How To Create Shopify Product Bundles

Create product bundles in Shopify by using an app. First, install the official Shopify Bundles app from the app store, or alternative apps such as Optizen Video Upsells. Inside the app, click “Create bundle” to begin. You then choose which products to include in your offer. Set a fixed price or a percentage discount, then publish the bundle.

The quick answer? Use an app. Seriously. Go to the app store, grab Shopify’s free “Bundles” app, or Optizen Video Upsells, click “Create bundle,” pick your products, set a price, and you’re done.

But that’s not the whole story. The how of creating bundles is an important technical decision that has a massive impact on your inventory management, operational sanity, and the customer’s experience. Bundling isn’t just a marketing trick to bump up the Average Order Value (AOV); it’s an architectural choice for your store. Get it right, and it’s a smooth, automated sales engine. Get it wrong, and you’re looking at overselling, constant manual inventory checks, and frustrated customers.

Let’s break down the landscape of bundling methods, their real-world trade-offs, and why one path is almost always the right one.

Fundamentally, every bundling method has to solve one central problem: inventory synchronization. When you sell a “bundle,” you’re not selling one thing. You’re selling multiple, distinct SKUs. Your Shopify backend needs to know that a sale of “The Morning Ritual Kit” means decrementing stock for COFFEE-BEANS-12OZ, MUG-CERAMIC-WHITE, and FILTER-PAPER-100CT.

Manual methods fail at this. App-based solutions are built specifically to solve it.

Here’s the breakdown of your options, from the most problematic to the most robust:

The “Manual Hacks” (Variants & Virtual Products): These are tempting because they’re free and don’t require an app. But they create a catastrophic inventory disconnect. Shopify tracks the inventory of the bundle product you create, not the individual components. This is a non-starter for any serious store. You’re signing up for manual reconciliation, which is a recipe for overselling.
The Discount Code Method: A slightly cleverer hack. You use a “Buy X, Get Y” discount. The good news? Inventory is tracked correctly because customers add individual products to the cart. The bad news? The user experience is terrible. The customer has to do all the work, and the deal isn’t visible until checkout. It’s confusing and leads to cart abandonment.
The Official Shopify Bundles App: This is your baseline. It’s free, first-party, and it gets the inventory part right. It works by creating a new product listing for the bundle, but it intelligently calculates availability based on the stock of the least-available component. When a bundle sells, it correctly decrements stock from all component SKUs. It’s perfect for simple, fixed kits.
Third-Party Bundle Apps: This is where you go for advanced functionality. Think mix-and-match, build-your-own-box, or tiered discounts. These apps handle complex logic and offer a much richer front-end experience for the customer, all while managing the crucial inventory sync in the background. They are the most scalable and powerful solution.
Full Custom Code: For enterprise-level needs, you might use Shopify Scripts or custom checkout functions. This gives you total control but requires significant developer resources to build and maintain. It’s overkill unless you have a truly unique bundling requirement not served by existing apps.

Sources for this analysis include the Shopify Help Center, practical experience, and insights from Bold Commerce and McKinsey & Company on merchandising strategies.

Common Types of Product Bundles You Can Build

Before you touch any code or install an app, you need to decide on the strategy. The type of bundle you offer dictates the technical requirements.

Fixed Bundles (The Workhorse)

This is the classic “kit” or “set.” A pre-selected group of products sold for a single price, like a “Beginner’s Skincare Kit.” From a technical standpoint, this is the simplest concept. The merchant does all the curating. The key technical decision is how this bundle is represented in the backend, is it a single “virtual” SKU (the bad, manual way) or an app-managed collection that links to real SKUs? The latter is the only scalable option. For the customer, it’s pure convenience: a complete, foolproof solution at a great price.

Mix-and-Match Bundles (Build Your Own)

Here’s where things get interesting… and complex. You empower the customer to build their own bundle from a pre-defined collection of items. Think “Choose any 3 T-Shirts for $60.”

This is practically impossible without a dedicated third-party app.

The app’s logic has to handle a lot: validating the customer’s selections in real-time, applying the right discount structure in the cart, and, most importantly flawlessly syncing inventory for every single SKU they choose. What’s interesting here is the shift in user experience. It’s no longer a passive purchase; it’s an interactive, engaging process. That level of personalization makes customers feel like they’re getting a unique deal crafted just for them, which can have a huge impact on conversion.

