Why are many of the bundles more expensive than the sum of the books within it?
There are 17 PF2e books I don’t have, because they came out after I received the Ultimate Bundle.
The price to update my Ultimate Bundle is listed as $261.63.
If I instead add the 17 books individually, my cart totals $261.22.
That’s not a big deal in itself, just weird. Maybe the convenience of updating the collection with a single button is worth $0.41?
More concerning is that the smaller bundles are significant;y more expensive than the sum of their parts.
• I’m not missing any of the pre-remaster books in the “Rulebooks Bundle”, yet the price for that bundle is listed as $99.48.
• The price of the Lost Omens Bundle is $195.13, but the only book I’m missing from that group is “Lost Omens: Tian Xia World Guide” which is $29.99 alone.
• The “Standalone Adventures Bundle” is $3.38. I’m only missing " Beginner Box Adventure", which comes out slightly worse individually, at $3.74.
• “Wardens of the Wildwood Bundle” is $68.97, while the books within it total $51.72 unbundled.
• “Strength of Thousands Bundle” = $137.94 & unbundled total = $ $103.44.
Much of the discrepancy is due to the ~25% discount that comes from having the Ultimate Bundle, but there are some cases which that doesn’t explain, and why would the discount be applied to the individual books while the bundled collections don’t? I’m not expecting to stack discounts, just wondering why the set would be more expensive than the total added separately. The Ultimate discount also doesn’t explain why the store wants to charge me for a bundle when I already have all the books in it.
Obviously, I can work around the strangeness, but I didn’t expect to need to. It seems like there are errors in tracking which books I already have, as well as inconsistent application of the discount.
Since we’ve made it a priority to provide “previously purchased content credit,” that comes with some complexities that can sometimes be confusing (which is I think a big part of the reason that hardly any companies out there tackle the problem and often force re-buying when it comes to this sort of thing). Looking at the bigger picture, we determined the huge benefits outweigh the potential confusion, but I can provide some context.
The discrepancy between bundles are fairly simple to explain - all bundles are groupings of individual books, not other bundles or including other bundles.
So the Ultimate Bundle is made up of all the individual Pathfinder books. It isn’t made up of the Rulebooks Bundle, Remastered Rulebooks Bundle, Lost Omens Bundle, Standalone Adventures Bundle, etc.
Looking at one of the “lower tier” bundles doesn’t do anything for you when it comes to the Ultimate Bundle. The Ultimate Bundle is the only bundle that this applies to, as all the other bundles are mutually exclusive / unique. This doesn’t have any impact, as if you have ever unlocked the Ultimate Bundle, you have locked in the 25% discount forward-looking for any Pathfinder book that ever comes out (so you don’t need the other, lower discount from any other bundle).
As for the few cents discrepancy that buying the Ultimate Bundle at once versus adding the individual books to your cart, that would certainly be rounding happening at different points in the process across a huge number of books. Pathfinder is the only place this would be an issue (since there are I believe hundreds of PF books on the NEXUS at this point).
We’re not terribly worried about a few cents, but we will take a look at some of the rounding order of operations to tighten that up where we can.