Product Bundling: 5 Strategies & Examples for 2026

Buy more, save more has been the retail savings motto for decades. The idea is that the more customers add to their cart, the deeper savings they unlock. Product bundles can be key for bringing this idea to your business. 

Customers, despite feeling financial pressures from inflation, don’t want to feel forced into spending more money to save. 

Curated product bundles are a great way to position products that can feel like a bargain to consumers, even when they aren’t saving any money. Bundles help the customer feel like you’ve read their mind and provided what they needed.

As with most other sales tactics, there’s an art to bundling products successfully. Here’s what you need to know about retail product bundling, with examples and ideas to increase cart sizes.

What is product bundling?

Product bundling is a strategy for creating and selling a curated collection of items as a single stock keeping unit, or SKU. A retailer can group complementary products in a bundle to be purchased together, like a printer and ink cartridges, or can offer a discounted price for bundled add-ons. 

The goal of product bundling is to capture both casual browsers and eager-to-buy shoppers while also increasing basket size and average order value.

Types of product bundling

There are several strategies for bundling products including:

Pure bundling

A pure bundle contains items sold exclusively in that bundle. For example, the Voduz Hair Spectrum 4 in 1 Curling Tong is sold with detachable barrels you can get only when you purchase the set.

Mixed bundling 

This type of bundling works by combining complementary products sold separately at a reduced price. A good example is Kylie Cosmetics lip kits. These kits consist of a lip liner and lipstick, each of which can be purchased separately, but they are bundled together for convenience.

Price bundling

Bundle pricing is offered at a discount or with an added value. In this format, the retailer selects a few specific items that must be purchased together to receive the discount. 

Sometimes, the bundle is offered as a general discount when purchasing multiple items. For example, when retailers sell products as buy one, get one (BOGO) offers. 

By offering a bundle discount on the total price or adding a perceived value (like a “free” item), the customer is able to feel they got a good deal—even though they’ve likely spent more than they planned.

Cross-sell bundling

Cross-sell product bundling involves promoting related products adjacent to other products in a similar group. In physical retail, this is similar to cross-merchandising. 

Using sophisticated algorithms, Amazon suggests product bundles that appeal to customers based on past purchases. For example, it may suggest a product bundle that includes a subscription to a digital book library to a customer who bought an ebook reader in the past. 

Upsell bundling

Upsells involve persuading the customer to upgrade. For instance, if someone is interested in a line of synthetic makeup brushes, you could upsell a brush collection that includes the original product they were interested in and a travel case and brush cleaning solution.

Leader bundling

Leader bundling is a loss leader pricing tactic where a popular product is paired with a lower-priced add-on product. Retailers leverage the popularity of a high-demand item to drive sales of a secondary accessory or related product. 

For example, a brand will bundle a popular video game console like PS5, which acts as the leader, with a controller and game—so the customer walks away with a complete setup. 

Product bundling examples

How you choose to put together a bundle will depend on your goals and individual products, but remember that there’s no limit to product bundling methods. It’s all about creativity. 

Related products bundle

Some products work best when combined with others. That’s not to say that the items within a bundle should be exclusive to the bundle. 

Escalade Sports, for example, has a portable pickleball kit that includes a net, two paddles, two balls, a carrying case, and a how-to-play guide. Customers can get the full setup and start playing instantly, without buying each item individually. 

That said, customers can still buy each item separately (albeit at a higher price). If someone loses a ball or chips their paddle, they can buy a replacement without repurchasing the entire bundle. 

Gift bundles

One way to meet customer needs during the holidays is to take a gift-giving approach to product bundles, which makes it easy for shoppers to find and purchase a thoughtfully curated gift.

Flower delivery service Lvly uses this approach. The gift section on its website features multiple product bundles at many price ranges, whether customers are shopping for an anniversary, a birthday, or Christmas.

Gift bundles also merchandise the items together for in-store displays. Hands-on associates can make recommendations for shoppers, which adds convenience and lets them get in and out of the store quickly.

Subscription boxes

Subscription boxes are product bundles in their own right—and they’re not just for ecommerce retailers. Many brick-and-mortar stores have launched subscription box services.

WineCollective is just one example of a brick-and-mortar shop that has capitalized on an opportunity for product education and curation with subscription boxes. After noticing several in-store shoppers struggling to purchase the right bottle of wine, it took the difficult decision-making out of the shopping process with curated wine bundles.

Build your own bundles

Some retailers have experimented with a mix-and-match product bundling tactic, allowing shoppers to create their collection of goods. 

This may seem counterintuitive to building product awareness, but you can still encourage product discovery by allowing customers to choose from a set group of products.You can do this by limiting customer choices to the items you want to promote.