Tiered or Volume Bundles

This is a pricing strategy disguised as a bundle. The more you buy, the more you save. “Buy 2, Get 10% Off; Buy 3, Get 20% Off.”

You can implement this in two ways. The “quick-and-dirty” way is using product variants on a single product page (e.g., variants for “Single,” “3-Pack,” “6-Pack”). This works for identical items but suffers from the inventory tracking problems we’ve already discussed. The proper, engineered solution is to use an app that dynamically applies discounts at the cart level based on the quantity of specific items. This provides a clear value prop for the customer on consumables or other items they might want to stock up on.

Subscription Bundles (The Holy Grail)

This model merges bundling with a recurring revenue stream by offering a curated kit on a regular schedule, think discovery boxes or replenishment kits. The technical lift here is significant. It requires a seamless integration between a bundling app and a subscription management platform like Recharge, Skio, or Bold Subscriptions. The system needs to handle recurring billing, customer subscription management portals, and, critically, process fulfillment and inventory decrements for multiple SKUs on each subscription cycle. It’s complex, but the payoff is predictable revenue and incredible customer convenience.

Add-on or Cross-Sell Bundles

This isn’t a “bundle” in the traditional sense, but it uses the same logic. It’s the “Frequently Bought Together” or “Complete the Look” widget you see on product pages. The strategy is to suggest logical pairings (a camera and a memory card) and offer a small incentive to buy them together. This is almost exclusively handled by apps that inject a widget onto the page. From a technical standpoint, these apps usually add the items to the cart as separate line items and apply a cart-level discount. This is actually great for inventory because each product is tracked by its own SKU from the start.

Video Bundles & Upsell

Using video to engage customers is nothing new, but using video for upsell and bundles is novel. Optizen Video Upsell does just this – it engages customers just at the right time, hooking them to add the upsell or bundle to their cart.

How to Set Up Bundles Without an App (And Why You Shouldn’t)

Okay, I know some of you will want to try this anyway, either to test an idea or to avoid paying for an app. While I strongly recommend against it for any store with real volume, it’s important to understand how these methods work and, more importantly, how they fail.

Method 1: The Product Variant Hack

This is the most common manual method, but it only works for bundling multiples of the exact same product. You’re basically creating quantity breaks.

The Process:

Create a New Product. Go to Products > Add product. Call it something like “Organic Cotton T-Shirt (Packs).”
Add Variants. In the “Variants” section, create an option called “Pack Size.”
Define Values. For the values, enter things like “Single Shirt,” “3-Pack,” “5-Pack.”
Set Price & SKU for Each. This is where the house of cards is built. You’ll set a discounted price for the 3-Pack and 5-Pack variants. You must assign unique SKUs like TSHIRT-1, TSHIRT-3, TSHIRT-5.
Set Inventory. You manually enter the quantity for each variant.

The Technical Failure Point:

Total Inventory Disconnect. This is the killer. Shopify has no idea that TSHIRT-3 is made up of three TSHIRT-1s. When you sell one “3-Pack,” the inventory for the TSHIRT-3 variant goes down by one. The inventory for your actual single t-shirt SKU? It doesn’t change. You have now created a phantom inventory discrepancy that will inevitably lead to overselling.
Only for Identical Items. You can’t bundle a shirt and a hat this way. It’s structurally impossible.
Constant Manual Work. To keep your inventory even remotely accurate, you have to run a report at the end of each day, calculate how many individual units were sold via bundles, and then manually subtract that number from your base product’s inventory. It’s a nightmare.

Method 2: The “Virtual Bundle” Product

This approach lets you market a bundle of different items, but it’s even more dangerous from an inventory perspective. You’re creating a new product that’s just a placeholder for the real items.

The Process:

Go to Products > Add product.
Create a compelling product page. Title: “Ultimate Morning Coffee Starter Kit.” Description: List every single item included. Images: Use a great composite shot showing all the products together.
Set a single price for the whole kit. Use the “compare-at price” to show the savings.
Assign a unique SKU for this virtual bundle, like KIT-COFFEE-01.
Now, the crucial step: Manually set the “Available” quantity.

The Inventory Management Protocol (The Nightmare):

You can’t just set the inventory. You have to calculate it. The available quantity for your virtual bundle is always equal to the stock level of your lowest-stocked component. If you have 100 bags of coffee but only 20 mugs, you can only sell 20 kits.

