A craft kit is a pricing sandwich: it must cost less than buying its components separately (or why bundle?) while earning more per order than selling them separately (or why bother?). The good news: both sides of that sandwich are just arithmetic on numbers you already have.
The cost of a DIY kit
- Components (bundled): about $3.60
- Printed instructions: about $0.35
- Kit box: about $0.90
$4.85 per kit: $19 retail is a 74% margin. The same components sold as singles would gross about $24.50 across several orders, so the $19 kit undercuts the pile by 22% while collapsing five purchase decisions into one. That's the convenience trade, priced.
Instructions are a component
The kit's real product is a successful project, and the instructions carry that promise. Well-written, tested instructions cost design time once and print cents forever; amortize the design work across the kit's expected run like any setup cost. Kits with great instructions get reviews; reviews sell kits.
The formula for kits
- Components at landed cost + instructions + box + assembly minutes + margin
- Ceiling: the components' separate total. The kit must beat it visibly
- Floor: your margin target, markup and margin on the bundle, not the parts
- Shared stock warning: kits draw the same components you sell as singles. One count, or the bestseller kit quietly sells out the singles too
Kit pricing mistakes to avoid
- Pricing above the parts' sum: a bundle that costs more than DIY-ing the bundle is a rebellion waiting
- Free instructions: the design work is the kit's soul; amortize it
- Assembly at zero: kitting is minutes per unit, times every unit
- Separate counts for kit and single stock: scale needs one inventory feeding both
Components counted, every box costed: Keepsel for craft supply sellers keeps the pieces you also sell on their own as products, and from the Maker plan a product can use other products as its components, so the box you sell is priced from the true cost of what goes in it. Build its price in the free pricing calculator.