Product Bundles

Product bundling is one of the most effective marketing strategies. Bundle a few products together, sell them at a discount price and voilà – sales go up! However, product bundling is not all about boosting sales. For some shops, product kits and custom-built assemblies are an essential part of their business, which needs to be built upon a flexible, user-friendly e-commerce platform. With ‘Product Bundles’, WooCommerce provides a one-stop solution that covers almost every bundling need!

‘Product Bundles’ is as flexible as it gets: Product packages can be created by mixing variable & simple items in any quantity, without losing the ability to manage every item’s stock. Variable items can be bundled in multiple instances, with some of their options disabled and, depending on what is bundled and how, different pricing and shipping schemes may be selected.

Features ↑ Back to Top

• Create and sell combos, multi-product kits, or product assemblies by bundling simple, variable or even downloadable products together, in any quantity or configuration.
• Keep track of stock not only on an item level, but also on a bundle level.
• Bundle products in quantities – useful for creating product kits and bulk discount combos.
• Bundle variable products and customize them down to the last detail:
  • Fine-tune their options by filtering out specific variations.
  • Override their default front-end selections.
  • Add and configure multiple instances of the same variable product to create any product/variation combo you can imagine.
• Individually customize the presentation of bundled items:
  • Show or hide their images.
  • Override their default titles.
  • Override their default short descriptions.
• Choose between different bundle pricing schemes: do you want to give your bundle a static discount price, or to follow a per-item pricing approach?
• Select a shipping scheme: are the bundled items shipped together, individually, or not at all?
• All this – and much more – wrapped in a predictable, simple user interface.

Checklist ↑ Back to Top

Installation ↑ Back to Top

• Ensure you have the latest version of WooCommerce installed.
• Unzip and upload the plugin’s folder to your /wp-content/plugins/ directory.
• Activate the extension from the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress.

Creating Bundles ↑ Back to Top

Creating a product bundle is super-easy. The first step is to create a new product and select the new “Product Bundle” type.

Pricing and Shipping Options

At this point, it’s time to choose a pricing and shipping scheme.

‘Product bundle’ type options: ‘Non-Bundled Shipping’ & ‘Per-Item Pricing’

Bundled vs. Non-Bundled Shipping

• If your bundle consists of items that are meant to be assembled or packaged together, then leave the “Non-Bundled Shipping” box un-checked and go on to define the physical properties and/or shipping class of the product bundle, as you would do with any other product.
• If, however, the bundled items are shipped individually, their shipping properties must be retained, since each item will contribute to the final shipping cost as if it was added to the cart alone. In this case, the checkbox must be ticked.

“Non-Bundled Shipping” basically tells woocommerce to calculate the shipping cost based on the shipping properties of the bundled items. If all items are virtual, there will be no shipping cost to calculate.

Bundled vs. Per-Item Pricing

• If you want to assign a static price to the bundle, regardless of the value of its contents, fill in the price fields as you would do with any other product and leave the “Per-Item Pricing” box un-checked. Keep in mind that if the bundle contains variable items, user selections will not have any effect on the total price.
• If, however, you need to let the bundle’s price be defined by the actual value of its contents, the “Per-Item Pricing” checkbox must be ticked. In this case, the price fields will be disabled, and the total price charged for the bundle will be the sum of all bundled item prices.

Managing Inventory

By default, the sale of a product in a bundle will have the same effect on its stock as an individual sale – there are no separate inventory settings for bundled items. However, by clicking on the Inventory settings tab, stock management can also be enabled on a bundle level. This can be extremely useful for keeping track of bundled sales, or setting bundle sale limits.

Adding Products

To add products to your bundle, click on the “Bundled Products” tab and start adding products to the “Bundled Products” field. Then, save your bundle to get access to the more advanced options. If you need to define quantities for your bundled items, or modify their options, keep reading! Otherwise, publish your bundle and you’re all set!

Multi-Instance Bundling

Since version 2.0, it is possible to bundle multiple instances of the same variable product and configure each instance separately. When adding products to your bundle, you can add a particular variable product as many times as you need – after saving, each instance that you have added to the bundle can be configured individually, as if it was a standalone item.

This new feature opens the door to endless bundling possibilities: If, for example, your catalog includes a “Tennis Ball” in “Green” and “Yellow” color variations, you can create a “Tennis Ball x2″ bundle by adding the “Tennis Ball” product twice, effectively allowing your customers to choose a different color for each ball. Or (see: “Advanced Options” below), you might prefer to activate only the “Green” variation for the first ball and the “Yellow” variation for the second one!

Product Bundles Admin Area – The “Bundled Products” Tab.

Advanced Options

‘Product Bundles’ is built with customization in mind. To start with, it allows you to assign a quantity to each bundled item, giving you great flexibility to create even the most complex product kits. Moreover, it is ideal for creating bundles that consist of variable products, since it allows you to restrict/modify their options on a bundle level.

