Online stores and e-commerce market places are designed to offer variety and convenience to customers while offering great deals and pricing benefits.
Every single product has its own appeal and while setting up your online store, you must ensure to highlight that in the product description and pictures.
Alas, it doesn’t make economic sense for any online shop to sell one product at a time to customers.
With the right positioning and emphasized value, you can motivate your customers to buy a group of products in every single transaction. And, that is something which you can achieve through product bundling. Product bundling means combining two or more products in your store and presenting them as a package to your customers.
You can bundle complementary products together, often based on their usage, just like a grooming kit containing a trimmer, beard oil, and face wash.
Alternatively, you can also bundle different variants of the same product, allowing your customers to experience more variety, like a pack of 4 differently flavored doughnuts.
Advantages of Bundled Products
Product bundling offers many benefits and advantages to a seller. So much so that, some sellers use product bundling strategies exclusively to maximize the value of each transaction for their customers and their business. Product bundling can –
- Push complementary products more efficiently
- Help you achieve better inventory turnover ratio for all categories of products
- Greatly improve your average transaction value, by motivating customers to buy bundled products at better-perceived prices.
- Offer the opportunity of customization to your customers, especially if you allow them to design their own product bundles
- Reduce your net overhead and shipping costs, that are borne on each transaction
Furthermore, if you are planning to offer subscription services to your customers, to keep them engaged with your brand, then the best way to do that, is through product bundling.
Types of Bundles
You can create different types of product bundles in your online store, depending upon your brand philosophy and how you want to serve your customers.
However, three main types of product bundles that are most popular among sellers and are worth considering for your own store are:
- Fixed Product Bundles: A fixed product bundle is a pre-designed bundle that is offered to customers on online stores. The categories of products, their sizes, their total price, and the discount attached are all pre-decided by the seller, thus leaving no room for customization or personalization for customers. Such bundles are often preferred to push complementary products. Since the motive behind offering such packages to customers is to increase their order value by buying a bundle instead of individual products, these are often sold at discounted prices.
- Personalized Product Bundles: A personalized product bundle is something that your customers can customize and design themselves, from all or a limited selection of products in your store. Since the customer accepts customization as a value-adding benefit, discounts or reduced prices are often not expected with these.
Also, if your online store sells products that can be used as gifts, then many of your customers can like this option for designing their customized gift baskets, which can be bought like any other product from your store. - Partial Product Bundles: Partial product bundles are personalized product bundles with the added feature for customers to complete the purchase without filling up the entire bundle.
For instance, if your personalized bundle option allows customers to choose any 4 products from a given selection of products and your customer can select only 2 and still check out, then that is a partial product bundle being provided by your store.
Now, if you are wondering how to bundle products in your online store, especially if you have a WooCommerce store and haven’t seen this option anywhere in its dashboard, then here is a step by step guide to help you do just that.
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So, to start creating your very own WooCommerce bundled products or extending bundling as a feature to your WooStore customers, follow these steps:
1. Install and Activate the Product Bundles plugin
Before we talk about creating product bundles, the very first step in this process is to install a WooCommerce bundled product plugin.
Now, there are plenty of plugins available that’ll do the job for you however, we recommend choosing the WISDM Custom Product Boxes plugin for your WooStore.
We suggest this because:
- This plugin comes with tons of advanced features that’ll add lots of value for your customers, simplify management for you, shoot up your sales and revenue, and most importantly, increase your customer delight.
- With over 1500 downloads, the plugin has received an average rating of 4.9/5.
- It is backed by an incredible and responsive support team who’s always available to help you out in case run into any trouble with the plugin.
Having said that, for the purpose of this article, we will be showing you the product bundling setup using the Custom Product Boxes plugin from WisdmLabs.
So, once you’ve purchased the plugin, the installation and activation is pretty simple.
After activating the plugin, go ahead and start using it as an extension of WooCommerce.
2. Create Product Bundles
Once you have activated the Custom Product Boxes or CPB plugin, it will appear as an extension in your WooCommerce dashboard.
Now, move the cursor over the ‘Products’ category, to view ‘All Products’, ‘Add New’, ‘Categories’, ‘Tags’ and ‘Attributes’ options.
To create a product bundle using CPB, you have to follow the same process as adding a new product to your WooStore and click on the ‘Add New’ option under ‘Products’ to begin.
You can give a name to your product bundle and provide a brief description for your customers to either understand the theme of the bundle or learn about the contents of the bundle.
You can also select the ‘Product Categories’ under which you want the bundle to be sorted. This feature, along with the ‘Product Tags’ which can also be added to the bundle, is especially helpful when your customers are trying to search specific product bundles, based on their contents.
