Let's talk about Product Bundling & Shopify

Natalie Miller
Natalie Miller
November 18 · 12 min read
image of woman packing an order of bundles to signify bundles as a form of sales for online sales

Shopify is one of the greatest and most dynamic E-Commerce platforms out there.

They have proven time and time again that they are an E-Commerce platform that businesses can rely on. They are user-friendly in their set-up. Whether you are going with any of their five plans, be it their basic plan, advanced plan or their most agile plan with Shopify Plus etc. Shopify offers all the support you need.

Oh, and have we mentioned that their support is 24/7? Extremely helpful for those 2am quick website changes you want to make to your Shopify store.

Part of being successful with your online store is making the right offerings to your customers through this platform of choice.

In times of rising ad prices and thus rising customer acquisition costs, many store owners are seeking opportunities to raise the value of their carts and increase average order value. One of the premier ways to do this is by offering bundles, yet Shopify doesn’t offer a native bundling feature.

Fortunately, Shopify is a platform that also allows you to incorporate apps into your website, which gives you more freedom and flexibility in your offering to your customers. At the end of the day, we all know that the experience that a customer has with you is king, so you will want to ensure that their time spent on your website is as seamless as possible.

You want to offer customers the option to purchase bundles, as this allows you to potentially boost sales and in turn boost revenue.

When it comes to Bundle Building, you need to think of two main things to start, namely apps and marketing.

Why do we say this? Well, because it’s through an app that you will be able to build Shopify bundles, and choosing to offer bundle selling options is a specific marketing strategy for your business. Selling products through the product bundle strategy is a way to entice customers.

The Benefits of Product Bundles

Let’s make sure we’re all on the same page here and start with explaining what product bundling is:

Product bundling is when multiple products are bundled together and sold for a single price as a single product, even though there are multiple products in that single product. It’s a marketing strategy to gain in sales and revenue whilst simultaneously increasing customer satisfaction.

It’s a clever way of getting customers to purchase more, as they will think that they are scoring on a deal. It's a true and tested upselling strategy that businesses have used for ages to increase sales.

If you offer bundles, and really try to create valuable bundles for your customers to buy, then you encourage customers to support your Shopify store and boost sales. You can sell the same bundle countless times.

Why would you do this? What are the benefits of product bundling for your business? Why should you display bundles?

  • You will sell more products
  • Visibility to introduce new products
  • Better ROI on marketing expenses
  • Clear excess stock
  • Customers will be more inclined to try new products
  • You can be smart about which products you include in the bundle offering

The above are important points that we’d like to dive into a bit more, as we feel that this will help you better understand why product bundling is so clever and beneficial to your bottom line.

Key factors to consider when bundling products

You will sell more products

This is logical. If you offer a single price for three products where that single price is lower than if the customer were to buy all three products individually, then of course a customer will want to take advantage of that discount and therefore buy three products instead of only buying one or two single items.

Introduce new products

You can create a bundle that is made up of two products, one being the lead product that you know is frequently bought and the other being a non-primary product that is new to your range. This will allow you to showcase the newer product to your customers, which will increase this product's visibility, as customers wouldn’t necessarily research this product as they wouldn’t know it exists.

And it allows customers to get their hands on top-selling products or some of your customers favorite picks, which they were going to add to their cart anyway!

Better ROI for marketing expenses through higher average order value

With bundles, your cart value will typically increase, greatly impacting the AOV KPI (average order value) of your store. Thus, your marketing efforts will be more efficient, as you earn more from the customers you acquired through paid advertising.

Moreover, if your cart value increases regularly, you increase sales regularly too. Nice how that one plays out.

Clear excess stock

This is the one area that customers are slightly afraid or negatively affected by. You should not overuse this power. The point of selling excess stock is not to cheat your customers, but instead look for a mutually beneficial way of clearing over-ordered products, or products that did not sell as well as you had hoped, whilst offering your clients a great product at a great price.

