Product bundling ideas to grow your business

Product bundling is an underrated but highly effective sales-boosting tool. Learn what makes it so powerful and how to create and deploy a successful bundle marketing strategy in your ecommerce store.

A product bundle marketing strategy is a sales approach where you group multiple products together and offer them as a single package, usually at a discounted price compared to buying the items separately. The goal is simple: increase your store’s average order value, help customers discover complementary products, and drive more conversions with less friction.

Bundling works across all ecommerce verticals. It’s not limited to one type of product or business model — which makes it incredibly powerful.

Considering offering product bundles in your ecommerce store? Here is a deep dive into the benefits of bundle marketing, how it works, and a six-step guide to developing your own bundle marketing strategy.

What makes bundle marketing a powerful strategy?

Grouping relevant products brings a host of benefits to both your business and customers.

Types of product bundles

At its core, product bundling involves combining more than one item in a single package. However, depending on your product catalog, inventory goals, customer behavior, and other factors, there are different ways to deploy the bundle marketing strategy in your ecommerce store.

Pure bundling

With pure bundling, products are only available as part of the bundle. Customers can’t buy them individually. For example, the Nintendo Switch Animal Crossing Bundle kit includes a special edition design of the console, a pre-installed game, and themed controllers. None of these items are available separately.

Mixed bundling

Products in a mixed bundle can be purchased individually, but there’s an added discount or incentive to buy the set.

Mix-and-match bundling

Also known as custom bundling, this involves enabling customers to put together their own bundles by picking from a predetermined group of related products.

Cross-sell bundling

Cross-sell bundles consist of related or complementary items. For example, an electronics retailer can empower shoppers to create a bundle that includes a phone case of their choice along with related accessories like earbuds, charging kit, and memory cards.

Upsell bundling

Upsell bundles offer a more premium version of the original product plus extra items, often at a better per-item price. For example, a beauty retailer might offer customers to upgrade from a regular $20 foundation to a “Pro Kit” for $35, which includes a high-definition foundation plus primer and setting spray.

Examples of bundle marketing

Here are some examples of how well-known brands across various industries use bundle marketing to offload surplus stock, boost customer retention, and ultimately, increase their bottom line.

Technology and electronics (Smyths Toys)

The Xbox Series X console is pricey. Bundling it with Minecraft Legends Deluxe, a popular video game, increases its perceived value and makes it easier for hesitant buyers to justify the investment.

Food and beverage (McDonald's)

Arguably the most popular bundling example, McDonald's Happy Meals consists of a burger, fries, and drink at a reduced price. Customers can order each item separately, however, the bundled offer saves money and simplifies the purchase decision.

Digital services (Amazon Prime)

The ecommerce giant, Amazon, bundles full seasons and entire movie collections at a discount — think: all Harry Potter films or the Lord of the Rings trilogy. This keeps users engaged within Amazon’s ecosystem and reinforces the value of their Prime membership.

Entertainment and media (Hulu)

Hulu’s triple-play package bundles Hulu, Disney+, and ESPN+ under one subscription and expands their user base across content types — sports, kids, families, binge-watchers, etc. Customers pay less than they would if subscribing to each service individually.

Pro tip: To make the most of your bundle marketing efforts, launch them as campaigns built around a central idea. For example, new product bundles to introduce recent launches, clearance bundles to get rid of surplus stock, buy one get one free bundles to get rid of surplus stock and encourage goodwill, etc.

How to develop a successful bundle marketing strategy

These steps will guide you through the process of identifying the products to bundle, pricing them, crafting messaging, promoting, and optimizing your bundle offer.

Conduct customer research

Knowing what your customers want and how they shop is the first step to curating bundles that fly off your virtual store shelves. Thankfully, there are tons of sources to gather this data:

• Review historical sales reports to identify which products are often purchased together.
• Review abandoned shopping cart data. Sometimes customers try to build their own bundles — but don’t complete the purchase. That’s useful feedback.
• Survey your customers. Reach out to your most engaged customers directly and find out which products they typically use together or wish were bundled.
• Collate customer feedback. Customers sometimes mention their upcoming planned purchases in support tickets and product reviews.

Pick the type of bundle marketing offer

The products you choose to bundle highly depend on insights gleaned from your customer research and business goals.

Here are some ideas to help you put together product bundles:

• Use pure bundles to offer a curated product experience that can't be pieced together from individual items or if you are launching seasonal or promotional products.
• Use mixed bundles to increase the sales volume of specific products and reduce friction in the ordering process in the form of convenience and savings.
• Mix-and-match bundles are great for a large or diverse product catalog. Use them to increase units per transaction while giving customers more control over their purchases.
• Use cross-sell bundles to enrich the product experience with logical, useful accessories or add-ons.
• Use upsell bundles to encourage product discovery by pairing new releases with proven best-sellers.

Decide on product bundle prices

Bundles are priced depending on their type. Pure bundles, for example, aren't discounted so their prices remain unchanged.

To decide on a price for discounted bundles, sum up the combined retail price of the bundled items and calculate your profit margins after factoring in product cost, shipping (especially if it changes with bundle size), packaging, etc. Then offer a discount that makes the savings obvious — but not so steep that it devalues your products.

Tips to help you price product bundles:

• If you're bundling high-cost products, you may want to lower the discount or add a lower-cost item as a bonus.
• Offer multiple bundle options using tiered pricing to boost conversion rates. For example, a pet store can offer 3 bundle variants for dog treats as follows: a small pack (3 items) at $20, a medium pack (5 items) at $30, and a large pack (8 items) at $45.
• Avoid using bundles to give away too much value unless it's a strategic move — like clearing old stock or launching a new product.

