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An in-depth look at Bold Product Options and Hulk Product Options for a clear view into which makes the most sense for your Shopify store.
So you’re looking for a product option app for your online business, and have narrowed it down to two of the most popular apps in Shopify’s ecosystem: Bold Product Options and Hulk Product Options.
Now you’re probably wondering, “which one is best?”
The short answer is, the one that makes the most sense for your business. Both are well-reviewed, highly-rated, tried-and-true apps that will help you provide shoppers with a wide variety of customization options when they purchase products from your store.
For instance, maybe a customer wants to purchase a t-shirt from your online catalogue. Both Hulk and Bold can help you create a variety of personalization options — known as variants in Shopify lingo — allowing shoppers to pick a size, choose from a variety of colors and select whether they prefer the shirt to be made of cotton or nylon.
Maybe you’ve also then added a variant that allows your customer to add gift wrapping or make a donation to a charity if they’d like. (Variants can be any type of option, from muffin flavors to collecting information for online forms or registrations). Finally, after all customization options have been applied, the price will automatically be updated as well.
These two apps both offer features that go above and beyond to improve product management and presentation.
Think: enhanced customization capabilities, enriched product information for customers, up-sell and/or cross-sell opportunities and the ability to implement “conditional rules” (we’ll explain this later on, don’t worry) that keep your product pages clean and elegant.
To help you determine which app is the better fit for you, we’ve done an in-depth review of both Hulk and Bold. Here’s what we found.
To begin, let’s get into the brass tacks and talk about how each app works.
Ok, now let’s dive into key features:
Perhaps most importantly, both Bold and Hulk offer unlimited product options or variants as opposed to Shopify’s meager 100 variant limit.
The native Shopify platform only allows you to create up to 99 variants. This might seem like a lot, but depending on what type of business you have you may need several thousand. Take a furniture or paint store, for example. Imagine how many different fabric swatches or accent colors might be offered?
The ability to add as many options as you desire, is also incredibly important when setting up more expansive customization.
Because Shopify’s built-in product options are all generated and housed within the platform’s user interface (UI), you’re fairly limited when adding, adapting or generally managing your variants. For instance, you may only be able to add options as a dropdown.
Whereas with Bold and Hulk you can make options available in a text box, as buttons or checkboxes, a date field, a color or swatch picker etc. The sky’s the limit.
Both apps also allow for bulk actions to take place, which isn’t possible via Shopify’s base UI. So instead of, say, applying the same options to similar products (perhaps all donut orders get a complimentary dusting of cinnamon sugar, if desired), you have to go into each SKU and create custom variants for individual products, one by one.
Available from both Hulk and Bold, conditional logic allows you to set rules or conditions within an option that then … triggers another option.
For example, if you’re a customized shampoo company, you can give shoppers the option of choosing what type of hair they have (wavy, straight, curly etc.). Each different hair category, then triggers a different set of options for the second step of the personalization process, which might be preferred ingredients or scents.
Both apps also allow for unlimited conditional logic — you can keep going down the personalization rabbit hole for as long as you’d like. Ultimately the value of conditional logic is that it cleans up your product page, so that it’s not a mess of different options all crowded together.
Both apps have been on the market for several years and bring support teams that carry deep institutional knowledge and insight to help solve finicky problems.
Hulk allows you to bulk import and export variants from other ecommerce stores. This can be extremely helpful if your store has acquired an already established line of products, for example, so you can automatically access all the variants that have already been established.
Hulk offers a more expansive range of option types and elements than most other product options apps, including a swatch/color-based dropdown, a Google font selector, and the ability to include hidden fields.
Because you can manage inventory directly within Hulk’s in-app admin dashboard, it’s easier to keep track of and manage SKUs, as well as inventory overall.
If you’d like to take your store customizations to the next level, Hulk enables you to develop greater personalization via the use of custom JS and CSS.
Bold allows you to add a “priced option” that is then accompanied by an upcharge. For instance, for a small fee, customers can include a handwritten note or purchase wrapping for a gift. There’s also the opportunity to tie back this option to a product that’s already in their basket or checkout — such as purchasing an in-house warranty.
Then there’s product bundling as well. Say a customer has shown interest in or placed a jacket in their shopping cart. You can create an adjacent variant that suggests they add a hat, gloves or a scarf to the order simply by checking a box.
All of the options created by Bold are stored as hidden variants directly within your Shopify back-end, which makes it easy to manage SKUs for each product, as well as organize and track inventory.
Both Hulk and Bold have incredible features (and there’s a lot of overlap between the two when it comes to functionality), so ultimately your choice might come down to which specific feature is most appealing to your business needs and goals.
Here’s how their plans work:
Bold offers two plans, one Basic and another Premium. If you’re a small-to-medium sized business (SMB), depending on the type of business you have, either of these are likely to meet all your needs with ease.
On the other hand, if you’re an enterprise level store, or even a startup experiencing rapid growth, one of the four Hulk plans might be a good bet because you have more pricing options to choose from/upgrade to as you scale your business.
In the end, both apps have excellent support teams who are ready to help you further customize your store and the options you provide your valued customers. Whichever one you choose, you won’t be disappointed.
