Shopify Bundle Inventory: Track & Manage Shopify Bundles Effectively

Every eCommerce business faces fierce competition; whether it is giants like Amazon, legacy brands, or your direct competitors in the DTC space. On top of that, manufacturing, shipping, and advertising costs are constantly rising, squeezing profit margins. Businesses are left with one crucial weapon- increasing Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV). 

One highly effective strategy to achieve this is through strategic product bundling. By carefully curating and presenting bundles, businesses can significantly boost Average Order Value (AOV) and nurture long-term customer relationships that boost CLTV.

What Are Shopify Bundles?

Shopify Bundles offer a powerful solution, allowing merchants to group multiple products and sell them as a single, unified unit. 

This strategy goes beyond simple product listings, creating unique and compelling offers that enhance the customer experience and drive sales. 

Surely you've come across product bundling on your favorite websites. They are often marketed as curated collections for special occasions (think holiday gift baskets, beauty sets, or gourmet food hampers) or seasonal bundles containing back-to-school, summer essentials, etc. You can use a bundling strategy in various ways. It can be used to move dead stock, offer discounts, or nudge customers to try newly launched products.

Different types of bundles

Here are the different types of bundles eCommerce businesses use to increase customer satisfaction and profits:  

1. Upsell bundles

These strategically offer complementary products or upgrades to a customer's primary purchase. For example, when a customer buys a new phone, an upsell bundle might include a phone case, screen protector, and wireless charger at a discounted price. This increases the average order value and provides customers with a more complete and convenient solution.

2. Cross-sell bundles

These suggest relevant products that are not directly related to the customer's primary purchase but are likely to be of interest. For example, if a customer buys a new pair of shoes, a cross-sell bundle might include a coordinating belt, socks, or a shoe care kit. This exposes customers to other products they might not have considered and can lead to impulse purchases.

3. Quantity bundles 

These incentivize customers to buy more of the same product by offering discounts or bonuses for purchasing in bulk. For example, a "Buy 2, Get 1 Free" offer encourages customers to stock up or purchase gifts for friends and family. This can help clear out inventory, increase sales volume, and reward loyal customers.

4. Subscription bundles

These cater to recurring needs and provide customers with a convenient and consistent supply of products. Examples include monthly snack boxes, beauty boxes, or coffee subscriptions. Subscription bundles build customer loyalty, generate predictable revenue streams, and provide valuable customer data that can be used for personalized recommendations.

5. Personalized bundles

These leverage customer data and preferences to create unique and tailored offers. For example, a skincare company can use customer information like skin type, age, and allergies to create a personalized bundle of skincare products. This enhances the customer experience, increases satisfaction, and demonstrates a high level of customer understanding.

Benefits of Effective Bundle Inventory Management

Inventory management is essential for the success of an eCommerce store. Whether you are managing individual products or product bundles, the benefits of effective inventory management remain the same: 

1. Enhanced customer experience

By accurately tracking inventory levels for all components within a bundle, businesses can minimize the risk of stockouts. Effective inventory management allows for smoother order processing and fulfillment.

This ensures that orders can be fulfilled completely and on time, increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty.

2. Reduced operational inefficiencies

When businesses run out of stock for even one bundle component, they may be forced to cancel orders or offer substitutes, leading to customer dissatisfaction and operational disruptions. Effective inventory management helps to minimize these occurrences, reducing order cancellations and improving overall operational efficiency.

3. Improved decision-making with accurate analytics

By tracking inventory levels, sales data, and customer behavior related to bundles, businesses can gain valuable insights into product demand, identify best-selling bundles, and optimize pricing strategies.

This data-driven approach allows for more informed decision-making regarding inventory levels, production planning, and marketing efforts.

4. Scalability as business grows

As businesses grow and product lines expand, inventory management becomes increasingly complex. Add to that the complexity of Effective inventory management systems can adapt to changing demand, ensuring that businesses can scale their operations efficiently and meet the evolving needs of their customers.