Name your product bundles

Beyond its function as a label, your product bundle's name is a powerful marketing tool. A good practice is to use the product bundle's name to spotlight how it benefits customers.

Once you've settled on the bundle's unique name, you can tack on words like kit, set, pack, collection, bundle, etc. to signal completeness and value.

These tips will guide you to pick a name that's apt, easy to understand, and appealing.

• Focus on value or outcome. What does the bundle help the customer do?
• Use seasonal or themed labels. If your bundle is linked to an event or season, include that in the bundle name.
• For limited-time products. If your bundle is part of a special launch, limited release, or exclusive drop, the name can reflect that.
• For always available bundles. Product combos that are made available for a long time should be optimized for on-site and search engine searches.

Market product bundles

This McKinsey case study details how cross-selling techniques like bundling can boost profits by as much as 30%. It stands to reason then that you should turn up the dial on your bundle marketing efforts.

These tips will guide you to market bundle offers across various customer touchpoints:

• Product detail pages. Show hand-selected bundles in the vicinity of the "Add-to-cart" button or below the product description.
• Homepage. Carve out a section focused on bundle collections.
• Marketing emails. Create personalized email flows targeted at different audience segments to introduce and re-market your bundles.
• Social media. Create and curate various kinds of social content — reviews, UGC, influencer posts, etc. — dedicated to bundle offers.
• Custom landing pages. Bundle-specific landing pages enable customers to focus on the message of your campaign without distractions.

Track your bundle marketing strategy's performance

Bundling products isn't a one-and-done activity. To maximize profits, you must continually evolve your offers based on customer behavior.

To begin, measure the conversion rates, average order value, and cart abandonment rates for units sold in bundles versus standalone products. If, for instance, your average store conversion rate is 2.5%, your bundles should aim for the same or better.

A/B test bundle names, images, discounts, layouts, and add-on bonuses like free shipping to improve conversions. Pay attention to qualitative feedback shared via customer reviews, support tickets, emails, social media, etc., and continually tweak your bundle offerings accordingly.

Tools to implement bundle marketing in your ecommerce store

Whether your ecommerce store is built with WooCommerce or Shopify, these tools will supercharge your bundle marketing efforts.

WooCommerce plugins

WooCommerce Discount Manager

Instead of manually creating and managing separate bundle products, WooCommerce Discount Manager lets you apply discounts automatically when customers add qualifying items to their shopping carts — no need to build custom product pages or track bundle stock separately.

You can also use it to:

• Offer tiered discount options for quantity-based bundles. Think: buy X items, get Y percent off, and buy X items, get $X off offers.
• Apply bundle discounts across related product categories to cross-sell and upsell customers.
• Schedule and run limited-time product bundle promotions that expire automatically.
• Customize and showcase discount notices directly on product detail pages so customers understand the offer without leaving the page.

WooCommerce Product Table

WooCommerce Product Table allows you to present products in a fast, responsive table layout with advanced search, sort, and filter options. You can use it to create mix-and-match bundle pages where customers pick their preferred combination of products from a preset product catalog.

WooCommerce Fast Cart

WooCommerce Fast Cart upgrades the standard WooCommerce cart to a sleek, fast, on-page cart popup and checkout that shows recommended products alongside the cart summary. This makes it easier for customers to upgrade to a bundle offer and complete their purchases without leaving the product page.

WooCommerce Product Options

With WooCommerce Product Options, you can add checkboxes, radio buttons, image swatches, dropdowns, and even text fields to product pages for customers to choose what goes into their personalized bundle.

It also enables you to showcase bundle offers on product detail pages so customers can add them to their shopping carts with ease.

Shopify app

Wide Bundles – Quantity Breaks

Wide Bundles takes a three-pronged approach to flexible price incentives by enabling you to offer product bundle offers, quantity-based discounts, and tiered pricing discounts.

Unlike other apps that force you to clone variants or create multiple SKUs, Wide Bundles lets you create bundles directly on product detail pages. All the product variants are presented in one clean "offer" grid with the discounted price already baked in. Use it to create BOGO combos, mix & match bundles, cross-sells that pair frequently bought items, and more.

The best part? There are over 100 different options to choose from to customize how the offers are displayed so you can adapt buttons, colors, copy, layouts, and other elements to your store's design with ease.

Get started with Wide Bundles – Quantity Breaks today.

Launch your bundle marketing offers today!

Fewer marketing strategies are more effective than product bundling. No matter your niche, pairing relevant items together is a powerful yet low-effort way to increase average order value and customer satisfaction in your online store.

These tools will help you create and promote bundle offers across various customer touchpoints:

• WooCommerce Discount Manager. Apply discounts to qualifying bundle purchases — no need to build custom product pages or track bundle stock separately.
• WooCommerce Product Table. Present eligible items in a fast, responsive table layout where customers can pick and put together their preferred product combinations.
• WooCommerce Fast Cart. Upgrades WooCommerce's default cart to a sleek, same-page popup where you can present recommended bundled products alongside the cart summary so customers can complete their purchases quickly.
• WooCommerce Product Options. Allow customers to build their own personalized bundles or select from pre-built bundles from the product detail page.
• Wide Bundles – Quantity Breaks. Offer product bundles, BOGO deals, and quantity breaks to increase your store's average order value (AOV). Use it to provide BOGO deals, bundle cross-sells and upsells, build your own bundle offers, and more.