What is Product Bundling (2026 Guide)

Want to learn what product bundling is and how to use this sales-boosting technique in your online store? We’ve got you covered.

👋 Bundling individual products together is a great way to achieve your sales and revenue goals. In this guide, we’ll walk you through how to do it.

Specifically, here’s what we’ll cover:

• What is product bundling (with types and examples)?
• The advantages of product bundling.
• How to use product bundles in your ecommerce store.

First, let’s look at what product bundling is.

What is product bundling?

Product bundling is a technique for grouping several products and selling them together as a single unit for one price.

With bundles, customers can choose to buy one or multiple items from the bundle or add the entire bundle to their cart, usually at a lower price point. 

Bundling is a way to encourage customers to buy more when they order. It is quite effective at this, which is why all the big brands do it.

Gillette’s Best Bundle and McDonald’s Happy Meals are great examples of product bundles. Instead of selling blades, razor cases, and razor stands separately, Gillette sells them as a combination in a bundle. The same goes for a burger, soda, and fries in the McDonald’s Happy Meal bundle.

What are upselling and cross-selling bundles?

The items in a bundle are usually complementary – those that work well together (like a razor, blades, and a razor stand). Because of this, we can consider product bundling a form of cross-selling, that is, selling complementary products together.

Product bundles can also be upsells, especially when there’s a main product and its add-ons in the bundle. For example, a smartphone with a screen protector, earbuds, and a phone case. This way, customers can upgrade their purchases with add-ons and buy more products in the process.

How is product bundling different from grouped products?

Most ecommerce platforms, like WooCommerce, have ‘grouped products’ as a product type. Seeing as grouped products and product bundles are all ways to gather products and sell them at once, how do they differ?

Grouped products are a collection of products that can be purchased individually but only consist of simple products. For example, a set of 6 ceramic espresso cups. Customers can buy individual items in the group or buy them as a set.

On the other hand, with product bundles, you can include different types of products, such as:

• Simple products.
• Variable products.
• Composite products, and more.

Bundle offers usually come at a discounted price. This is something we rarely see with grouped products. Grouped products are typically used to allow customers to have an easy time browsing and purchasing related items. In contrast, bundleds are used to market the items in the bundle and increase sales.

Now that we’re familiar with what product bundling is, let’s look at the different ways you can do it.

What are the different types of product bundling?

You can use different types of product bundling strategies depending on your marketing goals, pricing strategy, and what your customers prefer. Let’s look at some examples so you can pick the type of bundling that works for your business.

Pure bundling

Pure bundling is when the items that make up the bundle can only be bought as a bundle and not as individual products. Customers can’t purchase individual items in the bundle separately as standalone products. 

A great example of pure bundling is in Hello Fresh’s (the meal kit delivery service) business model. If a customer wants a meal kit, for example, a Chicken Thyme with Zucchini Couscous, they can only buy the ingredients plus the recipe in the bundle. They can’t order individual ingredients like zucchini, chicken cutlets, or dried thyme separately.

Mixed bundling/mix-and-match bundles

Mixed bundling is the exact opposite of pure bundling. This is when you bundle related products sold separately and sell them as a package. Customers can buy the items that make up the bundle individually or buy the entire bundle.

The Gillette Best Bundle we talked about earlier is a great example. Gillette sells blades, razor cases, and razor stands separately but offers them in the best bundle as a single unit. 

New product bundling

When you’ve introduced a new product, you can bundle it with other popular products to increase its visibility. This is called new product bundling and it uses the popularity of other products in your store to help you introduce new products to your customers.

Add-on bundling

Add-on bundling is a pretty common way to upsell your customer’s purchase. This is a type of bundling where you offer additional products as add-ons to a specific product. Let’s say you run a food delivery business, you can offer appetizers, sides, and extra sauces or components (extra pepperoni or chicken tikka for pizza) as add-ons to a customer’s meal.

Alternatively, if you sell electronics, you can offer several video games as add-ons to customers who buy a gaming console (PS5, X-box One, etc.).

Buy-one-get-one bundles

A buy-one-get-one bundle offer is when you offer an additional item for ‘free’ after a customer buys another one. We put free in quotes because the second product is often not free.

