Sell the shampoo and the conditioner together. Ship the polo shirt as a three-pack. Let customers build their own box.

Shopify ships a free first-party app for this: Shopify Bundles. It works on every plan, builds bundles directly in the admin, and syncs inventory in real time.

As of August 31, 2026, its Shopify App Store rating is 2.8 across 543 reviews, with 125 one-star reviews — 23% of the total.

The explanation is not a broken app. It is that the range of bundles this app can build is published as hard numbers in the Help Center, and almost nobody reads them before building around it. For apparel, food, or anything else carrying multiple options per product, the ceiling arrives much sooner than expected.

Below: the published caps, the incompatibility list, the line where a paid bundle app becomes necessary, and why the three leading paid apps bill on three different units. Research date: August 31, 2026.

The short version

• The native app builds fixed bundles and multipacks only. Mix-and-match — where the customer composes the bundle — is not supported.
• The first wall is 3 options and 100 total variants per bundle. In apparel, "product A color + size, product B color" already consumes all three options.
• Bundles cannot coexist with purchase options. Subscriptions, pre-orders, and Try Before You Buy are all incompatible, as is the Shopify Subscriptions app.
• No import, export, or bulk editing. Bundle maintenance is manual and scales badly.
• The three paid apps bill on different units. Bundler charges per feature set (revenue and orders unlimited), Kaching Bundles on app-attributed additional revenue, and Selleasy on your store's total monthly order count.
• Only two options ship a localized admin: the native app and Bundler.

Shopify recognizes three bundle types

Per the Help Center:

Fixed — a predetermined set of products. If components have multiple variants, the customer picks among them. Shampoo plus conditioner plus moisturizer.

Multipack — more than one of the same product. A polo shirt three-pack.

Mix-and-match — the customer composes the bundle from interchangeable products. A build-your-own bedding set.

The native Shopify Bundles app supports only the first two. For mix-and-match, the Help Center directs you to third-party bundle apps, or to building against the Bundles APIs if you are on Shopify Plus.

That is the first fork. If your campaign is a build-your-own box, a sampler, or a customer-configured gift set, the free app is out before you start.

The published limits

Every figure below is from the Shopify Help Center.

Subject	Limit
Components in a fixed bundle	30
Components in a dynamic bundle	150
Units per component	2,000
Options per bundle	3
Total variants per bundle	100

The last two rows are where stores actually get stuck.

The three-option cap is per bundle, not per product — options are counted across every component. Give product one a Color and a Size, then give product two a Color, and all three slots are gone. There is no room for a third component carrying options.

An August 5, 2026 review from a Japanese merchant (MITSUBOSHI 1887, over 1 year using the app) says exactly this: in apparel, the color and size of the first item plus the color of the second already hits the ceiling.

The 100-variant cap bites harder. A July 2, 2026 review (Arkham Bazaar, United States) works the arithmetic: two t-shirts, each with 2 styles × 6 sizes = 12 variants, gives 12 × 12 = 144 combinations. Over 100, so the bundle cannot be built at all.

The Help Center does document an option-combining feature — sell a red, blue, and green shirt and customers can pick size once for all three. But it states plainly that a combined option still counts as one of the three. The ceiling does not move.

What bundles cannot coexist with

This list matters more than the numbers for most stores. From the Help Center:

• Not compatible with purchase options — subscriptions, pre-orders, and Try Before You Buy
• Not compatible with the Shopify Subscriptions app
• Bundles cannot contain other bundles
• Not compatible with custom products (custom line items on draft orders)
• No import, export, or bulk editing support
• Cannot be used in exchanges, even when exchanging for an identical bundle
• No dedicated shipping profiles. Shipping is calculated from each component's own profile
• Cannot be marked final sale in return rules. Return eligibility is inherited from the individual components

Two operational details are easy to miss:

Change a component's SKU and you must delete and recreate the entire bundle. Bundles get their own SKU, separate from component SKUs. The Help Center suggests metafields or a third-party inventory app if you need component-level SKU tracking.

Component price changes do not propagate to the bundle price. Manual edits and price imports both leave the bundle price stale; you have to update it in the admin. For any category with moving costs, a missed update comes straight out of margin.

Also, a newly created bundle is always set to Draft and must be switched to Active manually. And the Help Center's troubleshooting section documents that a bundle reverts to Draft automatically whenever a linked variant or option is deleted or renamed. Editing a product can silently pull a bundle off your storefront — that is documented behavior, not a bug.

Eligibility

To sell bundles, a store must:

• Use the Online Store sales channel or a custom storefront
• Have a bundles app installed
• Use an upgraded checkout. Stores still running checkout.liquid customizations are incompatible with bundles

The Help Center also documents what happens if a store becomes ineligible after bundles exist. Fixed bundles are set to Draft and unpublished from sales channels. Customized bundles stay visible on the storefront, but their products get added to cart and checkout as separate line items — meaning bundle pricing and presentation break.

If checkout customizations are still in place, verify this before you build. It is the same migration territory covered in When Thank You Page App Features Vanish.

How bundle inventory is calculated

Bundle stock is derived from component stock. The Help Center's method:

1. For each component, divide its available inventory by the quantity the bundle requires
2. The lowest result, rounded down, is how many complete bundles can be sold

A bundle of 2 chairs and 1 desk, with 15 chairs and 8 desks in stock: chairs give 15 ÷ 2 = 7.5 → 7, desks give 8 ÷ 1 = 8. Bundle availability is 7.

