Shopify Product Bundles: Definition, Best Practices and Best Examples

Driving new visitors to your store is tough, expensive, and usually takes time, but once you drive the new visitor - the selling art starts - how do you sell as many products as possible to the shopper that you worked so hard to bring in? Shopify product bundles is a great way to accomplish this.

Shopify merchants always look for new ways to increase sales, and specifically the average order value (AOV) in their store. As acquisition costs constantly on the rise, merchants invest more effort in finding new upsell opportunities in their stores to maximize revenue without increasing marketing spend.

Further reading: Hack Your Conversion Rate With This 12-Chapter CRO Guide

One of the oblivious yet most effective ways to increase revenue is Shopify product bundles. As shoppers constantly look for attractive deals, combining complementary or similar products together into one pack is a great way to maximize revenue per shopper while providing an exciting experience.

In this post, we’ll go through definition, best examples and best practices for setting up Shopify product bundles to increase average order value. 

Outlines

• 01. What Are Shopify Product Bundles?
• 02. Why Upselling With Bundles?
• 03. Top 06 Types Of Bundles
• 04. Discounted Shopify Product Bundles
• 05. How To Bundle Items On Shopify
• 06. How To Choose The Best Shopify Product Bundles App
• 07. Creating Shopify Product Bundles: An Easier Solution
• 08. Analyzing Shopify Product Bundles Report
• 09. Shopify Product Bundles Strategies

I. What Are Shopify Product Bundles?

Shopify Product Bundles is an upselling method that offers several individual products for sale as one combined pack or product through a Shopify store.

Bundles are most effective when each product within the bundle sells for less of the amount the customer expected to pay for it. This difference between the expected price and the actual one is called the consumer surplus.

II. Why Upselling With Bundles?

You can sell more products by offering a combination of items that provides a better deal for customers. Customers benefit from the higher value of combined products while the merchant increases the average order value (AOV) and the total revenue for the Shopify store.

Many merchants choose to include bundles in multiple locations in their store to increase their chances of selling more products. Commonly used pages for bundles may include - product pages, homepage, cart, and dedicated bundle pages.

III. Top 06 Types Of Bundles

Shopify product bundling are implemented in multiple forms and variants. Here are the most popular types of Shopify product bundles with examples:

01. Group Bundles

Group Bundle consists of items that are frequently bought together (i.e. t-shirt and pants), similar to Amazon's recommended products. This type of bundle is usually based on sales historical data and can be created through manual or automatic product bundling.

02. Variant Based Bundles 

A combination of products based on a shared product variant (i.e. recommend a silver ring next to silver earrings). These bundles are based on a shared feature or material of several products.

03. Pack Bundles

Pack Bundling is selling a predefined combination of items as a pack. Usually, it's an efficient method when selling products on a large scale (i.e. buy six bubble gum packs and get 20% off). 

04. Mix & Match Bundles

This type of bundle lets your customers mix and match on their own. Usually, it's a good choice when you want to learn your customers' preferences or during seasonal sales. (i.e. choose any 3 t-shirts from the collection).

05. Combo Product Bundling 

A combination of individual products that are presented as one product to the customer. Usually used on dedicated product pages where it makes sense to sell several products as one. (i.e. buy a grooming kit that consists of a razor, tweezers and nail clippers).

06. Buy One / Get One (BOGO) 

A type of bundle that offers to get an item for a discounted price or free when purchasing another product or set of products. (i.e. buy a home stereo system and get headphones for free).

IV. Discounted Shopify Product Bundles

Discounts are a useful method to encourage customers to purchase bundles and increase the fear of missing out (FOMO). Many merchants use discounts to make the bundle offering more attractive to customers, so it is harder for them to skip the deal, in particular, if the margin stays sufficient.

There are three popular discount types on Shopify:

01. Percentage Discount

As simple as it sounds, Percentage Discount gives a discount percentage to customers who add the bundle to cart. It can be used for almost any type of bundle. For example, get 10% off when purchasing three t-shirts.

02. Fixed Value 

Fix Value approach is to offer a fixed discount for customers who add several products to the cart. Usually used with Pack bundles. For example, pick any two bottles of wine for $50 instead of $60.

03. Buy X get Y 

Buy X Get Y gives customers a free product when purchasing another product or spending a specified amount of money in-store. For example, buy a laptop and get a mouse for free.

V. How To Bundle Items On Shopify

Let's say you are selling wine online and based on your data you learn that most customers buy only one bottle of wine in each visit.

Knowing that acquisition costs are high and your margin is only 20%, your goal is to get your customers to purchase more wine bottles every time they visit your store.

