Bundling Strategy for Beginners: A Guide for Small Businesses

Product bundling is, by all means, a good marketing and sales method for your business. No matter what you sell and the scale of your business, having a good bundling strategy can do wonders for you. Be it selling more items by introducing complementary products with your most selling ones, or using it as a tool to present new products to your loyal customers.

Now as a beginner in Shopify (or any e-commerce field), you might wonder about different types of bundling, how each one of them works, and exactly how they help you expand the borders of your business, explore the newest trends, and use them to your benefit. This article will discuss bundling in economics of small businesses, and give you some tips on how to kick-start this practice.

What does product bundling mean?

To design a perfect bundling strategy and on a bigger scale, a firm marketing plan, you first need to know the meaning of the concept. The word “bundle” means “a collection of things or quantity of material tied or wrapped up together”. In the e-commerce world, product bundling means putting together two or more products and selling them as one single package. Bundles often come with a special added value:

sometimes a discount, sometimes a free product, sometimes a new seasonal item, or many other things. This added value proposition makes buying the “bundle” more interesting than all of the products individually.

Many of our purchases -both online and from local retail shops- are actually bundles. Remember the skin care package that included the whole night routine and was sold on Mother’s day with a special discount? Or the sales offer in your local supermarket that included free fruit baskets in spring break? These are all bundle examples.

Making a bundling strategy, what should a beginner know?

As a beginner who doesn’t know a lot about the types of bundling, bundle pricing, and implementing the practice into your business, everything is blurry at the start. We are going to guide you through the process with 6 simple steps. With each step, you’ll know more about your bundling strategy, and learn how to decide about it. This is not going to be a tutorial on how to work inside a platform, but rather a general guide to start bundling based on your own business model.

Step 1: Identify Your Products for Bundling

What you select for a bundle, depends on what your target is. You can include literally anything in your bundling strategy, but decide wisely.
Do you need to free space in your inventory? Bundle small but practical items with your most popular items (small makeup bags that come with cosmetics are one of the best product bundle examples in this field).

Do you want to introduce a new product that is still unknown to most of your customers? Design it as a “frequently bought together” so that it becomes visible to users.

These were examples, but there are many more ways to identify what’s going into the bundle. Keep an eye on the calendar too, occasions require special product bundles.

Step 2: Determine Your Bundling Strategy

Let’s get to the part that determines the future of your sales: product bundling strategy. This strategy includes the big picture of bundling in your business, and it should have answers to these basic yet important questions:

Why are you starting bundling?
What products should be bundled?
What are you seeking in your product bundling strategy?

When you have correct, comprehensive answers to all of these questions, you can say the bundling strategy is made. When you have a good road plan, you will become more confident in your decisions, get a hold of discounts and bundle pricing strategy, can include more people and hire roles to make your job easier, and in simple words: you hold a light in the dark road.

Step 3: Set the Right Price for Your Bundles

A big part of the product bundling strategy is setting the right price for each bundle. This “right” price is one that gives you enough profit, yet it’s exciting for the customers and encourages them to add the bundle to their cart. Many of us have encountered bundles that include all of the individual items, but the price is less than all of them added together. That’s what the “added value” has to offer, a different price.

A good bundling example that illustrates the importance of pricing is the “Fast Food combo meal”. When the customer sees a burger + fries + soda combo for the low price of $5.99, they immediately imagine the cost of all of these items bought individually. Most of the time, they have to spend more to get them, so the combo is chosen over and over again.

Explore our product bundles shopify app

Step 4: Create Attractive Bundle Offers

Now that the bundle is made and the price is set, it’s time for customers to see it. How you present the bundles is very important. Ever seen the “frequently bought together” option on online shopping sites, they present a fun, pleasantly designed set of products that you can add to your purchase and make a bundle. The widget, the design of the bundle, and even the color and font that show the price matter. These are all part of the experience that you give your customers.

If the bundle pricing and products are what persuade the customer to click “add to cart”, the experience is what keeps them coming back for more.

Shopify’s “complete the look” or “add to kit” options, are among the best product bundle examples in the current market.

Step 5: Promote and Market Your Bundles

This is the part that many people call “bundle marketing”. Now that people have come across your product bundles (and even some have purchased them), it’s time to show them to a bigger audience. Many big enterprises make TV ads for their bundles (like Walmart, Target, etc). Some websites design banners and online ads, some send emails, and some local retail shops may even call you on your phone and have a conversation about it.

When it comes to product bundling Shopify and other platforms provide their shop owners with tools, apps, and automation to help market their products.

6 types of bundling in Fast Bundle

Fast Bundle is a bundling automation app, used for Shopify stores. It helps facilitate, accelerate, and empower your bundling processes. Mixed bundling or pure bundling, small business or a big enterprise, no matter what you do and where you stand, Fast Bundle is here to help you make better bundling decisions, and keep your customers happy. There are 6 types of bundles in the app, which you can use to the benefit of your own bundling strategy:

Simple bundle: also called “standard” or “pure bundle” too, this one is the most basic yet vital type of bundling. This means putting two or more products together and selling them as one single product. A pure bundling example can be a Christmas chocolate box + mug on New Year’s Time, a skincare package for Mother’s day, or a toothbrush with toothpaste.
Volume discount: this one includes a very special bundle pricing strategy: the discount will rise with each added item to the shopping cart. For example, If a pair of jeans costs $40 individually, but when customers buy a couple of them, they will get 10% off and the second pair will be $36.
Collection mix and match: the customer can make their own bundle among the products “of a collection”. One bundling strategy example in this field is when you give the user the option to select 4 T-shirts with their desired color and buy them with -or without- a discount.
Product mix and match: this is just like the last one, with one small difference: the customer is not limited inside the collection anymore, and can select any “product” and move across categories.
Buy x get Y: give additional items for free, if the customer selects a special product. For example, if the customer “buys” a toothpaste, they will “get” a toothbrush for free.
Frequently bought together: this one adds a horizontal section below the product page that promotes the literally “frequently bought together” products of the main product of that purchase, based on popular demand and sale statistics.