Challenges in Managing Bundle Inventory

Bundling products isn’t as easy as it sounds, especially if you are relying on manual stock takes and spreadsheets to keep track of inventory. Not only does bundling add a layer of complexity to inventory management, it leads to some or all of the following challenges: 

1. Risk of overselling

One of the primary risks of managing bundle inventory is overselling. If the inventory system doesn't accurately reflect the availability of all components within a bundle, businesses may inadvertently oversell the bundle. This leads to order cancellations, customer dissatisfaction, and potential damage to brand reputation.

2. Difficulty in replenishment

Determining the optimal reorder points for individual components within a bundle can be challenging. Without the right forecasting tools, businesses resort to last-minute purchase orders, not factoring lead times, demand variability, and inventory holding costs which must be carefully considered to avoid stockouts or excess inventory, both of which can have significant financial implications.

3. Manual errors

Manual inventory updates are as prone to human error as they are inefficient and time-consuming. Problems like data entry mistakes, incorrect adjustments, and delayed updates can lead to inaccurate stock levels, overselling, and significant operational inefficiencies.

Best Practices for Tracking and Managing Bundle Inventory

You can follow some practices that help navigate the complexity of managing inventory with bundles. If you are looking to optimize inventory levels and processes, you should: 

1. Sync inventory levels in real-time

Accurate and real-time synchronization between bundle stock and individual component stock is crucial for preventing overselling and ensuring smooth order fulfillment. Shopify’s inbuilt features do not support bundle tracking. It treats bundles as separate SKUs, which isn't the best way to track bundle inventory. Using this method makes you prone to double-counting.

When a bundle is sold through Shopify, the inventory levels of all its constituent components aren’t updated to reflect the reduction in available stocks. This makes businesses prone to stockouts. 

The best solution for this is to use third-party tools to keep track of stock quantities. 

• Utilize a robust inventory management system with features like real-time inventory updates, low-stock alerts, and automated stock adjustments.
• Barcoding and RFID: Implement barcode scanning or RFID technology to track inventory movement accurately and update stock levels in real-time.

2. Set stock thresholds for components and bundles

Reorder points for every component in the bundle will vary since each product will have different lead times, demand variability, and inventory levels. Instead of dedicating time and resources to monitor stock levels, maintain a buffer stock of critical components to prevent stockouts. 

3. Use inventory management tools designed for bundles

Due to Shopify’s lack of support for bundled products, business owners largely rely on third-party apps over manual stock takes to ensure seamless processes. Here are some features that complement Shopify’s offerings: 

• Real-time inventory updates: Ensure the system provides real-time visibility into stock levels for both individual components and bundles and automatically updates individual product inventory when a bundle is sold.
• Comprehensive reporting: The app should provide reports to track key metrics such as inventory turnover, stock levels, and sales trends for individual components and bundles. These metrics help determine the demand for each product and bundle, helping you manage your stock as well as offers (pricing, limited-time deals, etc). 
• Utilize automation features: The app should reduce your team’s cognitive workload by automating redundant tasks. Automated stock adjustments, reorder point alerts, and purchase order generation help tackle the added complexity of managing SKUs of individual products and bundled inventory. 

Here are some popular tools or apps that integrate with Shopify:

• Fast Bundle: Provides various customer-centric bundling features like letting customers customize their bundle, providing free gifts with purchases, and AI-powered ‘Frequently Bought Together’ at checkout to increase AOV.
• Bundler: Let you create various types of bundles for cross-selling, up-selling, and setting up pricing strategies like offering discounts and quantity breaks. This helps increase average order value and attract more customers.
• Zoorix: Uses AI to determine the best product bundles and supports related activities such as setting up a bundle promotion page or integrating cross-sell offers into a theme cart drawer. 

