Lot of websites offer bundled products packages.
There are many ways to implement this feature on an eCommerce website and the ideal way is to implement a parent / child relationship on products. This way, each time a master product is purchased, stock quantities for each child products are decreased!

Unfortunately, few shopping cart solutions implement this and VirtueMart is not an exception...

To get around this limitation, people tend to create new articles and decrease sub-products quantities from their stock manually.
They take a nice picture of the bundle, write a nice description so the new item can live its own life.

We came along with a nice solution to this problem which leaves the maximum user flexibility to choose the products part of their bundle and saves the tremendeous work of creating new bundle products.

We are analysing the user's shopping cart content in real time and look if it matches against a set of pre-defined shopping rules.
Should the cart comply with one of those rules, a discount coupon is then created on the fly which matches the rule definition.

Let's have an example and say we have a rule in our database that says:
Bundle #1 : Straight Razor Starter Kit -> Apply a 10% discount

• Any product from category "Straight Razors"
• Any product from category "Sharpening Tools"
• The product "Thiers-Issard BioDiam-3"
• The product "Dovo Stropping Paste Red"

During its purchase, the cart is compared to each rule defined in the system. Should the cart match a rule virtual coupon is created on the fly within the VirtueMart system for the configured amount: Here 10%

Like in VirtueMart's standard Coupon system, discounts can be a total amount or a percent of the total purchase.
This development can be seen in action on our 1barber eCommerce website: See the "Packs" link on the left.