Customers will be more inclined to try new products

Think about when you go shopping. If you’re being offered a deal on putting together a few products and therefore receiving a ‘discount’ on that, you will be more likely to purchase an item that you otherwise would not have bought, as it’s coming at a discounted price.

Who says no to a discount? No one!

Create product bundles that are beneficial for your customers and that can save them a penny or two.

You can be smart about which products you include in the bundle offering

We’re convinced that you have some products in your offering that aren’t as popular as other products, the ones that aren't as frequently bought, but that you’d love to sell because they have the highest profit margins.

The ultimate whole package bundle type

Right, let's get to it!

Put all of these high profit margin products into a column/collection and for the sake of this example call in ‘Column A’. Then put all your super popular products between ‘Column B’ and ‘Column C’. Now offer a bundle where a customer can choose one product from each column and get to pay a lower price for this single bundle this way.

It’s a win-win situation. You get to sell a product you otherwise perhaps wouldn’t through ‘Column A’ and the customer gets their amazing and in demand products from ‘Column B’ and ‘Column C’.

Customers do not pay full price for each separate item, there is a discount they receive through purchasing a bundle.

Bundle Strategies

This is a very specific kind of bundling that is called Pure bundling. (You might recognize some of the following tactics from our bundling benefits above.)

It is the act of selling particular items exclusively with one another. So, your clients can only get their hands on a product in ‘Column B’ or ‘Column C’ if they buy it along with a product from ‘Column A’.

Pure bundling actually consists of three subcategories, which we will explain below:

Leader bundling

is the act of bundling together one super in demand product with a lesser in demand product. For example, if you are a burger restaurant who has ordered an excess of potatoes that are due to expire.

Instead of losing out on profit by throwing away your soon to expire potatoes, you could offer a bundle on your lead product (burger) and your non-lead product (potato fries) at one low single item price (but actually have two products in there without the customer truly realizing it).

Joint bundling

is simply offering two items together as one bundle.

Mixed-leader bundling

is like leader bundling only; it allows a customer to also buy these products individually too if they prefer. So, either they can pop some items together and pay a lower single price, but also give customers the option of buying these products individually if they are only interested in one or two products and not in the bundle.

Have your bundles options on a dedicated product page which includes all your bundle options to firstly make it easier for your loyal customers to buy and secondly with this easy overview, customers are more likely to purchase, and therefore you can improve sales this way.

How to create Shopify product bundles

Now that we have shown you the benefits of bundling, and how to set up an attractive bundle package on Shopify, we also want to talk about how you can set up bundle selling on your Shopify store.

The easiest way to bundle products on Shopify is to just create a new product that represents the bundle. Then you include all the information about the bundle products included in this package in the description. You can even create variant-based bundles with this, by using Shopifys variant feature. The bundle will then appear as a singular product on the checkout page.

As mentioned in the introduction, there is a major issue with this basic approach to bundling on Shopify. When you set up a bundle product on Shopify, that product will actually include multiple individual products. That’s all good and well for the sales process in your store. Yet, many organizations run into issues when they then need to fulfill the order, as they need to split the individual products within that particular bundle.

There are many reasons for this. First and foremost, someone in their warehouse has to pick up the items from different shelves, then package and ship them. This will be more complicated, if they have to dissect the bundle product on their own.

Additionally, when someone buys a bundle, this also reduces the available number of products that are included in the bundle. Let's say you sell a bundle of razor and shaving cream. The amount of available bundles will, of course, be reduced by one, but at the same time, you also need to reduce the availability of the razor and the shaving cream as individual products by one. This is the slightly more confusing logistical side of offering bundle deals.

That means that there needs to be a process in place that splits a bundle product into individual products included, after the sale has been made and updates product availability. This is where apps come into play.

Another challenge are so-called “bundle builders” that are very popular today. The key features of a bundle builder allow your customers to create their own custom product bundles – typically from a pre-selected range of the items in your catalog. Merchants typically employ measures like quantity breaks, volume discounts, free gifts at certain order amounts and many more creative ideas to incentivize customers to build ever larger bundles.