4. Forecast bundle demand with analytics

Building bundles requires a lot of cognitive inputs; right from deciding what products to bundle, what pricing strategy to employ, and where to display bundles on your Shopify store. Without the right data inputs, a crucial part of your success relies on guesstimates and can cause significant losses.  To ensure accuracy in predictions, analyze historical sales data to identify trends, seasonality, and other patterns in bundle demand. Ensure that the production and procurement of bundle components are aligned with forecasted demand to prevent stockouts and minimize inventory holding costs.

5. Automate replenishment workflows

Creating accurate purchase orders takes a lot of your team’s time, especially when bundled products add a layer of complexity to stock counts. Implement automated replenishment workflows to streamline the process of reordering components when stock levels fall below predetermined thresholds. This can include automated purchase order generation, vendor communication, and shipment tracking through third-party apps for Shopify stores.

How Prediko Helps Shopify Merchants with Bundle Inventory?

While Shopify stores are increasingly relying on bundling as part of their sales and marketing strategies, the platform does little to support bundle creation and inventory management.

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See Prediko in action:

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Apps like Prediko use AI to help Shopify owners manage inventories with a large number of SKUs or bundled products. Prediko is an inventory management app that provides a comprehensive set of features like:  

1. Real-time syncing of components and bundles

One of the most lucrative features of Prediko is its Buying Table. The Buying Table provides a comprehensive view of your entire inventory. You can apply 90+ filters to create a customized view of your inventory and filter products based on factors like health, product type, and gross profit. 

Prediko does not display inventory levels for bundles and their SKUs. However, when an item is sold through a bundle, Prediko automatically updates the inventory levels for individual items. This helps avoid confusion and keep track of all items in the inventory. Here’s how you can activate bundles on Prediko-  

• Prediko offers a convenient import feature. Simply download the provided template, populate it with your bundle details, and re-upload it to activate your bundles within Prediko
• Prediko has strong integrations with Bundles.app. You can activate your bundles on the Bundles.app platform directly within Prediko
• You can even create bundles directly within Prediko’s settings section. This approach offers granular control over your bundle configurations.

2. Automated restocking alerts

Prediko’s Buying Table also shows an inventory health bar which indicates how much stock of a certain item you have and whether that product is at risk or sold out. Prediko also provides buying suggestions in the same view. These suggestions are based on the best time, quantity, and historical sales data. 

These suggestions account for items in bundles and are adjusted to the same. This helps owners make proactive decisions for reordering and replenishment, making sure they never run out of items in the inventory, whether these are individual items or product bundles. 

3. Detailed sales and inventory analytics

Prediko helps businesses understand seasonality and changes in demand by providing detailed sales reports. The reports and analytics that help you understand inventory levels and retail value of your inventory. 

Prediko sends weekly and daily updates showing how much inventory is tied up and how much you’ve sold. 

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Apart from this, it shows net sales, net quantity, and average order value inside the platform. This will help gauge the impact of bundling and show its impact on AOV. 

Sync Protein, a developer and distributor of nutritional supplements, faced challenges with its inventory management. Inaccurate forecasts led to stockouts and overstocks, resulting in lost sales and increased costs. To address these issues, Sync Protein implemented Prediko.

By leveraging Prediko's AI-driven capabilities, Sync Protein significantly improved its demand forecasting accuracy. This resulted in optimized order placement, reduced stockouts and overstocks, and ultimately, a substantial time savings of 10 hours per week on inventory management tasks. This freed up valuable resources for the company to focus on other critical areas such as enhancing customer service.

Effective bundle inventory management is critical for the success of any Shopify store but the platform’s inbuilt features don’t align with the best practices. Hence, by utilizing AI-powered inventory management tools like Prediko, businesses can optimize operations, and avoid double-counting, stockouts, or manual errors. 

Ready to streamline your bundle inventory management and boost your sales? Book a Demo with Prediko today or get a 14-day free trial to experience the power of AI-driven inventory optimization firsthand.