This tactic isn’t just for online retailers. A retail store owner could take a similar approach by hosting a build-your-own gift bundle event or allowing in-store associates to help shoppers build their bundles, with in-store gift wrapping available.

Offering customization can be a memorable experience for the shopper. 

“We’ve used it during the holidays for people to create their own gift box where they can have this fun user experience of selecting three candles that get thrown into that pretty box, and then it just gets shipped off to whoever the recipient is,” says Erica Werber, founder at Literie Candles.

Buy-one-get-one bundles

HiSmile, a retailer that sells teeth whitening products, sells flavored toothpaste on its online store. New customers might not know which flavor they like best, so it introduced a bundle that contains more than 10 different flavors. This gives potential customers a chance to try each one and discover their favorite. 

The product bundling strategy has proved fruitful for HiSmile. Now, more than 80% of orders are bundled products—which has increased the retailer’s average cart size by four times.

Inventory clearance bundling

Product bundling doesn’t have to be customer-driven. Sometimes, you’ll have dead stock to squeeze revenue through bundling and reducing inventory holding costs. 

A clothing retailer could bundle three slow-moving items, for example, like sandals and sunglasses, with a popular item, such as a dress, and offer the bundle at a lower price. This could encourage customers to save money and buy the bundle.

Similarly, a food retailer might want to bundle products nearing their expiration date. For example, customers could get a “meal deal” bundle that includes a sandwich, drink, and snack for a discounted price. 

How to create product bundles

1. Understand your audience
2. Decide which products to bundle
3. Define your bundle strategy
4. Name your product bundle
5. Build the bundle in your POS

1. Understand your audience

Bundling isn’t just grouping items and selling them as a package—carefully curate your selection to sell product bundles in your retail store. It all starts with a solid understanding of who you’re selling to. 

A complete view of your customer, inventory, and sales data can show you the items customers already tend to buy together, and what they want from future bundles. This is possible by unifying your data into a centralized platform like Shopify. 

For example, when brainstorming product bundle ideas, you can use Shopify to:

• Read customer feedback surveys
• Monitor which products customers click in marketing emails
• Reference notes created by retail associates off the back of in-store conversations 
• Track inventory commonly purchased together both online and offline

Elph ceramics is one retailer that turned to Shopify POS to unify customer and inventory data across store locations and its ecommerce website. 

“Before unifying our online and physical stores with Shopify, capturing customer data was a challenge,” explains Sophie Rankine, co-founder of elph ceramics. “Now, we can collect our customers’ contact information in a way that feels authentic and create profiles in just a few clicks at checkout.” 

These unified customer profiles give elph ceramics extra insight into who their customers are and what they want from the brand, which has helped increase the retailer’s retention rate by 30%. 

2. Decide which products to bundle

The products you choose to bundle will be determined by the bundle type that best accomplishes your goal.

Let’s look at how to approach product bundling:

• The buy more, save more bundle typically is applied to your entire online store or select product lines you carry, and is particularly useful for driving sales of stagnant inventory. Most often, you will choose the items for this bundle based on your slowest-moving inventory category. 
• Quantity discount bundles are intended to sell multiples of the same product, based on which items you want to promote, Choose bestsellers to increase average order value (AOV), or experiment with seeing if quantity discounts help move stagnant replenishables.
• Leverage data. Because pre-packaged kits are most effective for products that are complementary or meant to be used together, select items that your POS data tells you are commonly bought together. For instance, if you have a history of customers purchasing socks with shoes, that’s a solid indicator that you can sell a bundle.

Don’t overdo it with the bundling strategy. Pick one or two approaches and lean into those to ensure you’re not overwhelming your customers.

If you’re still unsure where to start, analyze your stock-to-sales ratio to discover which products or categories stagnate. Calculate a SKU or category’s contribution to your total unit inventory, and compare that to its contribution to your total unit sales. 

📌Pro tip: Shopify POS creates these inventory management reports for you. The ABC analysis report, in particular, shows which products generate the most (and least) revenue for your brand across every sales channel you’re using.

3. Define your bundle pricing strategy

Now that you better understand your customers’ shopping habits, the next step to product bundling is choosing a pricing strategy. 

Common approaches include:

• Anchor pricing. Displaying the total individual cost of the items next to the bundle price to highlight the savings.
• Tiered pricings Offering levels of bundles at various price points to appeal to different budgets.
• Margin-based pricing. Setting the bundle price to achieve a target profit margin and offer an attractive discount to the buyer.

When setting a bundle price, consider these three factors:

• How much of a discount can you afford to give and still remain profitable?
• What are the competitive pricing benchmarks for similar sets?
• Does the customer feel the convenience and savings justify the total cost?

Your price choice ideally solves a back-end logistics hurdle, like clearing out inventory and maintaining a margin threshold. 

