Product Bundles: Bundle-Sells Mini-Extension

Important: The Bundle-Sells mini-extension was rolled into Product Bundles v5.8. Downloading a separate feature plugin is no longer necessary.

Meet Bundle-Sells — the most recent addition to our growing list of mini-extensions for WooCommerce Product Bundles.

As its name suggests, the mini-extension introduces an extra recommendation type — Bundle-sells. After installing and activating the plugin, head over to the Product Data > Linked Products tab. There, you’ll find a new Bundle-sells field under Up-sells and Cross-sells.

What’s a Bundle-sell?

Bundle-sells are our take on a tried-and-trusted cross-selling concept: Bundle-style recommendations. If you have recently purchased something from Amazon, this should ring a bell:

Much like a cross-sell, a bundle-sell is always a highly related, helpful add-on that’s lower in cost than the currently viewed item and usually high in margin.

What really sets bundle-sells apart from cross-sells is that they can be selected and added to the cart along with the main product. This means that bundle-sells:

• are usually easier to discover; and
• convert immediately.

However, compared to other types of recommendations, bundle-sells are more likely to have a negative impact on conversion. For this reason alone, they should be used sparingly. As a rule of thumb, bundle-sells ought to be relevant, helpful and backed up by strong, data-driven evidence.

Bundle-sells in WooCommerce

Truth is, if you were looking to add simple “Frequently Bought Together” recommendations to your WooCommerce store today, you’d find a handful of plugins to choose from. Most of them work just fine — and none of them depends on a premium WooCommerce.com extension to work, like Product Bundles – Bundle-Sells.

So why did we build Bundle-Sells, then? And why on top of Product Bundles?

Look closer and you’ll notice that, instead of copying Amazon’s approach, we took a different route — one that’s better adjusted to the needs of small/medium-size WooCommerce stores. Bundle-sells are:

• displayed above the add-to-cart button; and
• added to the cart along with the main product when the add-to-cart button is clicked.

This approach makes Bundle-Sells suitable in applications beyond cross-selling — e.g. in use cases that require grouping one or more optional SKUs along with a “main” SKU.

Our decision to build Bundle-Sells on top of Product Bundles can only mean one of two things for you, depending on your perspective:

1. Peace of mind, if you are a Store Owner. If you are already using Product Bundles, you know it’s rock-solid. And as there’s very little new code in the mini-extension itself, that’s less code for you to worry about.
2. Flexibility, if you are a Developer. Every bundle-sell is a WC_Bundled_Item object grouped by a WC_Product_Bundle instance, which means you can tweak the underlying data structure to create mandatory bundle-sells, or even bundle-sells with configurable quantities.

The catch? v1.0 only allows you to use Simple products as Bundle-sells.

What’s Next

If you are a WooCommerce Developer and feel like taking Bundle-Sells for a spin, we’d love to know what you think! Down the road, we plan to experiment with third-party integrations for offering curated bundle-selling recommendations. Interested? Drop us a line!

If you are a WooCommerce Store Owner, rest assured that Bundle-Sells is stable for production and based on a rock-solid foundation: WooCommerce Product Bundles. Try it and let us know how it helped you optimize your sales funnel! Please keep in mind that the version hosted on GitHub needs to be updated manually and comes with no support. We are actively looking at different distribution options and hopefully we’ll have some good news to share soon 🙂

Thoughts? As always, we’d love to hear from you!