A typical wine costs $30 per bottle, which means $6 profit generated per purchase (based on a 20% margin). If you offer a bundle of three bottles for a 10% discount, your customer will save $3 per bottle and you could gain another $5 of profit for every bottle.

Further reading:

• How To Optimize Your Shopify Store - Learn From The Best
• How To Use Price Bundling To Optimize Pricing And Boost Sales

VI. How To Choose The Best Shopify Product Bundles App

Here’s a short checklist of what to look for when considering adding a new app:

• Does the app support the bundle type you are interested in?
• Would you be able to use discounts with bundles?
• Can you preview and customize the bundle?
• Are manual and automatic bundles supported?
• Is it easy to add the bundles to your store with just a few clicks?
• Is it possible to adjust the bundle’s location if needed?
• Would you be able to analyze the app’s performance?
• Choose an app that doesn't modify your theme files and keeps your store clean
• Make sure support is available through live chat in case you’ll need assistance

VII. Creating Shopify Product Bundles: An Easier Solution

As mentioned before, the best practice for creating Shopify product bundles is through a dedicated app. Many Shopify bundles apps were built to support a specific use case which is ok for now but what if you need more bundle types?

Apps like PickyStory were built to enable you to easily create multiple types of Shopify bundles. With just a few clicks, you can bundle your products, showcase them on multiple pages, analyze performance, and optimize for better results. Here’s how to quickly create Shopify product bundles:

Step 01: Go to the Shopify app store and add the app to your store.

Step 02: Once installed, Automated Frequently Bought Together bundles will be shown on your product pages, under the description section:

Step 03: If you prefer to control the bundle items, you can create manual bundles. Go back to the app, and click on Bundles.

Step 04: Scroll down to add a new manual bundle

Step 05: Link products to the new bundle

Step 06: Create a discount and attach it to the bundle

Step 07: Adjust the discount percentage and the minimum number of products required:

• Enable discount
• Percentage - adjust the discount percentage
• Required quantity - adjust the minimum required quantity for the discount. 

Step 08: That’s it. Go back to bundles, and preview your bundle!

Further Reading: Everything You Need to Know About Shopify Product Bundles (Strategies and App Reviews)

VIII. Analyzing Shopify product bundles

So you created bundles, added them to the store, and now what? Time to analyze the results. A Shopify product bundles app should do what it promises - help you bundle and sell more products to your customers. Check if the app enables you to easily measure how much revenue is generated for you at the bottom line. Look for apps that can report on the number of add to carts, purchases, and revenue generated from the bundles.

If you’re using the PickyStory app, you can easily add a conversion pixel to your store and see sales performance in the app:

1. Add conversion pixel to your store under Settings (detailed instructions provided)

2. Analyze performance under Reports

Further reading: How To Add Google Analytics Tracking To Your Shopify Pages

IX. Shopify Product Bundles Strategies

So you are ready to start creating your first Shopify product bundles but now you need to ask yourself the following crucial questions:

01. What product bundles should you create?

02. Where should you place the bundles in your store? 

There are no simple answers here, but no worries, we collected some great tips for you to get started quickly.

01. What product bundles should you create?

Consider the following bundles when planning your upselling strategy:

• Top selling products - promote them on your homepage to sell even more of them
• Complementary bundles - bundle products that complement each other. For example, a t-shirt and pants.
• Least selling products - combine underperforming products together and offer a discount
• Promote your new collection
• Promote your customers’ favorite picks as a bundle
• Test new products by bundling them with existing products
• Promote unique products only within bundles
• Partner with another related business to create valuable bundles to your customers 

• Showcase your Shopify product bundles on a dedicated page

• Display bundles on product pages

• Display bundles on product pages in the form of pop-up

• Upsell bundles in cart

• Upsell next to the Add to Cart bundle

Conclusion

Shopify product bundles are effective upselling tools when it comes to increasing the average order value in-store. More and more merchants realize that product bundling became the new upsell standard in e-commerce especially because it’s a win-win for both customers and merchants. Customers enjoy a complete shopping experience and lower pricing while merchants sell more products and increase their revenue.

With advanced apps like PickyStory it’s easier than ever to start upselling even for non-tech-savvy merchants that just started their eCommerce business on Shopify. Make sure to do your research and create a clear plan before start upselling to make sure you’re providing the best possible experience for your customers while increasing your business metrics.

Upselling is fun, enjoy it!

Author Bio

Jason Gre
Jason is a storyteller at PickyStory, fascinated by how businesses grow through upsell tactics in eCommerce. When he's not obsessively writing or learning new selling methodologies, he's riding his bicycle around the globe

PickyStory description
PickyStory app helps Shopify’s merchants to increase the average order value (AOV) by enabling them to quickly bundle products and upsell to their customers.