The bundle builder approach leads to hyper customized bundles with different discounts on every order. It is practically impossible to create each combination and discount code beforehand. Hence, a bundle builder approach requires Shopify stores to dynamically create bundle products right when a customer creates it. You will need a Shopify app to help you do so.

So let's take a look at product bundles apps in the Shopify app store.

Use Bundling Apps to create Bundles

There are loads of apps out there that you can tie into your website to ensure that it’s smooth sailing when it comes to product bundling. The apps typically solve the two big challenges when it comes to bundling:

First, they take care of the whole order and availability processing, we just mentioned above. Second, they also come with the user interface components you need to make different types of bundle scenarios available on your store. There is no specific Shopify product bundles app but there are some that work very well for Shopify merchants. Create bundles easily with the the product bundles apps which we will mention shortly.

Below, we have outlined our Top 10 choices of product bundling apps:

Top 10 Shopify apps for product bundles

All of these bundle apps allow you to sell products through bundles, which means you add product bundle sales channels to your store, where you initially only sold separately. Creating manual bundles are a thing of the past with these useful apps!

Bundle Builder

Bundle Builder

BYOB – Build Your Own Bundles

BYOB – Build Your Own Bundles

Bundler – Product Bundles

Bundler – Product Bundles

Fast Bundle – Product Bundles

Fast Bundle – Product Bundles

Bundles Upsell – PickyStory

Bundles Upsell – PickyStory

Product Bundles – Fast Checkout

Product Bundles: Fast Checkout

Bundles

Bundles

Bundle Bear – Volume Discounts

Bundle Bear – Volume Discounts

Bold Bundles – Product Bundles

Bold Bundles – Product Bundles

Advanced Bundle Products

Advanced Bundle Products

Build a Custom Bundling Solution

Although there are many bundling apps available on the Shopify app store, many of our clients have found certain limitations with them. Even this blog post only scratches the surface of the myriad of options and ways you can come up with when building your own bundle approach, and these apps typically cover only the most basic cases. Even the most dedicated app can only offer key features but can't cover every single demand you might have. App support is important, however, not always all-encompassing.

This is why we have built different custom bundling solutions for our clients over the years, that all work differently to cater towards the specific requirements of these companies and their customers. You are welcome to take a look at the following cases to get an idea how that can look like.

Plants are Purple Bundle Builder

Plants are Purple wanted their customers to be able to build their own bundles and get increasing discounts the more products they added to the bundle, which worked like volume discounts and feels like an automatic discount for customers. This approach to bundle products helped Plants are Purple to increase their average order value massively.

You can check out their custom bundle builder here.

LesLunes' pre-configured fashion bundles

As a fashion brand,LesLunesbundles are pre-configured sets that create a certain look. Here, one of the challenges was to let customers pick their size and favorite color for each item in the bundle out of their existing products.

Take a look at how we solved it in their store.

Conclusion

It is clear to see that there are great reasons to explore product bundling. Yes, it will require some research on your part between the very many bundle apps on the market until you find the one that does all that you need.

And yes, potentially you may need to develop a custom solution for the perfect bundling experience for your customers. It will also mean that you need to incorporate this type of sales process into your sales funnels and into your marketing strategy, as it touches on each of these points.

But in the end, in every case we experienced with our clients, the introduction of bundling has led to an increase in AOV and overall revenue.

Depending on which app you go for and how advanced your Shopify plan is, you will either be able to pull off doing this by yourself or you may need an agency to create this bundle option for you. Especially if you want (or need) to go with a custom bundle, should you have very specific requirements for how you want your bundle to work.

Should you wish to contact us to build a bundle for you, please do not hesitate to contact us on hello@especial.digital or via our contact form here on our website.

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Natalie Miller
Written by

Natalie Miller

Marketing Manager

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