Bundle up this BFCM: Offering product bundles on Shopify

When it comes to Black Friday and Cyber Monday, online shoppers expect deep discounts and massive savings. But as a Shopify entrepreneur—even if you sell a bunch of your products—the discounted prices cut into your margins and leave a meager profit. Offering crazy discounts on your products can also devalue your brand, resulting in your customers always waiting for the next big sale and never purchasing your products at their full price.

So how can you compete with those stores selling of their entire catalog at 60% off? It’s all about perceived value. In retail, perceived value is the value of the product to the customer in its ability to solve a problem they have—not the actual monetary value of the item. One way to boost that perceived value is to bundle your products with other products to offer a more complete experience. Of course, you’ll also want the price of your bundled products to be less than the sum of the product’s individual prices.

Some classic examples of product bundles include bundling gaming consoles with controllers and games, bundling home internet with tv packages, or offering a drink and fries with a burger. Sure, a new Playstation is great but it’d be a lot more fun with two controllers and Madden 20.

In the next few weeks leading up to Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the rest of the holiday season, we’ll be taking a deep dive into Ultimate Special Offers’ top three offer types (by popularity). We’ve already tackled volume discounts, this week it’s bundles, and next we’ll go in-depth on BOGO offers.

Deciding which products to bundle

Choosing the right products to bundle takes a bit of research, common sense, and iteration. First off, your bundle needs to make sense. For example, if you’re selling shoes you could offer socks or shoelaces in a bundle as both those products fit with shoes and add value. Let’s take a look at a few IRL examples and determine how enticing each bundle is.

One of the hottest gaming consoles on the market—and a very popular 2019 holiday gift—right now is the Nintendo Switch. Currys PC World, a UK-based electronics retailer, is offering the console in a variety of bundles to their customers. Rather than just a single bundle offer, Currys is offering various combinations of games, controller types, memory storage, and colours. Offering a greater amount of bundle combinations leaves the customer with options and feeling of control over what they’re purchasing. If Currys only offered one bundle with one game their bundle offer would not be as appealing to as wide of an audience.

It’s important to leave bundling options somewhat in the hands of the customer. The more control they have over customizing their bundle the greater their perceived value will be.

Biolite sells its PowerLight Bundle year-round. The bundle includes their best-selling lighting products, and the product page includes a video that shows customers how the items in the bundle work together.

It’s worth investing time into perfecting your bundle offers because they have a longer shelf life than a classic discount sale. As we’ve mentioned, bundle offers increase your average order value and don’t cut into your profits as much as some other deals, so put some thought into which products you want to bundle, and leave the sale up over the entire holiday season.

MEC offers camping bundles for customers who need a full setup—tent, mattress, and sleeping bag. These items are often bought together, so offering them in a bundle rewards the customer while increasing MEC’s average order value.

Showing each item on the product page gives the customer a good visual of what the products will look like together (this is especially important for anyone in the clothing and fashion industry).

Marketing your bundles

When it comes to marketing your bundle offer, you’ll want to use all of the regular channels you would with any other products—email, social, paid media, etc.
Of course, the main difference is that you will want to show your products being used together.

Classic product photography of the two items together—as seen in the MEC example above—is good, but showcasing the products actually being used/worn together will give your customers a better idea of the true value of the bundle.

One of the best ways of doing this is on Instagram. The platform is a natural fit for lifestyle product photography, plus if you’re using a business account (and you should be!) you can tag your products in the photo.

Choosing the right tool

There are plenty of apps that will allow you to offer bundles in your Shopify store. Our app, Ultimate Special Offers, will allow you to offer bundles along with seven other offer types including BOGO, volume, bulk, free gifts, and more. On top of these other offer types, Ultimate Special Offers provides a robust analytics dashboard that will allow you to review, adjust, and optimize your various offers on the fly.

Ultimate Special Offers is trusted by thousands of Shopify merchants to run their Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and many other important sales year-round. It’s also backed by our stellar support team who will help you get past any hurdles you may encounter with the app.