You can either:

• Add a pretty heavy discount to the second item (like 40% off).
• Or inflate the price of the first item and offer the second one for free.

Domino’s Pizza uses this technique to great effect. You can order a large classic pizza and get a soda for free.

Inventory clearance bundling

If you have slow-moving items, you can bundle them together with the faster-moving ones to increase the rate at which they’re sold. For example, in a bookstore, you can pair academic textbooks, which are usually slow-moving, with your best-sellers.

This allows you to clear out slow-moving stock to create space for new stock.

Gift bundles

Gift bundles group related items together to be sold as a gift package. These bundles are usually themed, for example, you can have a ‘Foodie’, ‘Techie’, or ‘Spa Day’ bundle. 

There are many more types of bundling. Bundling is such a flexible marketing technique that you can bundle any items together as long as they make sense to your customers.

How important is product bundling to your online store? Let’s go over some advantages and see why you should be using it in your ecommerce store.

Advantages of bundling

Product bundles were initially popularized during the holiday season and by specific online stores. But now they’re used year-round by more online retailers because they have numerous benefits, such as the following:

It increases average order value (AOV)

One of the main benefits of product bundling is that it increases your AOV (average order value). And, as mentioned earlier, it is effective at it.

📈 According to studies, there is a 20% increase in transaction value when products are bundled together.

Product bundling encourages customers to buy more products each time they order. Instead of leaving your online store after buying a razor blade only, for example, they can buy a bundle containing the razor blade, shaving cream, and a razor stand. 

As a result, they’ll spend more when they buy products in a bundle. This will boost sales and your AOV.

It improves customer experience

Shopping for related products can be a frustrating experience when customers have to add each individual product to their carts one after the other. Product bundling saves them the time and effort it would take to do this by presenting related products on a single product page. 

They don’t have to make several trips to the shop page to find related items. This makes for a great shopping experience for your customers.

📈 In fact, studies show that 68% of customers prefer bundled offerings.

In addition, customers will get the chance to buy products at a reduced price, which saves them some money.

It helps you save on marketing costs

When done right, product bundling can be a cost-effective marketing strategy. Suppose you have 10 products in a bundle. Without product bundling, you would have to market each of these products separately. 

You’ll need to set up different campaigns which will inflate your marketing costs. But with bundling, you can group these items and market them as a single unit.

Reduced distribution costs

Product bundling reduces your distribution costs in the same way it helps you save on marketing costs. Look back at our example, if you have 10 individual products to sell separately, you’ll have to package and ship them separately. That’s quite a lot of boxes to ship when you’re doing it for all products in your store.

Bundling enables you to ship fewer boxes and save on your distribution costs. You can place all these items in a single box and ship them at once.

Reduced inventory wastage

📈 Research shows that across the supply chain, 8% of stock ends up as waste. This happens due to various reasons such as overstocking, damage, or poor inventory management stock.

The items you stock but don’t sell end up being dead stock. Deadstock hurts your profit margins and your bottom line because you spend money to acquire this stock, but it doesn’t bring in any returns. 

Product bundling can help you avoid the problem of deadstock by bundling slow-moving products with fast-moving ones. You can even make use of the Buy-One-Get-One technique to incentivize customers so that you move this stock and replace it with products that sell.

After understanding what bundles are and why they’re important, we’re ready to jump into what brought us here. So let’s dive in and see how you can use bundles in your ecommerce store.

How to use bundles in your ecommerce store

In this section, we’ll walk you through how to add product bundling to your online store. We’ll talk specifically about WooCommerce stores on WordPress sites, but you can also apply this to any online store.

WooCommerce has two ways of grouping products on the product page in the default install:

• Grouped products. Displaying products in the same set (for example, a set of dinner plates).
• Linked products. Upsells and cross-sells.

By default, WooCommerce lacks a way to group different products on the product page and sell them as a single unit. Fortunately, you can do this easily with the help of a plugin.

Add product bundles with discounts

WooCommerce Bundled Products is the plugin that allows you to add product bundles to your online store and increase your average order value. It gives you the freedom to create your bundles, pick the products in the bundle, and incentivize them with irresistible discounts.

