There are many upselling or cross-selling strategies, but product bundling is the easiest one to implement and understand for both customers and merchants. There are plenty of product bundling apps in the Shopify app store that have essential features, but some of them offer special features that can change your shop and increase sales significantly.
In this article, we are going to compare some of the outstanding Shopify product bundling apps in a way that you can make a decision that which one fits your business the best.
1. PickyStory
PickyStory helps you generate more revenue from every shopper that visits your store. Rather than selling single products to your customers, PickyStory allows you to create upselling and cross-selling product bundles and deals, thus increasing your average order value (AOV) and boosting overall revenue. Add optional discounts to your bundles, and display them throughout your store. Start with PickyStory and generate up to $500 for free.
Why PickyStory:
- Uses AI to generate bundles, titles, descriptions, and images
- Post-purchase upsell and checkout upsell to increase AOV
- Create a progress bar in the cart to give free shipping, free gift, or discount
2. Fast Bundle | Product Bundles
If you want to sell a bundle as a product (combo products, kits, etc.), Fast bundle has the solution for you. It is totally synced with your inventory and you can even manage to show the items in the order separately or as one product. Some other apps provide this feature too, but Fast bundle is the only one that supports the combo option for Mix & Match offers too.
The other feature that is well implemented in their app is the Bundle Builder or the Collection Mix and Match. This feature is great for those customers that love to create their own bundle out of one or several collections. The Bundle Builder is a landing page where you can grant your customers the joy of bundle or box building.
Last but not least, is a wide range of customizations available in the app by FastBundle. Changing the color of the Add to Cart button is not a big deal and all of the apps have this option, but Fast bundle gives you the ability to change or translate all the wordings of your bundle widgets and even supports multilingual and multi-currency shops.
3. Wide Bundles
Wide bundles has focused on supporting these page designers. Although it doesn’t have a free plan, but its paid plan is affordable. It is also well designed for creating quantity breaks.
4. Bundle Bear | Volume Discounts
If you are focusing on volume discounts or BOGO offers (Buy One, Get One), Bundle Bear is the easiest app for these types of offers. Another charming feature is that they provide cart goals which means your customers will get X% off if they spend more than $Y. This is a sweet strategy besides bundling that increases the AOV.
Their other interesting feature is that they have designed various ready themes and you can choose the one that fits your shop design the most, without the need to spend a lot of time customizing every detail of the bundle widget. It’s kind of fun to test different designs with only one click!
5. Frequently Bought Together
When you look for apps that concentrate on increasing the average order value, this is a veteran app in the league. Frequently Bought Together (as it says!) is the Shopify version of Amazon’s frequently bought together feature. They add a section to your product pages that offers other items that have been bought beside the main product of that page based on your shop’s historical data.
If you search for this feature, you’ll find some other apps that are offering the same feature but Frequently Bought Together has optimized this feature and has reliable performance, especially when it comes to response time. The only noticeable weakness of this app is that it’s limited to one main feature and if you’re looking for creative tools to cross-sell, upsell and bundle your products, you may not feel fulfilled with this app. Many merchants add a complementary bundling app to satisfy their creative solutions.
What to consider when choosing your product bundling app on Shopify
There are some essential requirements that you should check if you want to install a product bundling app on Shopify.
1. Monthly subscription instead of commission-based subscriptions
Shopify apps’ payments are mostly classified into two main categories: (1) those with monthly/annual subscriptions and (2) those that charge you based on your sales via the app and a commission of that sales.
In the short run, you may think that the commission-based ones are better but if you’re a professional and determined merchant, bundling will rapidly increase your sales. In that case, bundling will cost you a lot and you will always rethink switching to another app, but since it may take a great effort, you’ll continue using your current app and pay a significant amount of money to them.
2. Fast responding support team
Since bundling will affect your shop’s UI and there are a lot of themes in the market, When you add a product bundling app to your Shopify store it is very common to face some UI disorders at the beginning. First of all, be patient and do not jump to conclusions when you face little problems. Then ask for support. You are probably not the first person to face a problem, especially if you’re using a well-known Shopify theme or one of their editions. So they will probably have a straightforward routine to solve the problem. Problems like little graphical alignment issues, displaying discounts on the cart page, and minor errors like that are no issues to worry about.
To understand how qualified the support of each app is, you can read their reviews on their app listings in Shopify.
3. Inter-app integrations
If you are using a special app that plays a huge role in your business like page designers or email marketing apps or the Shopify POS, make sure that the bundling app is integrated with them already or ask the support team if they can integrate with them quickly and painlessly!
4. Service flexibility
Some customizations are general and all of the top bundling apps support them, like changing the color of the Add to Cart button, etc. But you may need some customizations on the product bundling process according to your business needs or your store design. Many of these apps do not support customizations but some of them do. For example, you need to change the position of the bundle widget on a special page, add a custom CSS code to your theme, or make some back-end structural customizations that are not that common in the market. So those apps that support these changes are more recommended.
5. Syncing combo products with the inventory on all product variants
Being synced with the inventory is an essential quality for a product bundling app and most of them are ok, but when it comes to combo products and kits, you must check the app. Combo products are one of the most popular features among merchants but not all of the apps support it because of its complexity. When a feature is complex, you must test it. So make sure to test the synchronization of the combo product feature and the inventory when you install a product bundling app on Shopify.
Conclusion
If you’re considering product bundling as the main strategy for your shop, which you probably should (!), there are plenty of 3rd party Shopify apps in the market that have the essential requirements, but vary in some details. If you have read the whole article, I hope you have found it useful to make the best decision. But if you have by any chance, skipped the whole article to the conclusion, just make sure to stick to these hints:
(1) know exactly what you want, (2) be patient and collaborate with support teams, (3) make sure to create meaningful and attractive bundle offers, unless you can’t engage them and you’ll not see any sales enhancement, and (4) if you’re a professional merchant, don’t let a few dollars a month distract you from installing the right app, because you’re going to make a lot of money if you bundle your products right.
