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Shopify and selling bundle products

All systems have limitations, and Shopify unfortunately has some difficulty managing inventory in the situation where you have a product made up of sub-products. Typical examples are a gift basket that combines several different products, or an item that needs to be assembled from several sub-components.
No automatic handling has been built for this, so selling an item does not create a link to the sub-components included in the sold item and the inventory count of those sub-components.

Fortunately, there are apps for Shopify that can help create the necessary link. We have seen solutions that use:

Once you have a solution in your Shopify that can create these combined products or "bundles", you can be sure that when you sell a bundle product in your Shopify, the inventory in Shopify is reduced on all the sub-products included in your bundle product.

At least as important, however, is that the sale of a bundle item comes across to Lagersystem in a way that lets the warehouse see all the sub-products included in the sold product, so the items can be picked and packed correctly.

The link to Lagersystem can be created either via tags or via metafields in Shopify, and must be programmed specifically for your Lagersystem solution.
If you use variants together with bundle products in your Shopify, you must use metafields (method 2); otherwise you can handle it with Shopify tags (method 1).

It is important that you only use one of the two methods below:

Method 1: Bundle linking to Lagersystem using Shopify tags​

On your bundle product in Shopify, you need to add tags for all the sub-components included in the bundle product. This gives us a way in Lagersystem to capture the information when the order comes over from Shopify.
You need to create tags based on the following principle, which describes the quantity of each of the item numbers included in the bundle products:

bundle_[quantity]*[itemnumber]

Example:
You have a bundle product, which is a bicycle set with item number A3014. This includes 1 bicycle frame with item number B706, 2 wheels with item number C316, and 2 tires with item number D207.
On the bundle product A3014 (your bicycle set), you therefore need to add the following tags:

  • bundle_1*B706
  • bundle_2*C316
  • bundle_2*D207

"bundle_" (the first part of the tag) tells Lagersystem that this is a bundle tag.

Remember to write your item numbers exactly as they appear in Shopify. This is case-sensitive.

The field where you can add tags is found on the product's page in Shopify:

We have created an Excel tool that can help you quickly and easily create tags for your bundle products in Shopify. The file must be opened with Microsoft Excel. Download the file here.

NOTE: Once you have created your tags, let us know, and our developers will make sure your Lagersystem solution can find and translate your bundle tags.

Method 2: Bundle linking to Lagersystem using Shopify metafields​

If you have variants, you cannot use the tag solution for your bundle products, because there is no tag option for variants in Shopify.

Instead, you need to have a metafield added to your variants in Shopify, which can function in the same way as a tag field.

If you do not have a Shopify Pro subscription, this requires an app in order to do it.
Getting a metafield added may require you to contact a Shopify expert to get it done properly. If you want to dive into it yourself, some of our customers have been happy with the Shopify app called Metafields Editor

Once a metafield has been created for your variants, you should use it as a text field and enter your bundle combination, similar to tags, but as one large block of text with a comma between each tag:

[quantity]*[itemnumber],[quantity]*[itemnumber],[quantity]*[itemnumber]

Remember to write your item numbers exactly as they appear in Shopify. This is case-sensitive.

Example:
You have a bundle product, which is a bicycle set with item number A3014. This includes 1 bicycle frame with item number B706, 2 wheels with item number C316, and 2 tires with item number D207.
On the bundle product A3014 (your bicycle set), you therefore need to add the following text to your metafield:

1*B706,2*C316,2*D207

It is important that the metafield is of the type string.

Please note that metafields must always be filled in at the variant level – even if you have a packaged product that, for example, only has one variant.

Once you have filled in your metafields with these metafield tags, let us know what your metafield is called (key), and our developers will make sure your Lagersystem solution looks for that field and finds and translates your bundle tags.