We have 6 flavors of spices that we want to sell as a 3-pack or 6-pack and let customers choose the quantity of each flavor to go in each pack. What’s the best way to do this?
Each flavor has to be associated with a variant for keeping track of inventory, so it comes down to allowing the customer to choose the quantity of each variant in a way that prevents them from choosing more than 3 or 6 in total.
Any suggestions? Thank you.
Hi, @pauldrecksler .
This is Max from the Shopify Team.
It sounds like you might benefit from an app that can help bundle your products! Check out some of those options here.
Otherwise, you might want to work with some other options like creating many combinations of variants, or creating a product with variants like 1, 3, or 6 items and having the customer do some manual inputs on the spices they want. This could be in additional fields on the product page or by adding notes to the cart page! Depending on the volume and inventory tracking requirements, this could be doable.
Take a look at some of those options and let us know what you choose or if you need some advice on narrowing down the frontrunners!
Cheers,
Max
Hi Max - Thanks for the reply. The bundle apps available would not be ideal because their setup would require each spice to be its own product, and the bundle to be a separate product. However we do not sell the spices individually, only in packs of 3 or 6. We could certainly “hide” the individual spice products, and I thought about that, but it adds a few extra steps and a monthly subscription that aren’t needed.
Allowing for user-written manual inputs would not be ideal either because it leaves too much room for error from the customer. For example, the customer might choose “3 pack” but write in 4 spice names. Or alternatively choose a 6-pack but only write in 4 names. (How do we know which 2 spices to double-up on?) It’s best to minimize user error by limiting their options to pre-filled selectors like dropdown menus.
We’re not really after a bundle as much as we are customizing options within one product. An equivalent would be like if a chocolate company sold a 32-count chocolate box, and the user could select the chocolate flavors that go inside from 60 flavors. There needs to be quantity limits, so that the user couldn’t add more than 32 chocolates, which manually inputting won’t account for.
Since we’re only dealing with a 6-pack and not a 32-pack, we decided to reverse what the user inputs. Instead of listing the Spices and the user inputs the Quantity of each that they want, we list 6 individual dropdown menus (Spice #1, Spice #2, Spice #3, etc) w/ 6 choices each and the user selects the spice flavor from each dropdown. I set the default as one of each flavor. So if the user wanted more than one of a particular spice, they would just choose it more than once in each respective dropdown. This works fine for a 6-pack w/ 6 flavor options, but would obviously become a cumbersome process if we had more options than that.
I appreciate your ideas and don’t mean to sound like I don’t with the over-explanation above of why they would not work for us. I only took the time to explain why to help anyone else who’s reading this in a similar position. I actually found the solution we went with in another comment on a different Shopify thread: https://community.shopify.com/c/Shopify-Discussion/Mix-n-Match-up-to-6-items-to-create-one-item-i-e-Build-your-own/m-p/157384
This was the example site from that thread that I modeled: https://saltandstraw.com/product/pick-your-own-five-pack/
When I saw the example, it clicked in my mind that I could save us some headache of dealing with quantity limitations by having the user select the spice flavor 6 times.
Here is our implementation of it: https://shop.rondenoculinarydesigns.com/products/rondeno-spice-collection-6-pack
The biggest downfall to this solution is that the flavor choices are not synced to any inventory. The flavor choice dropdowns are basically just us collecting pre-filled customization info following these instructions: https://help.shopify.com/en/themes/customization/products/features/get-customization-information-for-products - The user choices are not synced to any variant or inventory system, so we have to do that in house. This is a perfectly suitable solution for our needs, but I bring it up because it may not work for others.
Thanks again for your help Max and I hope this thread helps other people who find it who are looking for the same setup.
Hi, @pauldrecksler .
Max, again.
Thanks for the added information. I think that will definitely help you get some more feedback from the community, especially with the example links.
The first thing that springs to mind is the option to use some product builder apps. Have you explored that at all? Some of these can be quite pricey, but it might be worth a look.
There are also some other forums posts where merchants were looking for some help with “mix & match” solutions, that might spark some ideas for you, check those out here and here.
Let us know if that helps narrow the search at all!
Cheers,
Max
Hello @pauldrecksler ,Have you got your solution? Though it’s been a long time still I’m leaving this reply as it can be helpful for others who are dealing with the same issues. As you want to allow to choose the different packs from a single product page then you can try the MultiVariants - Bulk order app.
With this app, you can sell your product in a particular number of bundles so that your customer can not buy more or less than your provided number of restrictions. Also, you can allow choosing multiple packs. For example: For the 3-pack, they can choose 3 quantities from all flavors, and for the 6-pack, they can choose 6 quantities from all the available flavors. To do this, they need to select quantities for a particular pack and need to add to cart that package. And when they return to the product page again, they can choose another package.