With this plugin, you can create different types of product bundles, including:

• Hampers. Especially for gifts, to make it easier for your customers to select gifts for friends and family.
• Add-on bundles. With a main product with its add-ons.
• Lookbooks. To help customers shop the look.
• And more.

Here’s how it works.

How WooCommerce Bundled Products works

Once you install the WooCommerce Bundled Products plugin in your WordPress site, it automatically adds the Bundled product type to your WooCommerce store.

As such, you can specify ‘Bundled Product’ as your product type from the Product Data section when creating a new product.

Then, you’ll pick the items to be included in the bundle. For example, shampoo, leave-in conditioner, and texturizing spray are available for customers who want fine hair products.

You’ll have the option to:

• Set up bundle pricing. Show or hide the price for the bundle and determine how the prices will be displayed.
• Allow customers to add individual items or the entire bundle to their cart.
• Show or hide prices, quantity, and ‘Add to Cart’ buttons for each product.
• Add and configure discounts.

When customers visit your product page they will see multiple products in a bundle which they can add to their carts at once. Or select what they want to add to their purchase from the bundle.

Why should you use WooCommerce Bundled Products in your online store?

WooCommerce Bundled Products allows you to extend your product types to include bundled products. This is an extremely profitable product type that boosts your sales and AOV (average order value).

Apart from that, you’ll also enjoy the following benefits.

Add any product type

You won’t be limited to simple products alone, unlike with grouped products. You can add any product type to your bundle including simple products, variable products, or composite products.

When you add variable products to the bundle, customers will be able to choose the color, size, material, etc., before purchasing the entire bundle.

Make your bundles irresistible with discounts

📈 Did you know that 67% of customers have made an unplanned purchase solely because of a coupon or discount? This means customers factor discounts into the purchase decision-making process.

WooCommerece Bundled Products allows you to add discounts to make your bundled offer appealing to your customers. You’ll be able to show them how much they save by purchasing the bundle, and this might just seal the deal for you.

Create customizable bundles

WooCommerce Bundled Products does a great job of allowing you to create product bundles. But if you want to create a cross-sell bundle where customers can add or leave items out of their purchase, you’ll need a different plugin.

Iconic Sales Booster for WooCommerce, the WooCommerce cross-selling plugin, allows you to do this quickly and easily. You can use this plugin to bundle complementary products or product add-ons together with a simple or variable product on the single product page.

It allows you to suggest a product bundle comprising products frequently bought together with what a customer is interested in. When customers click on this product, they’ll see a bundle with related items on the product page, just below the ‘Add to Cart’ button.

Each product will have a checkbox next to it. Customers can check the boxes for the items they want to add to their purchase and leave what they aren’t interested in unmarked. Then, they can click ‘Add to Cart’, and the items they checked, together with the main product, will be added to their carts.

Add discounts to make your customizable bundles irresistible with Iconic Sales Booster

Iconic Sales Booster allows you to customize this offer and increase the chances that customers will add it to their purchase. You can add a discount to this offer which customers will only get if they choose to buy these products together.

We’ve already seen how important discounts are to customers’ purchasing decisions. The discounts you add here might just give them the gentle nudge they need to buy your bundle. Also, you can customize the sales message to appeal to your customers.

What makes this customizable bundle so effective?

The ‘Frequently Bought Together’ bundle you suggest here is so effective because it doesn’t frustrate your customers or disrupt their purchase in any way. If customers like the products in the bundle or want the discount, all they have to do is check the boxes.

And if they don’t, they can simply ignore it and proceed with their original purchase. No harm no foul.

Get to grips with product bundling today

Product bundling is a great way to increase your revenue and average order value by selling more products to your customers. But if you want to create product bundles in your WooCommerce store, you’ll run into a little problem. 

This is because product bundles are not included in the default WooCommerce install. Fortunately, you’ll have all the help you need to create bundled products with the plugins mentioned in this guide:

• WooCommerce Bundled Products. Add bundled products as a product type in your WooCommerce store.
• Iconic Sales Booster for WooCommerce. Add customizable product bundles on the single product page.

Get these plugins from the Iconic store and set up product bundles to start selling more on your WooCommerce store today.