Selling online with WooCommerce is now popularly an enjoyable experience when WordPress users have more choices of product bundling assistive tools than in the past. By grouping two or more products and putting for sale with an appealing price, product bundling is surely a sharp tactic in online selling. Product bundling is increasingly outweighing other eCommerce strategies with many apparent benefits for both sellers and buyers.
- Higher profits and sales
- Lower marketing & promoting costs
- Enhance the cross-sell, up-sell, and related products
- Easier to manage product stocks
- Convenient shopping for customers
- Build strong customer loyalty
- Promote your business’ popularity
Knowing how to properly create irresistible deals would boost your sales impressively with ease. WPClever team has dedicatedly developed many WooCommerce plugins to help skyrocket your sales in various ways: product bundling, kit building, product grouping, frequently bought together deals, force selling. Let’s dip into their advantages and differences to find out what’s most suitable for your business.
Common Features
WPClever team has always been striving to put more useful features into our plugins while maintaining their intuitiveness and usability. There are common features that users can find in all of these four plugins, namely: custom shipping fee (on each item or the whole deal), custom price formats, adjustable before & after texts, drag & drop to rearrange items, custom deal’s position, various selector interface options (ddslick, select2, or WPC Variations Radio Buttons).
These functionalities entitle users to customize each deal or type of deal in a preferred way and to make them appealing to customers. Learning to make good use of them would persuade customers to be more willing to buy when they see the offered benefits from your deals. When it comes to shopping, the chosen language, the given options, the information presentation, etc. are all taken into account and help convert the audience into customers. Hence, you should make your visitors clearly acknowledged those benefits. It’s even more effective when compared to just giving discounts or promotions.
Product Bundles – WPC Product Bundles
Bundle as the Whole
WPC Product Bundles is intended to bring two or more products together, which are often related items from different product types or multiple variations of a variable product, and put a discounted price for the whole bundle. It’s the most common way of cross-selling and up-selling in eCommerce. Users can simply add simple products, variable products, or a specific variation of a variable product to the bundle. Moreover, a bundle is treated as a special product type, which means all bundled items can only be added or removed altogether from the cart, not separately.
Flexible Quantities & Stocks
Smart bundles allow users to set flexible quantities for bundled items and customers can even change the quantity to their preferences. In addition, selling multiples of the same product is possible when users enable the “Accept same products” option to repeatedly add one product to the bundle. Stock management is strictly managed by this plugin and will be automatically enabled when any of the bundled items use stock management.
Special Features
Especially, these features are exclusive in Product Bundles only. Users can choose to exclude unpurchasable products from being added to the cart. This option keeps your bundle purchasable even when one of the bundled items becomes unpurchasable. We also developed a special tool to display all product bundles in a list and mark bundles with a counter in the admin dashboard. There’s another button for users to update the bundle prices immediately for the whole store.
Composite Kits – WPC Composite Products
When it comes to building a composite product, a complex kit or selling a group of accessories, spare parts, small objects, etc. Composite Products plugin is the perfect choice with unlimited possibilities, especially the separate settings for components and the whole composite.
Flexible sources
One of the most outstanding features is the possibility to use Categories, Tags or Products as the source for components whilst other plugins only permit users to add products. This could save you a great deal of time for adding products or creating variable products. Additionally, it’s possible to include one product under various categories to sell in multiple deals or sell multiple times in a single deal. For example, users can put “Wine” under both “Breakfast drinks” & “Dinner drinks” categories and add it respectively to “Breakfast” & “Dinner” components. Your customers can enjoy the same wine at both breakfast and dinner of a day.
Descriptive components with flexible pricing
No other plugins give users the chance to briefly describe or include additional information for each item like Composite Products. Pricing of Composite Products plugin is also the most versatile as users can put a new price in amount or in percentage for each component. Meanwhile, they can set the rules to calculate the composite’s price using only/ including/ excluding the base price (the price configured in the General tab of Product data section). This flexibility allows Composite Products to deal with even the most complicated pricing rules.
Component Management
It’s easy to manage your offer while still providing customers the freedom to choose their preferences: set required & optional components. This feature is reinforced by setting the min/max quantity for each component or the whole composite. Options to hide composite name or component lists in mini cart/ cart/ checkout page are available to maintain a clean and neat view of the deal. Similar to Product Bundles, Composite Products plugin also has an “exclude unpurchasable products” option to prevent buyers from adding them to cart while maintaining the availability of the composite.
Product Grouping – WPC Grouped Products
This is the plugin that provides users with a great deal of freedom with very straight-forward settings. It’s a tool to group any type, be it simple products, variable products or variations together in a deal. The main function of this plugin is to make it more convenient in searching and buying products rather than promoting goods or services by means of discounting. If users want to give some promotions, this must be conducted via creating and applying coupons/ vouchers.
