How to bundle products with WooCommerce

It can sometimes be tricky to know which of these methods is required or is most appropriate for the type of products you’re wanting to sell. They all do similar jobs and have some overlap, but they also have significant differences and uses. Knowing how to bundle products with WooCommerce using any of the available extensions will help.

This document gives examples and use-cases to outline the differences between these methods for selling multiple products together and, hopefully, helps you decide which is right for your store.

As the name suggests Chained Products lets you chain additional products (simple/downloadable and variations) to a ‘main’ product. Chained products are visible on the details page for the main product and listed as such. When the main product is added to the cart, the chained products are also added with a price of zero. The chained products are free, unless purchased individually. The customer only pays the price of the main product.

As an example, you might be selling mobile phone handsets and accessories. You want to run an offer so that when a customer purchases a particular handset they get a set of headphones (which can still be purchased individually for their listed price) for free. In this case, the handset would be the main product, and the headphones would be chained to it.

Use Chained Products if you want to gift customers product x & y when they purchase product z.

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Product Bundles is a general-purpose bundling extension that lets you sell multiple products together. It allows you to build customizable bundles with configurable quantities and optional items by adding simple, variable, and subscription products to bundle “containers.” The extension supports virtual and downloadable flavors of all supported product types and is suitable for creating physical, digital and downloadable bundles. Thanks to its flexible pricing and shipping options, it covers a wide range of applications.

You may be a musician looking to sell singles and albums as downloadable products. The singles will be available individually, but you also want to group a selection of singles into an album, with a set price, and sell that group as a bundled product. In this example, a customer purchases your album and gets access to all the singles as downloadable products.

Product Bundles is ideal for creating product packages and assembled products. It can be used to offer bulk discount combos and pick-and-mix boxes and even allows you to attach optional items to existing products.

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Force Sells lets you link products together so they are added to the cart simultaneously. ‘Force Sold’ products are displayed on the main product page as being ‘linked.’ These products can be modified in the cart (quantity) or set to be synced with the main product (so they cannot be removed unless the main product is removed). The ‘Force Sold’ products retain their price. So if the main product is $20 and the force sold product is $10 the customer pays $30. This is one of the key distinguishing features that sets Force Sells aside from Chained Products.

You may run a workshop that sells repair services such as ‘mobile phone glass repair’. If someone purchases that service, you know that they will also need to purchase a new screen. The new screen is, therefore ‘force sold’ along with the repair service.

Force Sells is used to link ‘required’ products together such as a service and a product.

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Grouped Products is a product type bundled in WooCommerce core and is more about product display — it does not involve any different purchase rules like the aforementioned three extensions. Grouped Products lets you add similar (think materials, design, etc.) simple products to a single parent product. This allows the customer to add products from a range, or a couple of products from within a range, to their cart on one page instead of navigating to several different pages to do so.

Consider a furniture store. It sells sofas, chairs, stools in different ranges. The ‘Classic’ range includes a three-seat sofa, a two-seat sofa, a sofabed, an armchair, and a stool. All products in this range are made of the same materials and have the same properties (size/shape excluded, obviously) and description. These individual products are set up as simple products that are purchasable individually. Finally, a grouped product is created to describe the range, the aforementioned products are added as children of this grouped product resulting in a single product details page where customers can add any of these products to their cart in one go.

Grouped products are perfect for letting a customer add several similar products from a range to their cart in one go.

Documentation

With Composite Products, it is possible to create sophisticated product kits and assembled products by grouping existing Simple and Variable products in configurable Components.

New Composite Products are created by defining Components and adding existing Simple or Variable products as Component Options. The extension allows you to:

• Customize many aspects of the configuration flow, layout, and appearance of a Composite product.
• Introduce dependencies between Component Options.
• Create multiple configuration paths by conditionally hiding entire Components.
• Use discounts to make your kits more appealing.

Say your store sells cameras, a product that typically requires several subsidiary products in everyday use. As a purchase option, you might want to allow newcomers to purchase the camera, along with those subsidiary products (lens, filter, memory card, bag) in one go from a single page. There may, however, be several options for these products. There are, for example, many different memory card sizes/manufacturers. Instead of listing these on the product details page, which will be messy, Composite Products walks customers through each option and allows them to choose what they want to purchase. Additionally, the extension makes it possible to define selection constraints between cameras, lenses, and memory cards, since some cameras might require the use of specific lenses or memory cards.

The Composite Products extension is ideal for creating product kits and assembled products with configurable components. It offers many options for customizing how a Composite product looks and works and supports conditional logic.

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With Mix and Match, its name should help explain what it does! You select a product container that you then can add simple and variable products into. Allow as many or as few items as you wish to be available in any given Mix and Match assortment. These can have a static price or be priced per item and totaled. The assortments can also be shipped together in one package, shipped separately, or not shipped at all and ready for local pickup.

Inventory for products in the Mix and Match assortment are tracked just like standalone products, and the Mix and Match product container can be stock-managed, too. Once set up, a Mix and Match product appears similar to a grouped product. Customers see a list of all available products and are allowed to assemble their assortment in any configuration that you allow.

Say you run donut shop and you want to let your customers create their own custom baker’s dozen. Set up your Mix and Match product to allow 12 products from your catalog of fried treats. That’s the easy part, your customers then have to make the hard decision of what donuts to get.

Mix and Match is ideal when wanting to give the ultimate choice to your customers. They can buy with flexible parameters to their heart’s content. If you sell products that work great with that in mind — shirt bundles, donuts, candy, candles, soda/beer/wine, essential oils — Mix and Match products is a great extension to encourage more sales in your store.

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