How Zuluvape Hit $1.9M in Bundle Revenue with FoxSell After Hitting Shopify's Variant Wall

About Zuluvape 

Zuluvape is one of the US’s fastest-growing online vape retailers, built around a straightforward idea, give customers genuine choice and make it easy to act on it.

Their flagship product, the Geekbar Pulse 15000, comes in 25 distinct flavours, and their shoppers don't behave like typical add-to-cart customers.

Their shoppers browse and compare before making a choice, often picking two old favourites and one new flavour to try, or building a full Pack of 10 with a combination that feels entirely their own.

That personalised buying behaviour is the whole point of the experience they've built.

The Challenge

To understand why this was such a hard problem, you need to think about what "mix and match across 25 flavours with repeats allowed" actually means in real time.

When a shopper can build a Pack of 3, a Pack of 5, or a Pack of 10 by choosing any combination of flavours, even repeat the ones they loved most, the number of possible configurations runs into the millions.

Whereas Shopify's native variant limit sits at 100. Pre-creating every possible bundle as a product variant wasn't just impractical, but it was mathematically impossible. So, Zuluvape hit that ceiling before they'd even gotten started.

On the other hand, Zuluvape had already built a custom bundle interface on their storefront, which reflected their brand and the shopping experience they'd deliberately designed.

Also they didn't need a Bundle app that would replace it with a generic template. Rather they needed something that could power the logic underneath their existing UI without touching the design. However, most bundle apps are built to be the front-end, and very few could operate any other way.

Solution 

To solve what felt like a technical dead end, FoxSell approached Zuluvape's challenge by rethinking how bundling should work in the first place by building everything dynamically at checkout so there was no need to create thousands or even millions of product variants just to support customer choice.

Instead of wrestling with Shopify's variant limit, Zuluvape could keep a single product for each bundle size.

Let’s say a customer builds their Pack of 10, as shown in the image above, and hits checkout. In that moment, FoxSell automatically splits that order into its individual SKUs behind the scenes, takes the right inventory off each flavour, and passes accurate line items straight to the fulfilment team.

The customer gets a smooth, familiar experience. The warehouse gets exactly what they need to pick and pack. And nobody has to manually figure anything out, because the system already did it for them.

Rather than replacing the custom bundle builder which Zuluvape had already built, FoxSell worked closely with their developers and integrated seamlessly underneath it, protecting the storefront experience they had worked so hard to create.

And then there was the analytics part, that FoxSell has built a reporting system, turned out to be just as important as everything else. FoxSell built out variant-level tracking that gave Zuluvape something they'd genuinely never had before, which gives them a clear picture of how each flavour was performing inside bundles, which bundle sizes were driving the most revenue, and exactly where in the selection flow customers were dropping off. For the first time, they had the insight to actually understand what was driving them, and where more revenue was sitting.

Results

The first big spike said everything when on one standout day, Zuluvape sold huge number of bundles within 24 hours.

For a store that had spent months staring at a variant ceiling and wondering if a proper mix-and-match experience was even possible, but the results says it all!

Since launching with FoxSell, Zuluvape has generated close to $1.9 million in bundle revenue, and that number continues to grow…