Two caveats:

Components that are not inventory-tracked, or set to continue selling when out of stock, are excluded from the calculation entirely. Their stock is simply ignored. It is an easy way to construct a bundle that oversells.

Bundles track overall stock, not stock by location. Multi-warehouse stores should expect divergence from real availability.

The search filter interaction

One more documented quirk. The Shopify Bundles limitations list states that bundled products do not appear under option filters, because of how the index is named.

So if you have set up Size and Color filters in Shopify Search & Discovery, your bundle products will not surface in them. The better your collection filtering, the more thoroughly your bundles fall out of that path. Filter design is covered in Shopify Search & Discovery Is Free and Rated 2.7.

The three paid apps

Based on Shopify App Store listings as of August 31, 2026. Confirm current pricing before installing.

	Bundler » Product Bundles App	Kaching Bundles App & Upsells	Upsell & Cross Sell — Selleasy
Developer	Bundler.app (Slovenia)	Kaching Bundles & Upsells (Lithuania)	Logbase (India)
Rating (reviews)	4.9 (2,564)	5.0 (5,418)	4.9 (2,537)
Built for Shopify	Yes	Yes	Yes
Billing unit	Feature tier (revenue and orders unlimited)	App-attributed additional revenue	Store's total monthly orders
Free plan	Yes, usable on live stores	Development stores only	Yes, to 50 orders/mo
Paid tiers	$9.99 / $19.99	$14.99 / $29.99 / $59.99	$9 / $19 / $29
Mix-and-match	Yes ($9.99 tier and up)	Yes	Not listed
Volume discounts	Yes, on the free plan	Yes	Not listed
Free trial	7 days	7 days	30 days

What the table actually says

First, "free plan" means three different things here.

Bundler's free plan works on live stores and its listing states "Unlimited revenue & orders." Buy X Get Y, volume discounts, quantity breaks, product page upsells, and POS are all included. The limits are on features — mix-and-match and analytics sit behind the paid tiers.

Selleasy's free tier is capped at 50 orders per month, and the listing is explicit that your store's total order count is what's counted — not orders the app influenced. Barely use the bundles and you still move up a tier as the store grows.

Kaching's free tier is development stores only. There is no free plan for a live store.

Second, Kaching bills on revenue the app generated. Starter covers up to $1,000 in additional revenue, Scale up to $5,000, Pro up to $10,000. That is close to performance-based pricing: cheap while it isn't working, more expensive as it does. No tier above $10,000 appears on the listing, so larger stores need to check the developer's own pricing page.

Third, all three carry a Built for Shopify badge. What that badge does and doesn't certify is a separate discussion, but in this category the badge works as a filter — and precisely because all three have it, it cannot break the tie.

Fourth, only Bundler ships a localized admin. The Languages field on the Kaching and Selleasy listings does not include Japanese; Bundler's does, alongside 16 other languages. The native Shopify Bundles app lists 20.

Fifth, Selleasy covers a narrower set of bundle types. Its Bundle types field lists fixed bundles, upsell, cross-sell, frequently bought together, and related products only — no multipacks, mix-and-match, or volume discounts. A screenshot caption on the same page does mention "Mix and match bundles, volume discounts," which contradicts the structured feature field. If either is a requirement, ask the developer directly.

Picking by situation

Fixed sets or multipacks only

Use the native Shopify Bundles app. Inside 3 options and 100 variants, it costs nothing. Build there first and migrate when you hit the wall.

Customer-composed bundles (build-a-box, samplers)

The native app cannot do this. Bundler or Kaching Bundles are the candidates; Bundler if a localized admin matters.

Apparel or anything option-heavy

You will almost certainly exceed 3 options and 100 variants. Multiply your components' variant counts before installing anything — the answer takes two minutes.

Bundles alongside subscriptions or pre-orders

Native bundles are incompatible with purchase options, full stop. If you go third-party, verify subscription coexistence with that specific app. Subscription-side considerations are covered in Shopify Subscription Apps Compared.

Starting with no budget

Bundler's free plan is the only one usable on a live store with no revenue or order cap. Selleasy lists identical features across all four tiers, so the 50-order free tier appears unrestricted on features — which suits early-stage stores.

Pre-install checklist

• Classify the bundle you want: fixed, multipack, or mix-and-match
• Multiply your components' variant counts and confirm the product is under 100
• Confirm you need 3 options or fewer
• Confirm you will not need subscriptions or pre-orders on the same products
• Confirm no checkout.liquid customizations remain
• Consider whether component SKUs or prices change often
• Consider whether you need location-level inventory
• Measure your store's actual monthly order count and expected incremental revenue
• Run those numbers against each app's billing unit and project 12 months
• Confirm the admin language matches your team

Wrapping up

Bundles are decided by where you stop, not by what you can build.

1. Classify the bundle type first. Needing mix-and-match rules the native app out immediately.
2. Do the 3-and-100 arithmetic. Those two caps are what most stores hit first.
3. Check compatibility before features. The subscription and pre-order incompatibility cannot be worked around later.
4. Choose paid apps on billing unit. Feature tier, attributed revenue, or total order count produce very different annual costs for the same store.
5. If you need a localized admin, it's the native app or Bundler.

All figures reflect the Shopify Help Center and Shopify App Store listings as of August 31, 2026. Limits and pricing both change; verify against primary sources before installing.