Creating Product Bundles- How to video for Shopify Stores

Hey there guys, this is Kellis Landrum from True North Social. We are a digital marketing agency in Los Angeles California and we are also Shopify experts. So if you need any help with your Shopify store, you need to build a Shopify store, You want to design one, you want to redesign one. You want to add some new functionality to it; you want to tweak somethings on your page, we are more than happy to help you out with that. Also,  we do digital marketing so if you need help with social media, with photography, with SEO or running ads. We can help you drive traffic to your store and get new sales and find new customers. So, we’d be happy to help you out with that but today, we are going to talk about creating product bundles.

website-design-review

Creating product bundles

Whoohoo! I know you are excited about this because if you have been trying to figure out product bundling, you probably be… been having a hard time with it. I know  I had to search far and wide (laughs) to find a good solution for this. There are product bundling apps out there on the market but none of them in my opinion actually bundle a product together which is a little misleading. Applying a discount to several products at a time is one thing but creating product bundles is another.

I looked through the Shopify forums very thoroughly to find an app that does product bundling and what I had to find was a little bit of a workaround because unfortunately only one offered bundling in the real sense of the term. So I am going to talk to you today about how we did that. I think it is prudent to talk first and foremost about what a product bundle is.

What is a product bundle?

The most direct correlation I can think of is if you have several individual products. Like, in this case, we are looking at sallysnacks.com. It is a client of ours that we, we put their site together. They sell high-end dog treats then and they come in 3 different flavors. So let’s say you had 3 different flavors of dog treats and you wanted to wrap them all in shrink wrap together and sell them as one product that is bundled together physically. Wrapped in shrink wrap, put a piece of tape around this, something where customers cannot separate them. Selling three products at a time increases your average order value and helps you with selling products at a faster rate, so it’s worth it even if you have to price the bundle slightly lower than the individual products. It also incentivizes the customers to buy more

Shopify product catalog

They must be purchased together as a set, so the set is a product in and of itself. That is what we refer to as a product bundle.  now, this is a little bit different than discounting several individual products. In this scenario, you can only buy these products as a set, which is a little bit different. Because there are apps out there that would allow you to take 3 products, add them to the cart and then apply a discount to it. But what can happen is somebody adds this one, they add this one, they add this one. They are supposed to get a discount on the 3 together and then they remove one, and now they are getting a discount on 2. They removed 2 of them, now they are getting a discount on 1. Maybe you don’t want to do that.

Product Bundling Strategy

We want to make sure that this person buys all 3 of these products. So what do we do? We go over to our products and we create a new 3-pack product. Tada!!!! We have… you know let’s go to this one on the front end over here in our shop. We got dogs, stuff for dogs and then we have a 3-pack product. So this is our 3-pack. Now, I know what you are saying Kellis, I can do that, no problem. Super easy to create a new product and it is. Why is that hard? Well, here is the tough part.

Sally snacks track the inventory on each of these products individually. So over here, chicken jerky has an inventory of 454, lamb is 383 and venison 417. So how do I get this product to subtract inventory from these 3 products over here? This is a little bit tricky animal here. You want to do this because you don’t want to move inventory from this product or any of these 3 products over to this, these 3 products. And in fact, you could create variants and track that inventory separately but you

Don’t want to do that. Because what if you run out of inventory over here and you still have inventory over here.

Creating Product Bundles with Products Assistant by Zetya

How to make a “real” product bundle in Shopify

What if you run out of inventory on an individual product and you actually still have it because it’s tied up in a separate product over here. You don’t want to do that. You want to make it so when somebody buys this product, it decrements inventory from these products. So let’s talk about how you do that. We found an app called ‘Products Assistant by Zetya’ (you can find in in the shopify app store). Now, you would notice the title of Products Assistant by Zetya does not include the word bundle in it . There are a lot of other apps that have the word bundle in them but they can’t create a bundle like this. What they do is they take a bunch of carted products and discount them, which is not what we want. What we want is to decrement inventory from individual products when they buy a bundled one. So let’s take a look at how Products Assistant does that.

Products Assistant

Products Assistant is actually an automation tool. It automates a lot of processes. Now, it’s not just for product bundling, that’s why it’s not called product bundler. But when you think of automation, what I want you to think of is rules. The rules are if this happens, do this thing, do something else. If this happens, do this, then this, then this, then this. so, what Products Assistant calls automation is tasks.

