Best Bundle Apps for Shopify

Last updated: September 1, 2022

Shopify is an incredibly competitive space. In fact, as of 2021, there were already more than one million Shopify businesses covering 175 nations. And, as you’d imagine, that figure is growing (Popupsmart, 2021).

With so much competition, it’s more important than ever for Shopify stores to stand out. One way of differentiating your store is bundling.

At Upscribe, we’ll provide a list of apps that can help you bundle your products. After all, we’ve built a service to give e-commerce subscriptions the charge that they need to deliver a fantastic CX, unlock trapped value, and scale to the stars.

What is a Shopify bundle?

A Shopify bundle is a collection of products sold together with a specific discount. Rather than addressing this manually, merchants can use Shopify bundle apps to simplify this process. Of course, there are many ways of arranging bundles by using different rules and settings.

Here are some popular examples:

Pure bundles – These bundles contain products that you only sell together. Cable services often use pure bundling.

New product bundles – As you might imagine, this type of bundle combines a range of newly-launched products. It’s a great way of creating interest in your brand’s latest offerings.

Upselling bundles – You may want to use the popular marketing technique of upselling when offering bundle deals. Upselling involves offering a customer an upgraded edition of the product they initially seek to purchase. You could take a bundle-style approach to this by providing various upgraded products.

Cross-selling bundles – In this case, if a customer sets out to make a purchase, you could offer additional related items at a discount when purchased with the primary item.

Mix-and-match bundles – If you’d like to give your customers more choice, mix and match bundles allow them to customize the items included. For instance, a store may use these bundles to offer “five clothing items for the price of three” or “20% off a mix-and-match selection of baked goods”.

Gifting Bundles – This type of bundle would involve customers choosing several items to purchase as part of a custom gift box.

Product bundling can be great for online businesses. After all, it can lead to increased sales while reducing your marketing and distribution expenses.

You might also find this approach lowers your inventory waste. That’s because bundling makes it easier to focus on your best-selling products. As a result, you’d find it more straightforward to remove low-selling items, which could result in more free space in your warehouse, if applicable.

The best bundle apps for Shopify

#1. Upscribe

Key takeaway:

If you want a service that offers bundling but also provides a whole host of features for managing your online store in general, consider Upscribe. It is a comprehensive billing and subscriptions management platform for Shopify stores that can enable a fantastic purchasing experience for your customers. All of this can ultimately make it easier for your store to scale. Our features include intuitive dashboards, payment retry, and churn deflection.

As of August 2022, Upscribe provides bundling and build-a-box features. With this, online stores can provide more subscription bundle options to their customers. You can use Upscribe to increase your store’s average order value (AOV) and customer lifetime value.

Relevant features:

You can set up different boxes using various discount levels or pricing structures.
Customers can build Shopify product bundles, including customized bundles.
Customers can purchase bundles once off or subscribe.
Sliding discounts applied to bundles based on how many products the bundle features.
Subscribing customers could change what products appear in a bundled product for alternative purchases (e.g., swapping out green shoes for black shoes).

Pricing:

At a cost of £300 per month, Upscribe offers far more than apps designed simply for bundling. This makes it a great comprehensive choice for those looking to enhance their online store all-around.

Additional Features:

Beyond bundling, here are just a few additional ways we can help your business grow:

Manage and scale your production subscriptions: We offer tools making it straightforward for your customers to purchase or/and renew subscriptions through SMS or email. Our passwordless authentication feature also reduces friction, meaning happier customers.

Lower your subscription churn: Our smart cancellation flows and dunning management features can help keep your customers satisfied.

Analyze powerful subscription KPIs: Our powerful dashboards can enable you to make sense of key features like your subscription revenue and churn rate. Breaking down this valuable data will make it much easier to make the right changes to scale your store and improve customer loyalty.

Upscribe has helped many subscription stores take new leaps forward. For instance, functional foods company Four Sigmatic used Upscribe to increase their active subscribers by 50%.

Pros:

Provides far more than just bundling.
Gives plenty of options to merchants and customers alike.
Five-star rating on Shopify.

Cons:

You haven’t tried our free demo yet 🙂

#2. Frequently Bought Together

Key takeaway:

This app does exactly what it says on the tin. Frequently Bought Together uses smart AI to automatically create customer purchase recommendations.

Unlike Upscribe, Frequently Bought Together focuses solely on bundling. As you can see below, this app will automatically find items from your inventory that customers tend to purchase in a single visit and apply a discount.

Relevant features:

Allows for bundle discount upselling on a global or individual level. Discount options include providing the cheapest item for free, free shipping, and of course, a percentage discount.
Lets you integrate with review apps so you can display customer reviews.
You can completely customize the user interface, so it aligns with your branding. Alternatively, the app can automatically set your store theme based on the theme’s popularity.
Aside from automatic and manual purchase recommendations, it can also display random products (when there is insufficient data for an automatic recommendation). However, you can tailor this to filter random products (where needed) based on attributes like product type and product vendor.