Move stagnant stock with deep discounts, but bundle high-velocity staples at or near full price to save customers time and keep a reasonable profit. If the discount doesn’t solve an inventory problem or a customer need, it’s just a race to the bottom. 

Once you’ve launched your strategy, test different product pricing and track your conversion rates to see which combinations drive the most growth.

Calculate the bundle price

Calculating your bundle’s pricing can be straightforward if you’re not offering discounts. 

To calculate the bundle price, you first need to know your gross margin on each product in the bundle. To calculate the gross margin dollars of a product, subtract the cost of goods sold (COGS) from the retail price.

Once you know your cost baseline, you can choose a discount that works for your brand (if you’re offering one). A few rules of thumb for discounting: 

• For brands with average margins of 50% or higher, shave 10% to 20% off the subtotal.
• For businesses where average margins are 50% or less, a discount rate between 5% to 10% typically will suffice.

If you are a new brand trying to gain market share, you might even consider a penetration pricing approach for your first few product bundles.

It’s worth testing your ecommerce pricing strategy over time to see what performs best. Is your conversion rate higher when promoting a percentage off instead of a cash discount?

4. Name your product bundle

Naming your bundle impacts how you draw attention to your new offering. 

An excellent naming best practice is to call the bundle based on the benefit it provides a customer. For instance, Manscaped’s skin care bundles are all named for what they do. The men’s shaving kit bundle is called the Ultra Smooth Package.

Calling attention to the overall benefit of the bundle tells customers from the get-go why they should purchase all of these products together rather than just one of them.

You could also give your bundle a descriptive name that helps the customer recognize the use case. Jones Road Beauty, for example, has a product bundle named The Party Kit that includes cosmetics that help the customer get a festive look.

5. Build the bundle in your POS system

Long checkout lines deter people from buying. Instead of having retail associates manually add products to the cart and type in a discount code, use the Shopify Bundles app to let your team ring up orders in a few clicks.

The app lets you create product bundles that customers can buy in-store or through your online store. You predetermine the price (including any applicable discount), and inventory quantities are automatically updated in real-time whenever you sell a product that’s part of a bundle.

How to sell product bundles in retail

Many techniques help companies promote product bundling. Let’s take a look at some of the best practices retailers have developed over the years.

Display the bundle discount prominently 

If your bundle is intended to offer a discount or value-add, prominently display that information on your product page and in your marketing efforts. Highlight the savings to remind people of the great deal they’re getting. 

Use a multichannel approach for promoting your bundles. Showing the offer at different digital marketing touchpoints keeps the value top of mind and makes it more likely that customers will convert. 

Some areas to promote your bundle include:

• Email marketing. Send a newsletter or add “Complete the Look” sections to transactional emails to highlight savings. 
• Landing pages. Create a page just for your top bundles so shoppers can explore the deal without distractions. 
• Homepage and collection pages. Use banners to boast bundle deals when customers are browsing your site. 
• Social media. Use shoppable posts and user-generated content to show the products in action and send followers to the offer. 

When it comes to in-store marketing, retail signage should sit alongside bundled or bundle-able products, so customers recognize the deal. Train your sales associates to mention the bundle as an option whenever a customer is looking at an individual item.

Use your bundles for gift guides

You could also create a gift guide landing page on your online store, which you can then promote via email, social media, and in-app. This helps raise awareness of your bundles across multiple sales channels. 

Retail store owners can also spotlight gift bundles by their registers with shoppable displays. For example, if someone pops in during the holiday season, you could position discounted bestseller product bundles beside the checkout line to encourage impulse buys. 

Upsell your product bundles at checkout

Offering a bundle at checkout can help a customer pull the trigger on multiple items. It’s also a smart move for ecommerce stores to increase profit margins and optimize their shopping cart experience. 

At a brick-and-mortar store, this retail activation might mean the sales associate mentioning that if the customer adds one more item to their purchase, they get 15% off everything. Online, it can be presented as messaging during the checkout flow. 

Benefits of product bundling

Product bundling is a win-win for both retailers and consumers. Here’s why it’s become such a popular tactic amongst retail and ecommerce businesses:

• Boosts sales
• Increases pricing opacity
• Grows product awareness
• Sells excess or slow-moving inventory
• Boosts customer loyalty
• Differentiates your brand

Boosts sales

Product bundling helps increase sales by boosting the perceived value of your products in your customers’ eyes.

Flower brand Lvly had its biggest ever Valentine’s Day sale in 2023, after expanding its bundled offerings. After moving to Shopify Plus, which allowed them to offer a full range of more than 150 bundled products, it saw a 6% year-over-year increase in average order value.

Encouraging shoppers to purchase more items typically leads to a higher transaction amount, which is an efficient way to boost revenue. Bundling also reduces marketing and distribution costs, since customers discover products more easily and order all of them at once.

