What are bundles in Shopify

You might have heard the phrase ‘bundle’ often while installing apps and exploring the various functionalities offered by Shopify apps. However, you might not even know what bundles are and how you can use them in your Shopify store. But don't worry, in this article, we will explain to you exactly what bundles are and how you can use them in your store to increase revenue of your store and boost your sales to the next level.

Prior to diving into that, if you are interested in with experimenting bundles yourself, you should install Bundler - Product Bundles in the Shopify app store.

What exactly are bundles?

Bundles are an exciting way to promote your products in your store. You might have a variety of products in your store that you could sell together. Perhaps you have a matching t-shirt and pants, or you have matching items that would fit well if sold together for your pets. Or you just want to offer a nice gift when someone buys a certain product. All of these options are possible by creating bundles in Shopify.

Now the main purpose why someone would want to create a bundle in their store is not to just sell combined products, the biggest plus is to offer customers benefits while they buy products together. By making a bundle, you can offer your customers some of the following options:

• Offer discounts to customers if they buy certain products together,
• Give free shipping discounts on order,
• Give a sitewide tiered discount when customers buy in bulk,
• And more!

As you can see the biggest benefit that you can give your customers via bundle promotions are discounts. This way, your customers will be more likely to buy products and increase the sales in your business.

Types of Bundles in Shopify

The majority of Bundling apps allow you to create many different types of bundles, not only the classic one mentioned above where you simply offer your customers specific products. For example, Bundler - Product Bundles app allows you to create 6 types of different bundles. We will explain the types of bundles here and their benefits, so you can pick the one that you feel your store needs the most!

Classic bundle

The most basic type of bundle. When creating it you pick specific products that you want to combine and usually, you will want to offer a discount when customers buy this bundle. This Bundle is great if you have certain items in the store that you wish to combine together, or pair items that complement each other. By combining those products in a bundle and giving a discount on it, your customers will more likely want to buy the products together for a cheaper price rather than individually.

The discount options for this bundle can be:

• Percentage discount (%): That will be applied to each product in the bundle,
• Fixed amount discount: That is a total discount amount that will be proportionally divided between bundled products,
• Set discounts on products: That means that you can set the discount on each product in the bundle separately,
• Fixed bundle price: That will be the final price for the entire bundle,
• Without discount: You can pick this to offer a bundle without any discounts.

Why should I pick this bundle?

Classic bundles are the most popular ones. Not only are they the simplest but they make customers want to buy more products in your store and increase the overall revenue. Classic bundles are also completely free in the Bundler app, which means that you can try it out to get the feel of having bundles in your store and then you can further think about expanding the plan and trying out more bundle types!

Mix & Match bundle

The biggest difference that separates Mix & Match bundle from the classic bundle is, that you give customers more freedom. In the classic bundles, customers see pre-defined bundles that you created. You select the products and the discount of that bundle, and all that the customers can do is to just select to either buy it or not. However, in the Mix & Match bundle, you give customers a selection of products and they can build their bundle based on your requirements. You can define minimum and maximum number of items that customers can pick from the selection before proceeding to add the bundle products to cart.

This bundle is another great option to offer discounts in your store. Some customers might want to change something about the classic bundles or maybe they would like to buy the two products together that you didn't pick when creating classic bundles. You obviously wouldn't know that, so by by creating a Mix & Match bundle with a selection of some products, the customers will be able to pick the ones they want!

The discount options for this bundle can be:

The same as the classic bundle described above

Why should I pick this bundle?

Mix & Match bundles are great if you have 4+ products that are in the same category, for example, t-shirts, pants, etc… This means that you can pick 5 or 10 different shirts and then put the requirements of a maximum 2 shirts and a minimum of 2 shirts. Which means that customers will be able to pick two of any shirts that you selected when creating the bundle!

Volume discount

When we described classic and mix & match bundles, you might have asked yourself “What if I want to offer a discount for any two products in my store?”. Well, we are glad to tell you that volume discounts offer you exactly that! Volume discounts allow you to give a sitewide or product-specific tiered discount when customers buy in bulk. The widget of volume discounts is a bit different than other bundles since it doesn't show the actual products included in the bundle (since it's applied for any product in your store if you picked the sitewide option). When setting up the volume discount, you have the option to pick a sitewide option (the most popular one), which means that the discount will be applied to all products in your store, however if you don't want that you also have the option to pick specific products that the volume discount will apply to.

So in short, volume discounts just mean that when customers buy a certain quantity of the products, they will get a discount. Volume discounts can have multiple tiers, which means that you can set different discounts for different quantities of products. It is usually recommended that the higher the quantity is, the bigger the discount should be.

The discount options for this bundle can be:

• Percentage discount (%): That will be applied to each product in the bundle,
• Fixed amount discount: That is a total discount amount that will be proportionally divided between items,
• Fixed price: That means that the app will calculate the discount to reduce the price to fixed price value and divide it between products.

Why should I pick this bundle?

Perhaps you would simply like to offer a discount to your customers when they buy a certain quantity of any products in your store. Creating a volume discount is the easiest option for that and your customers will get a simple widget on each of the products where they can see how much they can buy for a discount. It is also a good option if you are not sure which products should you put in classic or mix & matched bundles, so you can enable this option for all products in your store!