Freestyle Grouping
It’s easy to add new products to a group, especially when users would like to save time for creating new categories. Some retailers have special needs of keeping items in form of simple products instead of variations of a variable product, especially when the number is too big for variations. Then Grouped Products plugin would be suitable for them to present all available choices to buyers in one deal while easily control the stock of each one. Like when a seller has 40 different patterns for T-shirt design or an item that comes in more than 20 colors. Another example is when you need to create a combo for Drawing books from Beginner, Intermediate to Advanced level or a comprehensive set of all subjects for students of Grade 1. Grouped Products plugin enables you to include a single item in multiple deals without the need to create a new category.
Zero Price/ Free Items
One thing that certain users might need is the possibility for the main product to be added to the cart with zero ($0) price when the “include main product” option is enabled at the plugin settings. The intention for this feature is to give a 100% discount on the main product or include it as a free item when bought together with other products. This creates a feeling that customers can enjoy more benefits from your deal, thus more willing to choose and pay. It’s the cost-benefit perspective that actually boosts the sales by using this.
Frequent Deals – WPC Frequently Bought Together
We often see “People Also Buy” or “Frequently Bought With” messages with recommendations on related products when browsing an item. This is a way to suggest buyers with things that’s related concerning product types, preferences, styles, usage, etc. For example, you can suggest customers to buy a set of study accessories (pen, pencil, easer, ruler and pen holder) to as a Bought Together with notebooks or notepads. As based on shopping behaviors and the close relation between items & customers’ needs, Bought Together deals are easily to be taken. It’s good for both cross-selling or up-selling goods of different kinds.
Add Separately
Regarding customization, WPC Frequently Bought Together brings about great freedom. Users can set asynchronous default quantities and prices for each item. The “Add separately” option gives users a chance to treat added items as individual products, which remain independent of the main item. Their price will be changed back to the original when added to cart and stay unaffected even when the main product is removed from the cart. It’s also possible to hide the main item in the shop and cart page.
Versatile Plugin Combinations
It’s noticeable that Frequently Bought Together can combine with the other three plugins to expand the possibility of product bundling:
- Frequently Bought Together + Product Bundles: to add both required bundled items & optional discount with related products.
- Frequently Bought Together + Composite Products: to sell a kit with other related useful products together or separately.
- Frequently Bought Together + Grouped Products: to add a free gift, zero price item or very low price extra item to a Bought Together deal.
Another Product Bundling Method – WPC Force Sells
Entailed Services/Items
Force Sells is an essential tool for shops that sell products entailed with warranty or maintenance services. Its power is often underestimated. Force Sells can act as a Bought Together deal, but it’s forcing the entailment of extra products while clarifying the cost for customers. The purchase of added items is conducted at the same time when the main product is purchased. Instead of offering your customers a $59 vintage radio and an enclosed 1-year warranty, change that into a $50 radio and $9 extra fee for a 1-year warranty would make more sense to your buyers due to the cost difference perspective.
Zero-price Products or Get 1 for Free
It’s a powerful feature for this plugin to combine with any other product bundling tools namely Product Bundles, Composite Products or Grouped Products to give a $0 item or 100% discount on extra items, or even Buy-1-Get-1-for-Free deals. It’s possible to add Force Sell products and give a discount for it. Force Sell items won’t be affected by the discount applied to the main product, so you can give different discounts for your bundles/composites/grouped products. The only difference is that Force Sells always add one or more required additional products, not optional choices as Frequently Bought Together.
Summary
So, we have all kinds of product bundling for users to choose, which are designed to meet even the most complicated demands. Here’s a list to recap each plugin’s main features:
- Product Bundles: bundles items with discount applied on the whole deal, smart stock management, exclude the unpurchasable, bundle listing & price update buttons.
- Composite Products: kit building with descriptive, required/optional components from Products or Categories, exclude the unpurchasable, flexible pricing with 3 choices.
- Grouped Products: freestyle grouping of individual products with no discounting method.
- Frequently Bought Together: suggest related or frequently bought products with different or synchronous quantities & discounts, add items together or separately, versatile to combine with bundles, composites, or grouped products as optional items with custom quantities.
- Force Sells: versatile to combine with bundles, composites, or grouped products as required items with fixed quantities.
Hopefully, after reading this article, users won’t confuse about these WooCommerce plugins and get a better hold of which to choose, when to use, and how to configure each type of plugin. If you have any further questions, feel free to contact us via WPClever Support Forum. We’re always willing to help you at any time.
