Guides

Walkthroughs for the jobs that come up once Product Bundles is running. Each one assumes you have been through the quick start.

Selling a bundle whose components have choices

A component with a size, a colour or an upgrade makes the bundle a small configurator. You do not have to set that up; it appears on its own.

Add the component as usual. On the bundle's page, the shopper is asked for each choice the component offers, and the price on the page moves as they choose. The number they are shown is the number the cart charges: the page asks the server what the configured bundle costs rather than adding it up in the browser, so there is no second calculator to disagree with the first.

What the shopper chose rides into the cart on the line, so two of the same bundle configured differently are two lines. Both are recorded on the order, and the option values chosen come off your option-value stock at the right multiple: a bundle holding three of a component takes three of the chosen value, not one.

A bundle whose components have no choices shows nothing extra on the page.

Working out what a bundle weighs

Leave Weight on the Data tab empty and the bundle weighs what is in the box, added up from the components and kept up to date as you add, remove or reweigh them. That is what you want when the bundle ships as its parts.

Fill it in only if you repack the bundle into a box of its own. A number there always wins, and nought is a real weight rather than an empty field, so a bundle you meant to leave derived should have nothing in it rather than a zero.

Dimensions are never added up. Two 10cm cubes are not a 20cm cube, and only you know how the packed bundle sits, so the three boxes on that tab are yours to fill in. Left empty, the bundle has no dimensions, exactly like a product with none.

Setting what a bundle earns and costs in points

Both live on the Data tab and neither is derived, on purpose.

Points is what the bundle costs a shopper paying in reward points. Leave it at nought and the bundle cannot be bought with points at all, the same rule OpenCart applies to a product.

Reward Points is what a purchase earns, per customer group. It is deliberately not worked out from the components: a bundle sold at a discount would otherwise award the full points of everything in it, so you would be paying out on a price nobody paid.

Selling the same bundle in more than one shop

Tick the shops on the bundle's Links tab, and give it a SEO Keyword for every shop and language on the SEO tab. OpenCart resolves a URL inside the shop the request arrived at, so an empty cell is a page that cannot be reached there. The same keyword may be reused between shops.

Before you do it:

• Un-ticking a shop empties the bundle out of any cart in that shop, with no message to the shopper. That is OpenCart's own behaviour for a product taken out of a shop, and it happens before anything Product Bundles runs, so there is no line left to put a message on. Un-tick a shop when you mean to stop selling there, not to tidy up.
• A shop you add later does not get your existing bundles, exactly as it does not get your existing products. Tick it on each bundle it should sell.
• The broken warning is per shop. A component missing from one shop's catalogue is a bundle that cannot be packed there and can be in the next, so the badge and the banner name the shops it is broken in.

Finding out which bundles sell

Bundles appear on the two screens you already read, and one report of Product Bundles' own counts what went out inside them.

Reports → What's Viewed counts visits to a bundle's page, under your store's own product-report setting. It is a snapshot rather than a live counter: press Generate to take one.

Reports → Products Purchased groups order lines by name and model, and a bundle's line carries the bundle's own, so a bundle is counted as itself rather than smeared across its components.

Reports → Bundle components sold is the other half of that number. It lists each product that left your store inside a bundle, with the units and the number of orders, so a mug sold only in kits no longer reads nought while its stock drains. Filter it by order status and by date the way Products Purchased is filtered, and press Download CSV for every row under the same filters. It never shows money, because the order never recorded what one component cost. A user group needs Access on extension/product_bundles/sale/component to see it; see permissions.

The bundle form's Report tab lists the visits to that one bundle's page, by IP address, shop, country and date, the way a product's own Report tab does.

Choosing where bundles show

Extensions → Extensions → Modules → Product Bundles has a tickbox per place a bundle speaks, under Where bundles show: Product listings (the bundle card), Your Bundles page, Review wording, Cart notice, The customer's order page, Order emails and Returns Portal screens. Every one starts ticked.

Unticking one puts that place back to OpenCart's own behaviour and changes nothing else. A bundle is still priced, stocked and recorded correctly, and a broken one is still refused at checkout: untick Cart notice and the shopper is stopped without the sentence saying why. The pricing, the stock and the order record are not on the list, because a store without them would sell a bundle it cannot price or pack.

An update ticks every box again. See what an update keeps.

Show bundles on a product's own page

Put Bundles with this product under a component's own page, so a shopper looking at the lens finds the kit it comes in.

1. Switch Product Bundles on, if it is not already.
2. Go to Design → Layouts and edit the Product layout.
3. Add Product Bundles to a position (Content Bottom sits under the product's description) and press Save.

A product that is in no bundle shows nothing at all, heading included. How many cards it shows is Bundles shown under Layout module on the Product Bundles screen: 4 unless you change it, from 1 to 12, and one number for every layout the module is on.

Placed, it costs one query for the list, one more per card to read what is in that bundle (so at most 12), and the card images' resizes, which OpenCart caches after the first view. The cost sheet cannot show this figure, because it measures a stock store and no layout there has the module on it.

An update takes it off the layout. OpenCart's uninstall, which every update goes through, deletes a module's placements along with it. Place it again after updating. See what an update keeps.

Put a bundle shelf on the home page

The same module on any page other than a product's shows a shelf of your bundles, in the Bundles page's own order.

1. Go to Design → Layouts and edit the Home layout.
2. Add Product Bundles to a position and press Save.

It shows the same cards as the Bundles page, at the same prices, up to the Bundles shown limit, with a See all bundles link under them. The link is left out while Your Bundles page is unticked under Where bundles show, because it would lead to a page that is not there. On a bundle's own page the shelf leaves out the bundle being viewed.

It costs what it costs on a product page, above, and an update takes it off the layout the same way.

Retiring a bundle

Set Status to Disabled on the Data tab. The bundle stops being sold and its reviews are hidden until you enable it again. Past orders are untouched, because they carry their own frozen record of what shipped.

Deleting a bundle deletes its reviews with it, and still leaves every past order rendering exactly what it shipped. What you must not do is reach for the bundle's carrier product in Catalog → Products and edit or delete it there: that row belongs to Product Bundles, and it refuses to be deleted, copied or edited in place for that reason.