Imagine owning a traditional apparel business in a mall.  Your main entrance is intricately decorated with attractive products.  Glass displays are sparkling clean with sales and specials prominently displayed for visitors to see upon entrance.  In essence, you’ve created an attractive Meatball Mondae bundle – designed to unfold in a linear fashion as customers experience your business.  While this approach might work in an old fashioned mall – I wouldn’t recommend it with an online business.  Early in my online retail career – before I learned about website analytics – visions of online customers politely entering my store through a professional looking homepage dominated my dreams.  The visions were always the same – customers would land on my homepage – see the great products offered, BBB credentials, website security, etc. – then proceed directly to the product and checkout pages.  Unfortunately, this dream was rarely coming true.  I soon learned that many of my customers weren’t even seeing my homepage.  They were searching for specific products – finding my store in the SERPs – and proceeding directly to the product of interest.  The bundle I had carefully crafted wasn’t being unbundled like I had imagined.  This revelation led to some adjustments on my part.  Each page of the store would need to be treated as a potential “first impression” – each page would need to be a marketing element on its own. 

After making some adjustments to accommodate this asymmetric customer behavior – my sales approximately doubled.  As Seth points out – bundles are becoming a thing of the past.  No longer can you expect a potential customer to walk into your online store in a “normal” fashion.  You’ve got to unbundle your bundle, unbundle your thinking and adjust your online business to accommodate information specific customer behavior - treating every page of the site as if it’s the only page a customer might see before the checkout page.