EZBundle ‑ Bundle Upsell App

Two days after EZBundle went live, Canadian Liquor Store installed it.

Then they emailed: "I've installed the app but I couldn't search my products."

My first instinct was — is there a bug? I went straight to the Railway logs. Auth worked. Session created. AfterAuth hook fired. No errors.

Then I looked at the products page code and found it immediately. The product search is gated behind having at least one supplier added first. Logical from a data model perspective. Completely invisible to a new user staring at an empty screen.

The banner said "Add a supplier first." That's it. No explanation of why, no hint that the search they were looking for was one step away.

I changed it to: "Step 1: Add a supplier to unlock product search" with a full explanation of the flow.

One line of copy. Took 3 minutes to fix and deploy.

The real lesson wasn't the bug — there was no bug. It was that I built the onboarding for someone who already understood the mental model. The merchant didn't. That gap is on me, not them.

If you're building a Shopify app: your empty states are your onboarding. Treat them like landing page copy, not placeholder text.

Go read the reviews for BOLD Bundles. Then Kitenzo. Then Bundler. Then ZenBox.

Hundreds of 1-star reviews across all of them. Discounts that stop applying. Widgets that break after theme updates. Support tickets open for weeks. Merchants who paid $30/month for six months before giving up.

The Shopify bundle app category has a pattern: launch, get installs, accumulate bugs, accumulate bad reviews, watch merchants churn to the next app in the list. Repeat.

Merchants aren't leaving because they don't want bundles. They're leaving because none of the apps actually work reliably.

So I built EZBundle.

Why it exists

Bundling products to increase average order value is one of the oldest tactics in e-commerce. It works. The problem isn't the strategy — it's that every tool built to execute it is either buggy, expensive, or both.

EZBundle is the reliable one.

What it does

Two bundle types:

Fixed bundles — a specific set of products sold together at a discount. You define the products, the price, the widget goes on the product page.

Mix and match — customers pick any N items from a collection and get a discount. More flexible, higher AOV lift, harder to implement correctly. EZBundle handles the collection matching and discount application without breaking at checkout.

Create a bundle, activate it, widget appears on the storefront. Discount applies automatically. That's it.

The stack

Remix embedded Shopify app + Vite PostgreSQL on Railway via Prisma Shopify Discount API for bundle pricing Theme App Extension for the storefront widget

Total infra cost: ~$10/month.

Honest launch numbers

Installs: — Revenue: $0 Reviews: 0

What I got wrong

Spent too long building before validating that merchants actually trust a new bundle app after getting burned by the last three. The reliability angle needs to be in the first sentence of the listing, not buried in the description.

How I'm breaking through

The 1-star reviews on competitor apps are a search intent map. Every complaint is a keyword. "Bundle discount not applying" — I rank for that. "Mix and match bundle Shopify" — I rank for that. Every frustrated merchant Googling after their current app breaks is a potential install.

Product Hunt launch June 23. Content targeting every "best Shopify bundle app" and "BOLD Bundles alternative" search query already live.

What's next

First 5 reviews. Then direct outreach to merchants who reviewed competitors negatively in the last 90 days — they're actively looking.

If you've tried a Shopify bundle app and it broke — what specifically failed? That's exactly what I'm trying to make sure EZBundle never does.