Are you looking to spice up your Shopify store? Shopify is a great eCommerce solution for getting websites up quickly, but it lacks many of the unique features that businesses may need. Fortunately, Shopify has a robust app store that can help you to address these needs (and then some) – you just need to know what to look for.
While there is no de facto essential or best app on the marketplace, there are a few different types that many Shopify stores will need. We’ve compiled 10 of the best Shopify apps for you to consider regardless of your store. From designing custom pages to SEO optimization to creating social proof, there is an app for every new online store to benefit from.
10 of The Best Shopify Apps
Shogun
Create custom web pages
- Drag and drop editor lets you build your webpages visually
- Over 70 pre-built layouts and elements to build with
- Optimized for speed and search engines
- A/B testing and analytics for better conversions
Shopify is a great platform for your online business, but it isn’t particularly versatile out of the box. Themes and templates can help you to get a site up quickly, but if you really want to succeed, you need a tool to let you make your website what you want it to be – not a cookie-cutter site that turns people away.
Shogun is a Shopify page builder that can be used to handcraft your website’s pages with individual elements. In addition to editing the basics with Shopify’s page editor, this app lets you style, format, and place individual elements within a template or on a brand new page so that you can achieve the look you want. This way you can make your website unique and match your brand perfectly.
With Shogun’s help, your website will look better, sell more, and be entirely responsive on all platforms so that your business can thrive.
Loox
Collect reviews and generate social proof
- Allows customers to leave photo reviews
- Can enable verified reviews only
- Automatically requests reviews from customers
- Offers discounts or promotions as review incentives
- Includes responsive elements to display collected reviews
Earning your customers’ trust is one of the most effective ways to earn more sales. As a general rule, internet sales are inherently risky. When you buy from a store online, there is often no interaction between customer and business. It’s impersonal and makes it hard to complete sales to skeptical shoppers. But in traditional retail, there are employees, a physical location, and someone to hold accountable if something goes wrong, so there is much less assumed risk in the customer’s eyes.
Loox helps to bridge the social gap between online and traditional retail by providing social proof for wary online shoppers. The app allows businesses to collect user reviews – including picture reviews – and display them with responsive elements on your Shopify store. Requests to review can be automated based on chosen criteria and include special offers such as discounts for completing a review.
With this tool, you can use existing happy customers to act as your own salespeople. The reviews can help convince new buyers through marketing, social media, or just proof of legitimacy.
Oberlo
Easily find and add dropshipping products
- Access thousands of products without tracking down suppliers
- Oberlo helps identify hot sellers and recommends pricing
- Automatic inventory management
- Processes orders and updates progress
- 24/7 support to help set up your dropshipping store
Dropshipping is an incredibly popular business model where business owners collect sales and suppliers fulfill the orders. They have a low barrier of entry, require minimal startup or maintenance costs outside of advertising, and can be a great way to generate more passive income. However, getting setup with a dropshipping store isn’t so easy.
Oberlo is a dropshipping app that makes it easy to get started with dropshipping. Integrating the app with your store lets you access a wide catalog of different products to sell which can be uploaded into your store in minutes. You can edit the pictures included, the price you charge, and more in just a few clicks while the app helps you to find the optimal settings to use. Oberlo also gives insight into what products are selling to make it easy to choose which products to highlight in your shop.
Oberlo is one of the easiest ways to dropship with Shopify, handling everything from importing products to inventory management to order processing autonomously. You just need to make the sales!
Printful
Order custom-printed items
- Print or embroider on anything on-demand
- No startup costs
- Dropshipping-friendly
- Hands-off order processing
Customized clothing, accessories, and more are a popular type of product. Customized products make great gifts, but they aren’t usually cost-effective to offer unless you are creating each custom design yourself.
If you want to offer custom merchandise, Printful makes it easy. Their Shopify app allows customers to create their own designs on a variety of mediums and order them without minimums. All the orders that are placed are handled by Printful itself (similar to dropshipping), so sales will be hands-off and the app will integrate with Shopify to make order tracking easy.
SEO Booster
SEO optimization for Shopify
- Evaluates existing content for SEO
- Creates a list of practices to implement on the site
- Provides current pageranks
- Automatically identifies and implement keyword opportunities
- Highlights problems and provides solutions
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a crucial part of any business – and Shopify stores are no exception. SEO aims to improve where your business shows up in search rankings on engines like Google or Bing by implementing on-site tags that help these engines better understand your website. Unfortunately, Shopify itself does not provide store owners with many tools to improve their search rankings, so it’s a good idea to add an app to ensure your site is optimized.
SEO Booster is an app that makes it easy to implement the best SEO practices for your online store. Targeted to those who do not have experience with SEO, the beginner-friendly app provides information on SEO, evaluates the site, and identifies problems and how to fix them to get the essential SEO out of the way simply. After the site is fixed, it will provide recommendations for keywords to implement, manage meta tags for pages and pictures, and identify broken links or duplicate content that may hurt SEO.
An SEO tool is a great way to save time and make sure that your site is able to be seen, saving you from wasted marketing dollars and building organic authority on search engines to earn more customers.
Tidio Live Chat
Live chat and messenger bots for customer service
- Combines multiple support channels into a single dashboard
- Enables support bots during live support downtime
- Follows up with abandoned carts
- Collects missed messages
Customer service is an incredibly important part of online sales. It can be difficult to overcome the lack of trust that comes with eCommerce, but it helps to provide live support to put customers at ease. A live chat app allows users to contact a sales rep to understand promotions, ask questions about policy, and receive other help that they could get from asking an employee in a store. This not only helps to humanize the transaction, but keeps the customer on your store to ask their question instead of navigating away to Google it, risking the chance that they don’t come back.
