Adding Bundling to Your Shopify Store
Bundling is a feature that Shopify doesn’t support out of the box, and for less experienced store owners and developers, this can be an intimidating project to tackle. For restaurants and food products, this may be a noticeable inconvenience because store owners may get more profit selling in bulk. For example, a marinara sauce store that sells sauces may want to sell in bulk because of consumer habits. When people buy marinara sauce, they usually buy more than one. So, businesses want to sell in bulk or bundles. A great example of this is one of my recent projects. I had a client who wanted to replicate Raos.com. The website has a feature where the visitor can select 12 sauces out of the whole variation of sauces to add to the visitor’s case. When the visitor completes his or her selections, they add the case to cart and checkout. With some insight and connections with a knowledgeable developer, you can build a similar if not identical customer experience. Furthermore, I will only mention apps that give customers the option of selecting out of the variation products and adding them to a bundle for checkout. Now, when going about bundling, you have three options: a third party app integration, a custom app integration, and a progressive web app approach.
Third Party Apps
The first option to consider for bundling is third-party app integrations. At the moment, the two most popular third party apps that support this type of bundling are Bundable and Bundle Builder. These two apps have positive ratings, but Bundle Builder provides a free plan at the moment. Now, for my client, I used Bundable. With Bundable, I can create bundles, and specify the minimum and max amount for the bundle, the price, and other relevant details. I think that they made it very easy to use, but it lacked design flexibility. In other words, I’m stuck with the template that they provide. So I had to use JQuery to manipulate the DOM and change the content to fit the owner’s requirements. Bundle Builder, on the other hand, provides owners with the opportunity to use different template pages while customizing the css. This provides the developer with much more control over the layout of the bundling out the box. Another thing to keep in mind with these apps, is that they rely on routing which redirects you to another page, so you won't be able to use snippets with these apps. This was a problem that I bumped into, because I wanted to recreate the user experience from Rao's case builder.
Custom Apps
The second option to consider is building your own app. No monthly payments, and no third party support. Everything that you’ll need will be in arm’s reach in the case that you have a team. Great example of a custom built app that supports bundling is shopboxfox.com. They have bundling built-in into their website through a custom app integration. Depending on your selections, the website will add specific items to your gift box until you run out of space. It's an awesome website that provides an effective solution with an excellent customer experience. With the necessary skills and planning, the app can answer directly to the needs of the business seamlessly.
Headless E-Commerce
The last option to consider is headless e-commerce. Headless e-commerce separates the interface that visitors interact with from the backend. The major advantage of this approach is that you can build a website that’s not confined to the limitations of the Shopify platform. In other words, your team would be free to create features that the platform does not support by default. With frameworks like Next.js and Gatsby, this route has become much easier to go with. If you want to learn more about this approach, read “Headless Commerce, Explained”. This read demystifies the solution.
Conclusion
Overall, each solution provides its advantages and disadvantages. Once again, I know that there are other apps out there, but they approach bundling differently than Rao's. For example, Bold Bundles is another popular app that provides bundling from the angle of sales and promotions. Bundable and Bundle Builder provide bundling with a focus on convenience for the customer. For a team with more flexible design requirements, I recommend Bundle Builder because they provide a free plan and more design flexibility. For anyone who wants to use the Shopify platform and doesn’t mind building on top of the platform to create a more unique customer experience, I recommend the private or custom app route. With some planning and a touch of creativity, someone can build something similar to Rao’s Homemade Sauces without going the headless commerce route. Yet, if you need to exercise a lot of creativity and provide something very unique without investing a ton into building on top of Shopify, I recommend going the headless commerce route. Either way, I hope this general overview gave you a better understanding on your options. In the near future, I’ll go more into the technical side of the development of these solutions for other business problems, so stay tuned.