You must manually check this and update the bundle’s quantity every time a component’s stock changes.
When a KIT-COFFEE-01 sells, Shopify deducts one from its inventory. It does not touch the inventory of the coffee, mug, or filter SKUs.
You or your staff must then manually go into each of those three component products and reduce their stock levels by one. Every. Single. Time.

This method is only vaguely tenable for a flash sale with a tiny amount of inventory where you can watch every order come in. Otherwise, it’s an operational disaster waiting to happen.

Method 3: The “Buy X, Get Y” Discount Code

This is the only manual method that keeps inventory accurate, but it does so at the expense of the customer experience.

The Logic:

You don’t create a bundle product. Instead, you create a discount in Shopify admin (Discounts > Create discount > Buy X get Y). You configure a rule like: “Customer buys: 1 of Product A and 1 of Product B. Customer gets: 20% off the order.”

Why It Fails in Practice:

Zero Discoverability. The offer is invisible on your product pages. You have to explain it with banners or emails and trust the customer to understand and execute the steps.
Maximum Customer Effort. The burden is on the shopper. They have to navigate to multiple pages, add the correct items to their cart, and then hope the discount applies. It’s the exact opposite of convenience.
High Potential for Confusion. If they add the wrong variant or product, the discount won’t trigger, leading to frustration and abandonment.
The Only Pro: Because the customer adds individual SKUs to the cart, Shopify’s native inventory tracking works perfectly. But this single benefit is massively outweighed by the terrible user journey.

The Right Way: Using a Shopify Bundles App

An app is the robust, scalable, and operationally sound way to do this. Apps are engineered to solve the core inventory challenge and provide a seamless customer experience.

Why a Dedicated App is a No-Brainer

Automated inventory synchronization. That’s it. That’s the killer feature. When a bundle sells, a good app automatically and instantly decrements the correct quantity from each component SKU. This alone is worth the price of admission.

But it goes beyond that:

Support for Complex Bundles: Apps unlock the powerful stuff like Mix-and-Match or Build-Your-Own that are impossible manually.
Superior Customer Experience: They create clean, intuitive widgets and bundle pages that clearly communicate the value of the deal, which boosts conversion.
Seamless Checkout: No codes, no confusion. The discount is applied automatically.
Real Reporting: You get analytics on bundle performance, so you know which offers are actually working.
Scalability: An app can handle thousands of orders without breaking a sweat. Your manual spreadsheet can’t.

Deep Dive: The Official Shopify Bundles App

For many stores, this is the perfect starting point. It’s free, it’s from Shopify, so the integration is flawless, and it handles fixed kits beautifully.

Setup is simple:

Go to the Shopify App Store, search for “Shopify Bundles,” and install it.
Once installed, go to Apps > Bundles and click “Create bundle.”
Give it an internal name and select the products (and specific variants) you want to include.
The app then creates a new product for this bundle in your store. You’ll be taken to that product page to set the public title, description, images, and the final price.
Set the product status to “Active,” and you’re live.

How It Handles Inventory (The Magic):

The app uses component-based availability. It looks at the stock levels of all the products inside the bundle and sets the bundle’s availability to match the component with the lowest stock.

Example: Your bundle has a Shirt (100 in stock) and a Hat (25 in stock). The app will show that you have only 25 bundles available to sell.
When one bundle is purchased, it automatically reduces the Shirt’s inventory by one and the Hat’s inventory by one. Your stock levels remain perfectly in sync.

Exploring Top Third-Party Apps

When you need more power than Shopify’s native app offers, you turn to the third-party ecosystem.

What to look for in an app:

Supported Bundle Types: Does it do what you need? Mix-and-match? Tiered pricing? Subscriptions?
Inventory Syncing Mechanism: This is non-negotiable. It must provide real-time, SKU-level syncing.
Theme Compatibility & Customization: Don’t just check a box. See if you can inject your own CSS. Does the widget look like a cheap add-on, or can you make it truly seamless with your brand?
Performance Impact: A badly coded app will slow your site down. Check reviews and look for mentions of site speed.
Integrations: Does it play nice with other critical apps you use, like subscription platforms or page builders?