Tidio Live Chat is a free app; that enables live chat to be activated on your Shopify site. Up to 3 agents (or more with paid plans) can provide real-time support through Facebook Messenger, on-site live chat, or email to help improve your customer experience. Customers browsing the store can be followed and contacted preemptively on the dashboard, or requests can be handled as they are started. The app also provides a limited number of chatbox triggers – automated messages that offer discounts, ask for feedback, provide similar recommendations, and more without an agent – that can be used each month. These save your support agents time of answering FAQs and keeps your support active even during your regular offline hours.
With Tidio live chat, you can lower bounce rates, abandoned carts,and lost sales while increasing revenue by up to 40%. It’s an incredibly important app to consider to ensure you convert as many sales as possible.
Push Owl
Recover abandoned carts
- Send direct ads to customers on desktop or Android
- No email or contact information required
- Send abandoned cart reminders with special offers
- Update on sales, restocks, and new releases
- Create a sequence of automated ads for each segment
Gaining the attention of potential customers is one of the most important but also most difficult parts of owning an online business. Between marketing, conversion rate optimization, and closing the sale, there’s a lot of things that can get in the way of getting paid. So once you get them on the site, you can’t let them go without a fight.
PushOwl offers a new approach to interactive and highly targeting marketing efforts. While the app does not do much to bring new customers to your store, it greatly increases the chances that they will place an order, or come back at another time for another chance at a sale.
When a visitor arrives at your website, PushOwl prompts them to allow notifications. If they accept, you can then push web notifications for discounts, supports, or even cart abandonment prompts to their desktop or mobile phone. From the dashboard, you can set the triggers to activate different notifications such as previous purchases, abandoned carts, times visited, and more to ensure you’re showing the right ad to the right demographic.
OptinMonster
Exit-intent recovery tool
- Engages visitors before they leave your store
- Highlight important offers with popups
- Test different ads with A/B testing
- Grow mailing list with newsletter popups
- Drag and drop builder for ads
It takes a lot of time, money, and effort to get customers on your website. Whether your SEO is bringing in organic traffic or you’re seeing success with a PPC campaign, you can’t let potential customers slip through the cracks. This is especially true when you are paying per click on an ad where you pay the same if they bounce immediately or make a purchase. After all, if they’ve arrived at your site through search, they are most likely a potential customer in some regard. So, you need to keep them on your site as long as possible until you can convince them to buy.
OptinMonster’s Shopify app is a tool that monitors your visitors’ cursor, which allows it to sense when they are about to leave the tab or close the window. When this happens – known as exit intent – OptinMonster can create a popup that brings their attention back to your site instead of their browser navigation. Using a drag and drop editor to create these pop ups, you can offer coupon discounts, offer perks to newsletter subscribers, or send any message you want to try to salvage the sale.
OptinMonster also provides analytics to see which offers are working, including split testing to help you refine your customer retention efforts. It can be integrated with Mailchimp for mailing list formation, Drip for better sales funnels, and other tools to help send potential customers where you want them to go.
ReConvert
Earn Upsells and Cross Sells
- Upsell and cross sell offers increase average order value
- Build your own offers and sequence them
- Custom “thank you” page creation
- Collect reviews, feedback, birthdays, and newsletter registrations on checkout
As a business, you have to be wary of your profit margins, overhead, and other costs to ensure you are always ending up in the green. If your margins are too low or you simply aren’t selling enough to cover your overhead, your business won’t last. To combat this, you either need to sell more products so that the small margins add up, or increase how much your average sale value is.
ReConvert is an upselling and cross selling app that helps you to increase your profit margin and earn more sales by increasing your average order value. By providing recommendations for different products to add to their order (cross selling) or upgrades to their current order (upselling), you can increase the amount that each customer spends on your site. These offers can be put together using the page builder and then added on the checkout page or the “thank you” page to engage buyers. By making it easy (and enticing) to upgrade with a call to action and 1-click ordering, you’ll enjoy more sales and business growth.
By increasing your average order value, you increase the amount of money that can go into acquiring each customer which earns more traffic because you can reinvest your profits into more marketing.
Referral Candy
Provide rewards for purchases and referrals
- Incentivize customers to refer their friends
- Directly processes referral credits
- Choose between cash rewards, coupons, or special gifts
- Track referrers
- Create your own pages
Word of mouth is an extremely effective sales tool for online businesses. The social proof that reviews and personal recommendations provide can break the eCommerce concerns that online shoppers have, making it easier to close sales. According to Nielsen, customers are 4x more likely to make a purchase if referred by a friend, so implementing a referral system can be a great way to increase sales.
With Referral Candy, you can build your own referral program that is customized for your needs. Their page builder lets you make custom referral prompts and create special offers for when someone refers a customer. These can include credits to the store, discount codes, or special gifts that vary based on the number of referrals. Once the criteria is met, the app will automatically process the reward, so you won’t have to deal with people asking where their credit is. This can be done an unlimited amount of times, meaning that your referral system can lead to exponential reach of new customers for a fixed cost of whatever reward you offer per referral, making it easy to account for the cost of acquisition.
Final Thoughts
While Shopify offers an incredibly beginner-friendly and simple way to get an online store up and running, it needs some help from apps to truly reach its maximum potential for your business.
No matter what your business model, niche, or goal is for your business, our top 10 best app recommendations can help you to build a better store and set yourself up for success. There are also a lot of options for each type of app we’ve highlighted, so if something doesn’t fit your budget or needs, there’s an app out there that will.
If you’d prefer not to have to worry about choosing your own apps, working with an expert Shopify developer can help ensure your needs and budget are met with the best options available. At SEOpologist, we have years of experience setting new businesses up for success and improving existing stores to sell more and provide a better customer experience.
Get in touch today to get a quote for your Shopify store.
