February 22, 2023
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Bundling products is a great way to guide your customers on which items complement each other, whilst also building their baskets (and in turn, your AOV and UPT). It’s long been done in the world of bricks-and-mortar, and as these techniques are brought to the digital world, we see them working well for both enterprise and small businesses alike.
If you’re on Shopify, there are many ways to offer bundles. In this article, we’ll walk you through the different options, and highlight their pros and cons.
But before we jump to that, let’s quickly lay out the components of a bundle:
In the different configurations of building bundles, you can emphasize the Parent or the Children to track sales. There are advantages to both, which we’ll get into later when we cover bundle reporting.
Firstly, let’s dive into the options you have for building bundles initially.
With this option, the items in the bundle are set by the merchant. This can be a great way of allowing merchants to test different bundle configurations online, without pre-packaging items together at the manufacturing stage. This is also a good option for stores where customers are looking for recommendations that can simplify their purchase journeys e.g. showcasing the likes of ‘First time buyer’ bundles, or ‘Mother’s Day Bundles’ to make gift-buying easier.
Pros:
Cons:
Here, you offer shoppers the ability to choose a specific number of products for a set price. It doesn’t matter what products they select — they merely need to meet the required quantity to qualify for the bundle price. This method is often offered within a single category of products. Do note, it’s important to keep all items at a similar price point to avoid deep discounts on certain SKUs.
Pros:
Cons:
Examples:
See Third Man Records and Penguin Books
With this option, merchants specify part of the products within the bundle, but give shoppers the freedom to choose some of them too. It’s a nice way of letting the customer see what sort of products complement one another, whilst still allowing them to customize to their personal preference. A happy medium of customization and ease of purchase!
Pros:
Cons:
Example:
Option 4 allows shoppers to build bundles as they shop, and comes in as a way around the Parent/Child dynamic, avoiding conflicts of how to track sales. This is often seen with the apparel market e.g. buy 3 t-shirts save 10%. This bundle is primarily focused on value shoppers.
This option can be accomplished without a parent PDP and instead, through clever sign posting (think badges, collection page images and text blocks), alongside Shopify scripts to discount the items.
Pro tip: leverage the automatic scripts badge added at checkout as a place for clever micro copy!
Pros:
Cons:
Example:
Regardless of the PDP experience, there are three different ways you can showcase a bundle in the cart.
This option shows the child products in the cart as if they’d been added individually. This is the most simplistic option that keeps the development work at bay. We recommend adding a badge to indicate this item was added via a bundle, so customers can keep track.
Also, if there are any discounts as a result of the bundle, customers may be less likely to remove the items from their cart — so be sure that slashout prices show any cost savings.
This option hides the child products from the view and provides a clean UI. This can be ideal for ensuring customers keep all items in the cart, but can create confusion or uncertainty if customers want to check what specific items they’ve added to their cart, as it just shows the parent product.
While this demands the most development work, the UX of this provides a happy-medium to allow a view of what child products have been added to the cart, without the option for customers to edit the contents of the bundle.
While locking the editing removes customers’ ability to adjust one item within a bundle (meaning they’d need to remove the bundle from cart and start again if they wished to change anything), customers can misunderstand bundle rules and mistakenly lose their discount. Locking the ability to edit the cart this way, avoids this.
Now for a quick note on reporting. Because there are parallel products required to support bundles (Parent and Child), stores need to decide where the reporting will be attributed as it can’t be reported to both without double counting sales.
Focusing on the parent product allows you to attribute sales to that PDP, without assigning it to any particular Child product. This is great for tracking the progress of a bundle and making a case for pre-packed bundles down the line, such as our client, Lauren Conrad Beauty’s.
Reporting sales against the child products is great for tracking the sales’ impact of individual SKUs, but can make it difficult to pinpoint the value that bundles bring to the business. We recommend complementing this reporting style with Google Analytics’ events tracking of the parent PDPs.
We always recommend building features into a theme where possible. Aside from the operating costs, apps’ response/servers often impede site-speed.
There will be certain use-cases where using an app would be worth it. Say, when a feature would take too long to build. Or, perhaps, the back-end work an app could accomplish simply couldn’t be achieved by many developers via the theme.
Generally, though, we advocate for custom front-end work built into your store, with inventory management handled by your middleware or ERP. As well as the performance and long-term cost benefits, this is going to give you a solution that’s visually more on-brand: see what we built for Third Man Records.
That’s our breakdown on bundles! We see them as great option for selling online and believe the development work to make them happen is worth the increase in AOV and UPT.
If you want to explore adding this feature to your store. Reach out to us whenever. And another pro tip: bundling is a great project to involve your retail and live-chat CX teams on as they’ll have good insight on what upsells happen fluidly.
