Why Product Bundles Are Essential for Your Shopify Store
Product bundles are more than just a marketing gimmick; they’re a strategic tool that, when implemented correctly, delivers significant benefits:
- Increase Average Order Value (AOV): By strategically grouping complementary products, customers are naturally encouraged to add more items to their cart, boosting your overall sales.
- Simplify the Purchase Journey: Bundles reduce decision fatigue for your customers by presenting curated, ready-to-buy combinations, enhancing their shopping experience.
- Promote Specific SKUs: Effectively move slow-selling inventory by bundling it with your bestsellers, improving sell-through rates and optimizing stock.
- Improve Inventory Tracking: Properly set up bundles, especially native ones, can still track individual SKUs, ensuring accurate inventory management in your backend.
Whether you’re creating starter kits, holiday gift sets, multipacks, or “frequently bought together” options, a solid setup is crucial for optimal performance.
The Best Way to Implement Bundles on Shopify: Native & Reliable
For most Shopify stores, we strongly recommend utilizing the Shopify Bundles app. Why?
Its native integration with the Shopify platform ensures:
- Superior Performance: Enjoy faster load times and smoother operations without external dependencies.
- Fewer Bugs: Minimize glitches and unexpected errors often associated with third-party solutions.
- Seamless Integration: Avoid complex workarounds and frustrating third-party synchronization issues that can lead to long-term technical debt.
The Shopify Bundles app natively supports:
- Inventory-tracked bundles: Maintain accurate stock levels using real SKUs.
- Real-time availability: Ensure bundles are only available if all underlying products are in stock.
- Smooth checkout and fulfillment: A streamlined process from cart to delivery.
Opting for a third-party app often means sacrificing these crucial benefits, potentially leading to duplicated SKUs, broken reports, or the injection of risky custom code that can destabilize your store.
Important Limitations of the Shopify Bundles App
While the Shopify Bundles app is our preferred solution, it does come with a few limitations you should be aware of:
- You cannot combine products with variants and products without variants within the same bundle.
- Each bundle is limited to a maximum of 30 products.
- The total variant combinations within a bundle are capped at 100 by default.
- Only 3 options (e.g., color, size) are allowed per bundle.
However, Shopify offers some flexibility. For merchants requiring more than 100 variant combinations, it’s possible to request an increase to 250. We’ve successfully navigated this process for clients, demonstrating that the platform can adapt to specific needs.
Our Expert Recommendation for Shopify Bundles
Our advice is clear: start with the Shopify Bundles app. It’s the cleanest, most scalable solution available, offering robust functionality right out of the box.
We strongly advise against third-party bundle apps unless you have a highly specialized requirement that cannot be met natively and you are absolutely confident in their stability and long-term compatibility. We’ve witnessed countless instances of theme breaks, checkout errors, and inventory logic failures caused by overengineered or poorly integrated third-party bundle setups.
To implement product bundles that truly work, maintain clean data, and set your store up for future scaling, partner with a team that possesses a comprehensive understanding of the entire ecosystem – from user experience (UX) to complex inventory logic and Shopify’s platform limitations.
Chantecaille bundle example
Need Expert Assistance with Your Shopify Bundles?
We have extensive experience helping merchants of all sizes implement product bundles that effectively increase AOV without accumulating technical debt. Let us help you unlock the full potential of bundling.