Sectioned Mix & Match bundle

This bundle is a step further in the Mix & Match bundle concept. While the mix & match bundle allows customers to pick any products from the selection, the sectioned mix & match bundle allows them to go through sections and pick a certain number of products from each section. For example, let's say you have a selection of shirts and pants that you put in the mix & match bundle for customers to select. In the normal mix & match bundle customers can simply pick 3 shirts without selecting pants, however in a sectioned mix & match bundle, they first go through the section of shirts, where they have to pick the desired shirt and then proceed to the next section of pants, where they have to pick the desired pants. This way, this bundle gives you a better organization of products in a bundle while still giving the customers the freedom of picking any products from each section!

When creating a sectioned mix & match bundle, a good-to-know setting is the one where you can select the minimum and the maximum quantity of products that the customer can pick from each section. This means that sections can differ from each other depending on your settings.

The discount options for this bundle can be:

The same as the classic bundle and mix & match bundle described above

Why should I pick this bundle?

If you considered a mix & match bundle and if you like a better organization within it, such as leading your customers through different sets of products instead of showing them all products at once, sectioned mix & match bundle is a great choice! It's also a great pick if you want to add more products to the bundle since a customer looking at all of these products at once might get confused, so this way they can simply go through sections and pick the products they want!

Tiered Mix & Match bundle

Another variation of a Mix & Match bundle. In the normal mix & match bundle, customers get an overall discount on all of the items they selected based on your requirements. That discount is only the one “standard” discount that is applied to the entire mix & match bundle. Tiered mix & match bundle allows you to have multiple discounts in a single bundle. This means that when customers keep adding products from the selection, they will see a message about how many more items they need to add to get an additional discount. Usually, this means that the more items they add, the bigger the discount will be. This is great to further motivate your customers to buy more products in your store.

The tiered Mix & Match bundle also gives you an option to change how you want the discount tiers to work. The basic approach is the quantity type where customers get a different discount with the more items they buy, but you can also pick the options to put different discounts based on the range of the quantities (for example from 2 to 6 items you will offer X discount), and the setting to put the minimum limit only which the amount customers need to have minimally for this discount.

The discount options for this bundle can be:

• Percentage discount (%): That will be applied to each product in the bundle,
• Fixed amount discount:  That is a total discount amount that will be proportionally divided between items.

Why should I pick this bundle?

If you like the concept of mix & match bundle but want to offer more flexibility to your customers and more benefits, tiered mix & match is something to consider. When customers reach a specific discount tier in a bundle, they will get a message about how many more items they need for the next discount, this way you can achieve more sales in your store!

Standalone product bundle (BETA Access)

One of the newer types of bundles that have been introduced to Shopify are standalone product bundles. However, keep in mind that this is still a relatively new feature and some apps are still rolling it out. A standalone product bundle is a bundle that actually works as a product but still keeps the inventory synced. It shows in your store as a single product. The standalone bundle will also show up on collection pages and will have its own SKU. When customers go to checkout they will see an overlook of all the items that are included in this bundle.

The discount options for this bundle can be:

• Bundle price: This means that you simply input the final price for the bundle that you wish it to be.

Additional settings for Bundles

Now that you have a solid understanding of what are bundles, how they work, and know the different types of Bundles, it's also nice to know some additional quality-of-life options that you can consider when creating your bundles in your Shopify store.

All of these options are available in the Bundler app and will show you how you can enable them!

Customization

It's important that bundles need to be attractive and stand out to customers. While keeping the default look is good, it's even better for the bundle to fit with your site. By going to Bundler → Settings → Colors, you can change different colors for any bundle type. However, if you have some CSS knowledge you can completely customize the widget by going to Bundler → Settings → Advanced → Custom CSS

Funnels

By default, when you make bundles they will show up on the product pages where customers will be able to see them. However, you might want to extend this and promote bundles on other parts of your shop such as the cart page. With Bundler, that is possible with the feature called Funnels. By going to Bundler → Funnels, you can create funnels that will show up on other pages in your shop. This way, when a customer adds a certain product to the cart without knowing that the bundle with discount is available, they will see a popup in the cart before proceeding to checkout where they can pick a bundle if they want to.

Subscriptions

Using bundles is great, but using bundles with other apps that can integrate with them is even better. The most popular integration is subscriptions. Imagine that the customers can before buying a bundle also subscribe to products within the bundle, which would give the customer and the product a healthier relationship and the customer might stay with the product for a longer time.

Bundler has great integration with Seal Subscriptions, which enables the option where customers can subscribe to certain products and receive them at a certain interval. This is great for products that are not long-lasting and the customer might want to receive them each month or so.

You can read about how to manage subscriptions and more about Seal Subscriptions on this article.

Display discounts in cart

By default, you will see the discounts that are applied with bundles in the checkout. However, a good option is also to show the discounts directly in the cart. This is a very simple option and can be enabled by going to Bundler → Settings → Display discounts in cart

Conclusion

Bundles can help your business in more ways than one and it is one of the most popular options to promote your products. We hope that you now have a better understanding of using bundles in your Shopify store and that this article helps you consider the option to use bundles in your shop! To view more about bundling apps you can check out our other article about best bundling app for Shopify

Happy bundling! 🛒