So we are going to create a new task for it and the new task is to select inventory. or synchronize inventory (laughs) sorry, I don’t mean to confuse you. So what do we want to synchronize inventory on? We want to synchronize inventory on our product bundles so we need to select our product bundle. We get a list of products, it shows me 10 at a time and then it paginates. So my product, my 3-pack is not actually here, it’s on the next page.

Make it happen

So I’m going to click that select it and hit okay. Now, what are my components, I got to look those up. Okay, so  I have a bunch of products in here. Now, Products Assistant, unfortunately, truncates titles (laughs) on products. So what you want to do is you want to hover over it to see the entire title. We have the store set up to do subscriptions and subscriptions require some hidden products. I want to make sure I am not selecting the hidden product and I need to be able to see the entire title of the product with this tooltip.

When I went to this one, that is the correct one and hit okay. Now, I have one here so I need to add 2 and 3. So I hit the add button, this gives me a second product to add so I’m going to add my second product. Then I’m gonna hit add again to add my third product, which is  here.

But what about variants?

Okay, now just real quick, we are going to keep this simple but what you could do is some of your products might have variants and you might want to create a product bundle with variants as well. Think if this pack of dog treats comes in the small, medium and large. I could create a Sally Snacks 3 fault and small and then I would tie all the small variants of the individual product to it . I’d have to do that 3 times for each different size to create different rules. But for now, but rest assured you can do it, you can play with that on your own if you want to try it. For now, we are just going to keep this simple and we are just going to do these products straight up.

How to create a product bundle

I’ve created my product bundle, I’ve got my components, they are all selected. I’m gonna hit save. Now, I can see my rule here, it’s trigger… it triggers by the order here. That means when someone orders the 3-pack, it will trigger the inventory synchronization. My status is checked so we are good to go. So, let’s take a look at our back end here, just gonna close this out. I do want to keep track of our inventory over here. Cause what’s going to happen is I’m going to buy this 3-pack and what I want to happen is for the quantity of each of these to go down by 1. We call this decrement, yeah. If you think of increment as you go up one, decrement is you go down one. So you want it to decrement our inventory by 1.

The proof

I am going to screen shoot my inventory for reference here.  Save my little screenshot here cuz I am on a mac and we’ll go over here to orders. And I’m going to create a new order so I can order this product, I want a 3-pack. All products, Sally snacks 3 pack, that is what I want. So I can see my 3-pack here, this is my order. , for testing purposes, I’m going to mark this as pending, which basically tells Shopify to process this order and I’ll collect the money later somehow. Don’t worry about running your credit card. If someone wanted to pay you in cash and you wanted to process in order to ship through Shopify, this is essentially how you do it.

managing ecommerce inventory for creating product bundles

So I’m going to create an order, this creates my order. It says it’s been created, it’s nice and green. One note about Products Assistant is sometimes, it takes a second to run. Depending on how Shopify… how fast Shopify servers are on any given day. Could be 5 seconds, could be 30 seconds, could be a minute or two. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to refresh my page and we should see all of these numbers go down by 1. I’m gonna buy myself a little time here for  Products Assistant to run by opening my screenshot here and pulling it over so we can compare.

More proof

So let’s see, we are at 383, 417 and 454, let’s see if this thing has had enough time to do its thing. I’m gonna refresh our page and drum roll. We are at 382 down from 383, 416 down from 417 and 453 down from 454. This means that Products Assistant ran exactly as we expected it to, which is fantastic.

So this is how you go about creating product bundles, just for reference, just as important. If you want to refund someone, someone decides to cancel their order. We need to make sure that that Products Assistant is properly refunding somebody and putting our… Shopify will refund somebody but Products Assistant will put their inventory back where it is supposed to be. Let’s refresh this, see if it’s enough time to run and it looks like it was. We are back up to normal.

Conclusion

So that is how you go about creating product bundles. If you can follow this, fantastic kudos to you. If you are like I don’t want to bother with this, I want to get somebody to help me out with this, feel free to contact us. Go to truenorthsocial.com. Again, my name is Kellis Landrum, our phone number is on our website. Our email,  you can email us through any of the forums on our website, you can reach to us. We are more than happy to help you out with this or any of your other needs with running or marketing your online store. Once again, this is Kellis Landrum from True North Social and I hope you have a great day.

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