After doing this, the next thing to do is – Scroll down to access the ‘Product Data’ field and select the ‘Custom Product Boxes’ as the type of product to be created.
Under ‘Product Data’, you can fill details about the ‘inventory’, such as the SKUs and the stock available, shipping details, linked products for cross-selling and upselling as well as set specific settings for the custom box.
Furthermore, you can go ahead and click on the ‘Custom Box’ option under the ‘Product Data’ menu to select the ‘Pricing Type’, no. of items to be included in the box under the ‘Box Items’ field, and even include a gift message for the box under the ‘Gift Message label’ field.
Once you have defined the number of items to be included in the custom box, you can now move on to the ‘Add on Product’ field.
Through this field, you need to select the products that need to be added to the Custom Product Boxes. You will have to search for the products in the ‘Add on Product’ search box and manually select the items to form a custom product bundle.
You can also revise the product selection at any point in time, by simply de-selecting them.
Moreover, you also have the option of selecting Pre-filled boxes. With this option, you’ll be able to create and add as many products you want to the box as per your convenience.
Furthermore, you can even select certain products as mandatory products in the box. Plus, you can also allow the users to remove mandatory products only if they’re out of stock.
For e.g: You can create a pre-filled box of 5 Slim fit jeans of different colors and you can opt to keep the blue jeans as a mandatory item in the prefilled box.
3. Set Pricing Types
You can configure the pricing type which you want to be applied to the bundle, under the ‘Custom Box’ tab. There are three pricing options available for designing your custom product bundle, which are
- Fixed Pricing
- Base Price + Add-on Products, and
- Only Add-on Products Price
Fixed Pricing
Fixed pricing allows you to pre-define the price of the bundle. Even if you offer personalized product bundle design options to your customers, it will not affect the total price of the bundle.
This price type maintains your control on the grand total price of every bundle and is preferable if you want to either offer bulk discounts or share a percentage of the saved shipping cost with your customers while retaining some profits.
If, however, you don’t want to treat product bundles as products with fixed pricing and allow for customers to customize their bundles with the most economical and most high-end products in your Woostore, then you should try the variable pricing options.
Variable Pricing
You can also use the variable pricing option and set different prices for products, allowing the system to automatically calculate the final bundle price as per the products selected by you or your customers.
With the ‘Per Product Pricing with Base Price’ option, you can capture the boxing and shipping charges in your bundle price. Although, if you don’t want to include any base charges for bundling, you can select the option for ‘Per Product Pricing without Base Price’.
This type of pricing is especially useful if bundling is a privileged or gifting service for your customers, and offered as a premium value proposition as opposed to a discounting gimmick.
4. Allow checkout of partially filled product bundles
Now, if you want to offer product bundling as an additional value only and not restrict your customers from completing their purchase if their bundle is not complete, then you can also allow checkout of partially filled product bundles.
For e.g: From a pack of 6, you can allow the customer to select and check out only 2 or 3 vegetables as per their requirements.
5. Allow Subscriptions through product bundling
With the products selected and the pricing type selected, you can now offer pre-designed as well as personalized product bundles to your customers.
However, if you want to offer a subscription option to your customers so that they can keep on receiving curated product bundles repeatedly, then you can use the ‘Enable Subscription’ option in the product data.
This setting allows for monthly and annual subscription options to be opted for by your customers, giving you recurring revenue.
6. Select the Layout of Bundles on Frontend
With the Custom Product Boxes plugin, you can also select the layout of bundles on the frontend and ensure that it matches your brand’s image as well as the overall store theme. There are several new and legacy layout options to choose from.
You can select the number of rows and columns in a layout, along with the background color and the size of each cell in the bundle. This feature ensures that your products remain presentable and consistent with the rest of the WooStore, when viewed as bundle options by your customers.
7. Publish the Bundle
Finally, this is the last step 🙂
All you need to do in this step is to ensure you save all your changes and check the final look of your product bundles on the frontend to ensure that your customers are getting the best value that you want to offer through your bundles.
Once you’re satisfied, hit the ‘Publish‘ button to make your created product bundle live.
Final Thoughts,
Product bundling is a great way to enhance the overall value that your WooStore can offer your customers. At the same time, it makes perfect business sense to bundle your top-performing products with complementary products to achieve the best possible inventory turnover.
The WISDM Custom Product Boxes is an incredible plugin for WooCommerce bundled products that can help you plan and publish effective product bundles on your store and reap a lifetime of benefits in terms of increased revenue and customer delight.
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