Using the app, You can set the min and max quantity, so your customer must choose that quantity before going to the cart page. Suppose, your product has 10 different flavors and you want your customer to choose exactly 6 quantities from all those flavors. So, if you set minimum and maximum quantities as 6, they can’t choose quantities more or less than 6.
Additionally, through this app, you can apply restrictions for minimum-maximum quantities, predefined bundles, interval quantities, and limits on variants and orders that can be achieved.
Here is a Demo Product. here you can not go to the cart page without selecting all required quantities for a particular package.
also, explore our Demo Store. You can try the app with 3 days of a free trial.
Hi @EFOLI-Emilia7 - The manual solution I described above ended up working just fine for the client, so we’re keeping that as-is. However thanks for bringing your app to my attention. I hope that it helps other folks who find this thread (and potentially me in the future on a different project).
Hi Paul!
The forum post you linked has been archived and I can’t seem to view it; may I know which app you used to implement that page? It’s exactly what I’m looking for!
Thanks in advance,
SY
Hi SY - I did not end up using an app. My comment above outlines the steps I took using only 6 dropdown menus with our flavors. You can also see this solution in action on the website I linked to above. I re-read my answer and all the information you need should be in that comment without having to access that archived thread. No app needed!
Hey Paul, trying to figure this out for myself. Did you have the 6 pack as a product and then use variants to allow for the selections of spices? I can only seem to add a max of 3 variants so thinking this isn’t the right way to go about it.
Thanks.
Hello - I did not add 6 variants. Technically there’s just one product (6-pack) with no variants. Instead I simply added 6 dropdown fields to the product template, each with six flavor options. Someone could choose six different flavors, or the same flavor six times, or an combination in between.
When Shopify receives the order, it’s simply receiving an order for “6 Pack” product (one single SKU), and in the contents of the order, I can see which flavors were selected. However unlike a variant, there is no SKU assigned to each flavor. My setup is the equivalent of having a blank field for a customer to write notes in. Instead of a blank text field though, I have six dropdown fields so that I can force the customer to select the right amount of flavors.
Hope that helps explain things a little further.
Hey Paul. Begging you to do a video or something of how you did this. I am absolutely pulling out my hair trying to figure this out. none of the apps have been what I need and your shop is setup exactly how I need this done in my shop
I apologize, but I don’t have time to do a video. And plus, seeing it in action on my theme may not translate exactly to your theme. There’s unfortunately going to be an unlimited amount of ways to do this depending on your particular theme and app setup. No way I could cover that in a video and it would open a can of worms trying to troubleshoot.
Here’s the instructions / code though:
Create a new Product Template specific to your new 6 pack product.
Add this code to your new 6 Pack Template:
And here’s the CSS:
.choose-flavors {
margin-right:5px;
margin-left:5px;
margin-bottom:30px;
}
.choose-flavors-labels {
font-weight:bold;
font-size: 120%;
margin-bottom:-10px;
}
All the above would have to be customized to your particular design and product options, but hopefully that can get you started.
If anyone needs help implementing this, it’d be about two billable hours through my agency Ideas Focused. Feel free to contact me through that site. My e-mail and phone are at the very bottom. The process would be to hop on a call and learn what you’re wanting to do, obtain access to your Shopify site, create a duplicate theme to add the code to, preview the theme with you, test that everything works right, publish it, and test it once more. Happy to help further through my agency, but apologies that I can’t offer more free support beyond this thread.
Hoping this help anyone who hasn’t found a solution yet. Simple Bundles works well for this specific scenario. As you mentioned if you have 32 flavors and the customer can only choose 6, the bundle product shows 6 dropdowns, each with 32 options to choose from. This should take only a couple minutes to set up. Here’s a vid walkthrough here: https://youtu.be/yDM4lmZAfzo
There’s also an inverse way you can do this by allowing merchants to add any of your 32 products into cart. When they hit 6 items, they get a discount applied. Any additional multiple of 6 would also get the discount. but say if they buy 7, then only the 6 get discounted. This can be done on the Simple Discounts app. Vid walkthrough here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygKgN5h08I8&ab_channel=FreshlyCommerce
Hi @pauldrecksler ,
I know its too late to reply on the thread, but may be post could help other.
Kindly refer to the below video to implement the same, since you are a developer this will help you to get the logic to implement.
Let me know if have any questions regarding this.
Great solution! I don’t believe those metafields were available at the time on Shopify when this post was first made. Thanks for sharing your new method.
I still can’t understand how you did this. When I created the variants on a pick 3 it said I had too many. The link to the community page also does not take me there anymore 