Quantity Bundling

This is perhaps the most straightforward option, which applies to both simple and variable items: it simply allows you to select a quantity for each bundled item. Find the product whose bundled quantity you want to set, enter a number and hit save. Now, every time the bundle is added to the cart, the quantity of that item will be equal to the value that you have specified here.

Variation Filtering

Variation filtering can be applied to variable products only. It gives you the possibility to restrict the options available on the front-end, by activating only a subset of the available variations. Find the product that you wish to modify, enable variation filtering and then fill the available field only with the variations that you wish to activate – then, remember to save your changes.

Here’s two possible applications where Variation Filtering can work wonders:

• Offer bundle discounts on products or specific variations that haven’t fared too well with sales.
• Offer kits or assemblies that consist of parts with incompatible variations, by grouping these parts in bundles and activating only the options that match.

Override Default Selections

The front-end default options of each bundled variable product can be overridden by making new selections, which are only valid within the scope of each product bundle. When filtering out variations of a bundled product, it is probably a good idea to activate this option and select new defaults, since the option defaults set on that bundled item’s product page may correspond to variations which you have intentionally deactivated.

Selling Bundles ↑ Back to Top

Now it’s time to see how Product Bundles works on the front-end, with the help of a fictional store: “Handmade Glass”.

“Handmade Glass” sells two types of handmade drinking glasses:

• Regular glasses, which are variable products, available in ‘Low’ and ‘Tall’ size variations, and
• Cocktail glasses, which are simple products.

The “Handmade Glass” Catalog

Product Pages

Displaying, configuring and buying product bundles on the front-end is as straightforward as with any other product. When clicking on a product bundle, all bundled items are listed on the product page along with their short descriptions, quantities and availability statuses. Prices are also shown when per-item pricing is active. Variable product options can be chosen as usual, and when all options have been selected, all items can be added to the cart with one click.

Example 1: Cocktail Set

Let’s take another look at the “Handmade Glass” store. Their “Cocktail Set” bundle contains 3 simple products in quantities of 1. The bundle has a been assigned a static price of €16.50 (regular) and €15 (sales). This is how the product page looks like:

The “Cocktail Set” Product Page.

Note how Product Bundles aggregates the attributes of all bundled items:

‘Product Bundles’ lists any attributes added to the product bundle (none exist above), as well as the attributes of all bundled items.

Example 2: Rough Modern 2×4 Set

This one is priced per-item – therefore, the price of every product is clearly displayed.

Set of 4 ‘Low’ & 4 ‘Tall’ Rough Modern glasses.

Here’s how the ‘Rough Modern 2×4 Set’ was configured:

Rough Modern 2×4 Set Configuration.

Note that:

• The Rough Modern 2×4 glass set has been created by bundling 2 instances of the ‘Rough Modern Deco’ glass.
• The ‘Tall’ variation of ‘Rough Modern Deco Low’ and the ‘Low’ variation of ‘Rough Modern Deco Tall’ have been disabled and are not selectable on the front-end.
• The short descriptions of the bundled items have been overridden – in this particular case, they have been completely disabled by typing a single empty space character in the short description fields.

Cart & Checkout

The cart & checkout pages are as straightforward as it gets. All bundled items are added normally to the cart, and are organized right beneath a container item.

To make everything more clear, let’s go back to the “Handmade Glass” store and see the items we’ve added to our cart:

We just couldn’t resist.

Note that the quantity selectors of bundled items are disabled. The reason is that the quantity of each item is always kept in sync with the quantity of the bundle – or, more precisely, the quantity of the bundle multiplied by the bundled quantity of that particular item. Changes can be made by adjusting the quantity on a bundle level only.

Exception: If a bundle contains an item that is sold individually, its quantity will always be locked to 1. Moreover, if all items in a bundle are sold individually, then the quantity of that bundle cannot be adjusted.

Note, also, that when per-item pricing is active, all bundled items’ prices are displayed individually, otherwise a single price is shown next to the container product.

Upcoming Features ↑ Back to Top

• Support for dynamic bundled-product images (added in v1.3).
• Bundle variations of a variable product along with the product itself for infinite bundling possibilities (added in v2.0).
• Bundled item support for the Product Add-ons extension. (added in v2.10)

Theme Development ↑ Back to Top

For theme developers that need to modify or change the appearance of the single-product pages specifically in the case of product bundles, the extension includes a bunch of template files in the /templates/single-product folder, which can be overridden just like any other WooCommerce template file.

Moreover, the style of bundled items in the cart, checkout and order pages can be customized by making use of the “bundled_table_item” class, which is added to every bundled item table tr element.

Common Issues ↑ Back to Top

The individual products within the bundle must have a price assigned, even if the bundle is not priced per-product. WooCommerce does not allow products with an empty price to be purchased – the same is valid if these products are part of a Bundle.