Pricing:

Frequently Bought Together offers two payment plans:

Their Starter package is available for free and without limit for stores launched within three months of signing up.
This app also offers a Professional plan for $9.99 a month. Any Shopify store may use this edition, and it comes with efficient and knowledgeable customer support. The Professional package also comes with a 30-day free trial.

Pros:

4.9-star rating on Shopify.
Particularly keen on customization.
They will manually check your storefront after their app automatically generates a theme (if applicable).

Cons:

Customers have raised concerns over limited customer support options.
Some customers have complained that it’s hard to use.

#3. Bundle Builder App

Key takeaway:

Using the Bundle Builder app, you can offer customers product bundles, gift boxes, and customizable products. This app also allows you to use external inventory providers and multi-step pages to sell more at a faster rate.

Both you and your customers can build bundles using this app. Customers may also customize their packages to include a written message if they’d like.

The Bundle Builder app differs from the Frequently Bought Together app in quite a few ways. For instance, the former is more oriented toward customization and automation.

While the app allows multi-currency selling for single stock keeping units (SKU), multi-SKU bundles don’t come with this option.

Relevant features:

You can include all of your existing products on a single page.
Powerful templating with countless options.
Easy to set the minimums, maximums, required products, and discounts of your bundles.
Third-party inventory checks to prevent selling items that are out of stock.
You can also let customers sign up for an email notification when a currently out-of-stock item is back in.

Pricing:

The Bundle Builder app is available in three packages:

The free ‘Development Only’ edition lets you benefit from the app while you’re getting your store ready. However, you’d need to switch to a paid option for when your store goes live.
This app’s first paid plan is the $25 a month Standard package. It comes with unlimited bundles and a personalized onboarding call. This version suits stores on a Basic, Shopify, or Advanced plan.
Then there is Shopify Plus. With a $75 per month price tag, the Bundle Builder app has designed this package for stores on a Shopify Plus plan. You’d also get a personalized onboarding video call.

Pros:

Customers can create custom bundles.
Straightforward to sync up with your inventory.
This Shopify kit for bundling has a 4.4-star rating on Shopify.

Cons:

Not well-suited for multilingual Shopify stores.
Many customers have raised issues with the app’s customer support.

#4. PickyStory App

Last but not least, we have the popular ecommerce conversion platform PickyStory.

Key takeaway:

PickyStory is one of the more comprehensive bundling options out there. It has a wide range of product deals and discount engine features (more on those shortly). PickyStory has helped many ecommerce businesses advance. For instance, NxTSTOP used PickyStory to increase their AOV by 150%.

PickyStory, like the Bundle Builder app, focuses a lot on customization and automation. But it arguably gives the merchant more control and simplicity than its rival.

For example, PickyStory lets you establish a unique storefront API. You can use this app to differentiate your store in a way that will encourage customers to return. This not only makes it more likely for customers to remember your store, but it won’t look like you’ve gone with an overused template either.

Relevant features:

Uses drag and drop for adding bundles to your store.
Easily promote your PickyStory bundles via a range of marketing channels.
Offers tiered discounts and product kits for selling to a large market. This can include providing pre-defined and tiered pricing packs.
For fashion stores, use their “Shop the Look” feature to combine suitable items under particular visual themes.
Stack various deals with coupons. This can incentivize your customers to purchase more items.
You can choose from various discount options for your bundles (e.g., fixed amount, target price, percentage-based discount).
Merchants can set discount rules that require customers to meet specific conditions.

Pricing:

PickyStory offers two editions (Standard and Premium), although pricing within the Standard option can vary. If you have fewer than 500 monthly store orders, the Standard package would suit your store best.

How much you’d pay for the Standard edition depends on how much revenue you make with PickyStory. For instance, if you make between $0 and $100 a month, there is no charge. If you make $100 to $200 monthly, expect to pay $24.50 each month. Pricing rises to $279.50 per month plus $15 for every 1K of revenue if your store makes more than $5,000 monthly.

Pros:

You can easily monitor the performance of your bundles.
Stack many deals with coupons.
You get complete control over selecting product variance.
4.9-star rating on Shopify.

Cons:

Customer service is not highly rated.

How to choose the right app for you

You’ll need to consider your store’s criteria to find the right bundle app for you. Ask yourself questions such as:

Do I want specific bundling options? (e.g., mix-and-match bundles, upselling bundles, etc.)
Am I looking for a service to enhance my online store across the board or just an app for bundling specifically?
How much control do I want over bundling? (e.g., automated vs. manual or both)
What requirements may my store have that not all bundling apps will provide for? (e.g., multi-currency selling).
How much customization do I need for my storefront?

With these questions, you can narrow down your options further and hopefully find the perfect bundling app for you. Again, if you’re curious to explore more of Upscribe without spending a penny, you can schedule a free demo today.

Learn more through the Upscribe blog

In this article, we looked at the best bundle apps for Shopify. We explored their features, pricing, and pros and cons.

Check out our blog if you’d like to learn more about optimizing your online store. We explore topics like subscription business ideas and how you can generate more repeat business via Upscribe.