Which eSIM packages to sell

Why a full catalog sells less

The day your provider account is approved you can see every package they sell — two hundred destinations, a dozen sizes each, several validities, regional and global bundles on top. The natural instinct is to import the lot: more choice, more chances to sell. It is the wrong instinct, and the reason is what a traveller does on a page with fourteen options for one country.

They leave. Not always, but often enough to matter, and more often on a phone at an airport than at a desk. A traveller wants to be told which one to buy, by a store that seems to know. Three sizes for a destination, with the middle one clearly the sensible default, outsells fourteen — and it is three prices to keep honest instead of fourteen, three answers to support instead of fourteen, and three rows you can actually look at when the wholesale cost moves.

A catalog is a set of promises about what you understand. Every package you list is one you should be able to say something true about: which network, what a week of it is really like, who it is for. If you cannot, hide it.

The shelf: destinations, sizes, durations

Build the catalog in three passes, in this order. Each one cuts the list before the next begins.

Destinations

Start from where your customers go, not from where the provider has coverage. If your audience is Turkish travellers, that is a short list dominated by a handful of European countries, the Gulf, and the long-haul favourites; if it is inbound tourists to Turkey, it is one country and the regional bundle around it. Ten destinations you know cold, with a page each, beat two hundred you have never been to. Lead the storefront with the six that account for most of your orders — the featured destinations exist for exactly this — and let the rest be found by search on the store.

Sizes

A traveller using maps, messaging, a few photos and an hour of social media a day consumes somewhere around half a gigabyte to a gigabyte daily; video and hotspotting a laptop can triple that. For each destination pick three sizes that map onto a light, a normal and a heavy traveller for the trip lengths you actually sell — say 3, 5 and 10 gigabytes for a week — and make the middle one the default. The sizes above and below exist to make the middle one look right, which is not a trick; it is how people choose.

Durations

Validity matters less than travellers think and more than providers say. A seven-day package bought for a five-day trip is fine; a seven-day package bought for a ten-day trip is a support ticket on day eight. Offer the durations your trips actually take — a week and a fortnight for holidays, thirty days for the long stays and the students — and say plainly on the page that the clock starts on first connection, not at purchase. That one sentence removes a whole class of questions.

Unlimited, regional and global packages

Three kinds of package behave differently from a plain country-and-gigabytes one, in ways that affect both who buys them and what you earn.

The general rule: list a package whose terms you have read and can explain in one sentence to a customer. Unlimited packages in particular are where a reseller who did not read the fair-use terms discovers them, from a customer, on day three.

Pricing the shelf, not the package

Once the shelf is chosen, price it as a shelf. A single markup over cost is the right starting point and the right thing to keep for most of the catalog, because it follows the wholesale price when that moves. But a handful of packages deserve a fixed price, and the choice of which is a margin decision.

• The default size for your top destinations should land on a price that reads well — a round number, or just under one — even if that means a fixed price a little above or below the markup. It is the price most customers will see and compare.
• The smallest size can carry a higher percentage than the shelf: the absolute price is low, the customer is price-insensitive at that level, and it protects you against the packages where wholesale cost is a large share of a small ticket.
• The largest size can carry a lower percentage and still earn more per order than the smallest. Volume buyers compare per-gigabyte prices; make yours look reasonable.
• Top-ups follow the eSIM they load onto. A customer who is already yours and already connected is not comparing prices; a fair markup here is repeat revenue you did nothing to acquire.

Whatever you fix, check it against cost on a schedule. A fixed price does not move when the wholesale price does, and the failure is silent until it is a package selling at a loss — or, on a platform that refuses to save a price below cost, a package that quietly stops being sellable.

Reviewing the catalog every quarter

A catalog set once and never revisited drifts: destinations your customers stopped visiting, packages the provider repriced, a new regional bundle that would have replaced three country ones. A quarterly hour keeps it honest.

1. Sort your orders by destination for the quarter. Anything with no sales in two quarters goes hidden, not deleted — you can bring it back if somebody asks.
2. For each of your top destinations, compare the three sizes you sell against what customers actually bought. If everyone buys the largest, your sizes are too small for your audience; move the shelf up.
3. Re-read the cost column against every fixed price and every package whose wholesale price your provider has changed. Adjust or release back to the markup.
4. Look at what your provider has added since last quarter — new destinations, new bundles, changed fair-use terms on the unlimited packages you sell — and read the terms before listing anything new.
5. Check your support inbox for the packages that generated questions. A package that needs explaining every time it sells needs a better page or needs to go.

On Esimbit the shelf is the Catalog & pricing screen: every package your connected providers offer, with its cost, your price, a visibility switch, and a fixed price you can set or release per row. Hiding a package removes it from the store without losing its history, and the store lists whatever is visible — so curating the shelf is a matter of switches rather than deletions.

• Setting your eSIM markup →
• Top-ups: the second eSIM sale →
• What you sell, and for how much →