit and the whole delete is refused: none of the twenty go. You're told which products are the problem and which kits hold them, so either deselect those or empty the kits first. Kits you selected are not a problem in themselves. Deleting a kit together with the products inside it works in one go, because the kits are removed before their contents.

Switching a kit back to a simple product is only possible once you've removed everything inside it. A kit can't be turned into a variable product, or the other way round.

You also can't turn an ordinary product into a kit while another kit contains it, because that would put a kit inside a kit. Take it out of the kits that hold it first. The message names them.

Unpublishing a product stops every kit that contains it

Setting a product to Draft takes it off sale everywhere, and that includes inside kits. Every kit containing it immediately shows as out of stock and customers can't buy it, even when everything else in the kit is fully in stock, and even when the kit's own status is still Active.

This is not a stock problem, so adding stock won't fix it. Publish the product again, or open the kit and take that item out. Nothing warns you at the moment you unpublish, and the kit's page doesn't say which item caused it, so check the contents when a kit goes unsellable for no obvious reason.

You also can't add an unpublished product to a kit in the first place. Saving is refused and names the product. The same check runs when you edit a kit that already contains one, over the whole contents list rather than just the row you touched, so you'll need to publish that product or remove it before any other change to that kit will save.