Increases pricing opacity

While product bundling can mean discounts, it can also be used to build upsells into a package, thus blurring the focus around the price of individual items. 

For example, when you purchase a new smartphone, you also receive a charger in the box. The charger isn’t free, of course—the manufacturer builds the cost into the phone’s final ticket price. Phone retailers know if customers had to purchase a charger separately, many wouldn’t.

If you find that customers are often put off at the thought of having to purchase another small item to complete their set or experience, consider bundling those items to remove that obstacle to purchase.

Grows product awareness

Product bundling gives customers the chance to try a product they wouldn’t have typically purchased as a standalone item.

For example, we can look to LoveSeen, a false lashes retailer. It sells a starter kit bundle that includes lashes, lash glue, and tweezers.

Most people don’t try lash tweezers because they’re not entirely necessary to apply lashes. However, when included in the product bundle, customers can see how lash tweezers make the application process easier. They may even purchase another pair individually in the future. 

Sells excess or slow-moving inventory

Bundling dead stock with popular products can help move stagnant items. This creates a new product offering, which helps freshen up your surplus or overstocked inventory and reduces inventory holding costs. 

Say, for example, that you’re running a home goods store that’s invested $5,000 into a new collection of bath towels, but you’re struggling to sell them. The price is too high—you bought them for $5 per unit, but data shows customers are only willing to pay $6.

Instead of losing money by selling the towels at cost, incorporate them into a bundle. You can pair the towels with a bestselling bath mat, toothbrush holder, and towel rail to give customers an all-in-one bathroom setup. 

Boosts customer loyalty

Offering product bundles can also help boost customer loyalty. The reason is that bundles give buyers the chance to try multiple products at once, which means more opportunities for them to find items they love (and then buy them again).

Differentiates your brand 

Market differentiation is another benefit of product bundling. Customers can price compare and find individual products anywhere. With a bundle, you create a moat around your brand.

A good example is from skin care brand rhode skin. Based on data compiled by Particl, company revenue from upselling kits alone rose from $948,000 to $2.53 million per month, a 2.7-times increase, from January to July 2025.

When the perceived value of a curated set feels higher than the sum of its parts, the brand can hold its price more effectively.

Risks and disadvantages of bundling

Product bundling seems like an easy win, and with tools like Shopify Bundles, it is. But as with any marketing tactic, it comes with its own set of risks that can impact your profits. 

Bundles can make your retail operations harder to manage. From disorganization in your warehouses to potential customer confusion, here are the main ways bundling can go wrong:

• Losing money on bad promos. Revionics found that 65% of retail promotions are ineffective. If your bundle is just a hidden discount that doesn’t bring in sales, you’ll lose profit.
• SKU proliferation. Every new bundle creates a new SKU. Teams have to track, count, and store kits, which take up shelf space and increase labor costs. 
• Kit stockouts. Bundles have picking rules that make the whole set unsellable if one item is missing. If you run out of one lotion, you can’t sell the three-step skin care kit—and the other items become aged inventory that you can’t move. 
• Decision fatigue. A 2024 paper on rational choice overload shows that too many options can cause people to freeze. If you offer too many bundle variations, customers may default to inaction.
• Price-to-value mismatch. 2025 data shows shoppers abandon the sale when they feel forced to buy an extra item they don’t need just to get a deal. Forced bundling can impact brand confidence, and lead to higher return rates. 

To minimize these risks, keep your bundle menu tight, with curated options based on customer research. Let customers buy items individually so bundles feel more like a recommendation. 

Current product bundling trends

It’s clear that product bundling is a smart way to increase customer loyalty and average order value (AOV). But what does the future hold for this sales tactic? 

Consider these five trends to create a memorable bundle scheme:

• Brands are moving to value architectures. Brands like rhode skin are looking at bundles as more than discounts. Structured kits, edits, and seasonal sets sold as a lifestyle upgrade and value-adds are becoming commonplace.
• AI-powered predictive recommendations are increasing. Seven in 10 shoppers expect AI-driven tools to guide their buying decisions. Dynamic bundle logic based on customers’ unique profiles is now standard. 
• Sustainability is pushing conversions. One in 3 shoppers will abandon a purchase due to sustainability concerns. Bundles are being positioned to reduce waste due to minimal packaging and consolidated shipping.

Moving into 2026, the most effective bundles are those that reduce both cognitive and environmental friction. Brands treating bundles as a main revenue stream versus a discount promotion are unlocking higher customer lifetime value and stronger market positioning. 

Create product bundles for your store today

Product bundles are a great way to increase your products’ perceived value and improve your store’s customer experience. Use them for gift-giving occasions, repositioning dead stock, raising product awareness, and other creative ways to drive sales and improve your marketing strategy.