A Few Proven Options:

Bundles & Upsell by PickyStory: Great for a wide range of deals, especially visually-driven ones like “shop the look.” It’s flexible in how it can display offers, either on a dedicated page or as a widget.
Bold Bundles by BOLD: A powerhouse. It’s been around forever and is known for its robust logic for complex discounts like BOGO and tiered pricing. A go-to for high-volume stores.
Bundle Builder by HulkApps: If your entire business model is “Build Your Own Box,” this is the kind of specialized tool you need. It’s designed specifically for that interactive, step-by-step customer experience.

The general workflow for any of these apps is pretty similar: Install, create a new bundle campaign in the app’s dashboard, choose your bundle type, select products and define your discount rules, customize the look of the front-end widget, and then publish.

And for the love of all that is holy, test it. Run a test order. Check your inventory counts. Make sure the discount applies correctly. Do it all before a single real customer sees it.

How to Promote Your Bundles Effectively

Creating the bundle is the technical part; getting people to buy it is the marketing part. A perfectly engineered bundle that no one sees is useless.

On-Site Promotion:

Think about the user journey. The point of highest intent is the product page. That’s where your “Frequently Bought Together” or “Complete this Kit” widget needs to live. It’s a powerful, contextual upsell. Your homepage is for discovery, feature your best-selling bundle in a prominent banner. And create a dedicated “Bundles” or “Kits” page in your main navigation for the deal-seekers who are actively looking for a curated offer. You can even use in-cart upsells or exit-intent pop-ups to catch customers at critical moments.

Email & Paid Ads:

Never blast your whole list. That’s lazy. The real power is in segmentation. Find people who bought the coffee maker six months ago but never the grinder… that’s your target audience for the “Complete Coffee Kit” campaign. Customize your abandoned cart flows; if someone leaves a single item that’s part of a bundle, the recovery email should present the bundle as a better-value alternative. For paid ads, create dedicated campaigns for your bundles. Your ad creative should scream “value and convenience,” showing all the products together and highlighting the savings.

Analyzing Performance (The Reality Check):

You need to know if this is actually working. Track these metrics:

Average Order Value (AOV): The most obvious one. Is it going up?
Bundle Conversion Rate: How well do your bundle pages convert versus your regular product pages?
Attachment Rate: What percentage of total orders include a bundle?
Impact on Individual Product Sales: This is a big one. Are your bundles driving incremental revenue, or are they just cannibalizing sales of your individual products? If your total revenue isn’t increasing, you might just be giving a discount to people who would have bought the items anyway.
Profit Margin: Is your AOV going up but your margin is tanking? Your bundle discount might be too aggressive. You have to analyze the profitability of each bundle to ensure the strategy is financially sound. The data tells a story; you just have to learn how to read it.

Commonly Asked Questions

So how do these apps not mess up my inventory?

Good question. The magic is in the app’s logic. Unlike the manual methods that create a “dumb” bundle product, an app creates a “smart” one. When an order containing that bundle comes through, the app’s code intercepts the transaction (typically using Shopify’s webhooks) and, instead of telling Shopify “one bundle was sold,” it tells Shopify “one of SKU A, one of SKU B, and one of SKU C were sold.” It breaks the bundle down into its constituent parts before it hits your inventory system, so your stock levels remain perfectly accurate.

How much of a discount is enough to drive sales?

There’s no magic number, but it has to be psychologically significant. A 5% discount probably isn’t enough to move the needle. You’re looking for something that makes the customer feel like they’re getting a genuinely good deal. A common starting point is 15-20% off the total price of the individual items. The key is to use the “compare-at price” feature to visually show the original combined price crossed out next to the new bundle price. That visual cue is incredibly powerful.

Is bundling just about a better price? What else does it do for the customer?

Price is the hook, but convenience is what really sells it. Bundles remove cognitive load. Instead of having to research and decide on three or four complementary products, the customer is presented with a curated, expert-approved solution. It says, “We’ve done the work for you; this is everything you need.” That’s a huge value-add, especially for customers new to your product category. It builds trust and makes the shopping experience smoother and more satisfying.

Should I just offer one big bundle, or are different options better?

Depends on your catalog, but offering tiers can be very smart. Think “Basic Starter Kit” vs. “Deluxe Pro Kit.” This caters to different customer needs and budgets. It’s a classic “Good, Better, Best” pricing strategy. It gives shoppers a sense of choice and control while still guiding them toward a curated solution, which often encourages them to upgrade to the higher-value option. It provides convenience at multiple price points.

Creating Product Bundles In Shopify – Strategic Options