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Apps are the fundamental building blocks behind every great Shopify-powered store experience. Without a strong foundation of critical apps, you risk missing out on valuable features and potential sales opportunities.
On the other hand, downloading everything you see in the app store can push prospective customers away by extending site loading time, increasing operational costs, or creating recurrent bugs which can ultimately lower your search engine optimization or SEO score.
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Choosing the right apps for your ecommerce platform is a bit of an art form. However, there are a few steps you can take to make your decision-making process a bit more streamlined.
The first step in choosing the right Shopify apps for your store is defining your goals. In this case, the more specific your goal setting, the better.
Do you want to boost sales by a certain amount in the next six months? Or would you like to cut shopping cart abandonment by half? Maybe you want to attract twice as many new customers by the end of the year?
You need a clear vision of where you’d headed in order to select apps that suit your needs. If you don’t know the why behind your app integrations, you’ll wind up wasting a lot of time, money, and effort on something that doesn’t actually benefit your business.
Once you know the end goals you’d like to accomplish, you can start researching Shopify app options by individual use case. If your goal is to increase sales within six months’ time, then you may seek out an app to help with upselling or establishing a customer rewards program.
Alternatively, if your focus is on improving retention rates, you might like an app that can assist with retargeting or conversion marketing. And if you want to streamline processes, you may need an app that automates importing data into Shopify. The point is to consider how you want to interact with the app and/or what you need the app to do for you — and then dig into the details of what each platform can offer.
If you’ve created a shortlist of apps you’re most interested in, the next step will be to compare Shopify app reviews from other online stores. As you read through these customer reviews, pay attention to what they’re saying about the app’s usability, feature set, and overall value.
Reading through a handful of reviews can help you to better understand the pros and cons of each service, and will allow you to narrow down your options a little bit further.
Even after you’ve installed your Shopify apps and integrated them into your retail operations, it’s important to regularly assess and update everything you’re using. If the apps you’ve chosen aren’t user-friendly, or they lack drag and drop features, or you’d like more room customization, you can always cut them loose (or swap them out).
There’s such a wealth of apps out there to choose from, you have the flexibility to try out a few different programs before you decide which works best for your brand.
The Extensiv team has compiled the best Shopify apps to help you improve your ecommerce store — whether you’re a small business or a full-fledged enterprise. For each app listed, we will include the use case, app description, key features, and pricing.
Use Case: Digital Marketing
App Description:
Criteo gives business owners the tools to build and launch effective digital marketing campaigns. This application lets marketers design test content and optimize their messaging to fit any device, audience, or sales channel.
But in addition to campaign deployment, Criteo also includes robust analytics dashboards to inform your entire marketing and business strategy. This way, you know what messaging resonates with your audience, as well as which are the strongest landing pages to boost conversions and increase sales.
Key Features:
Pricing: contact Criteo for a custom quote
Use Case: Email Marketing
App description:
Klaviyo’s SMS and email marketing app is designed to help ecommerce businesses create high-quality, personalized email campaigns that are based on both behavioral and transactional data. Klaviyo supports ecommerce marketers in building their email list and simplifying the creation, deployment, and measurement of their campaigns.
More specifically, Klaviyo comes with pre-built best practice techniques, A/B testing, segmentation capabilities, and in-depth reporting for your Shopify Plus site.
Key Features:
Pricing: Klaviyo is free for up to 250 active profiles
Use Case: Omnichannel marketing
App description:
Omnisend operates on the idea that data integration among sales channels is the key to sending the right message at the right time (also known as omnichannel marketing). The Omnisend platform offers pre-created workflows for reaching subscribers at every stage along the customer journey, from brand introduction to retention efforts.
Plus, Omnisend has the ability to incorporate other tools — including SMS and web push notifications — for reaching an even wider audience of subscribers and customers.
Key Features:
Pricing: Paid plans starting at $16/month
Use Case: Affiliate Marketing
App description:
Refersion is a referral marketing app that connects your business with individuals that can help to promote your products. The purpose of this app is to capitalize on social media ‘likes’ by sponsoring content through affiliate or influencer networks.
Using Refersion, your brand can create and launch customized referral, affiliate, or promoter networks. This platform enables you to see clicks and conversions in real-time alongside channels and peak performance times, and to measure both revenue and engagement.
Key Features:
Pricing: Paid plans starting at $89/month
Use Case: Affiliate and Referral Marketing
App description:
UpPromote Affiliate & Referral is the top-recommended affiliate/referral marketing app on Shopify App Store. It is an all-in-one app that helps brands maximize exposure and boost customer loyalty.
With UpPromote, businesses can tap into the power of affiliate, referral, and influencer marketing to find and manage partners and brand ambassadors. It allows users to customize everything from forms and links to coupons and affiliate portals to fit their brand. With flexible pricing options, UpPromote can accommodate the needs and expansion of any business, making it an ideal solution for brands of all sizes looking to enhance their marketing efforts and drive growth through affiliate and referral marketing.
Key Features:
Pricing: Paid plans start at $29.99/month
Use Case: Ecommerce SEO
App description:
To be successful as an ecommerce brand, you need to optimize your storefront and drive traffic to your site. With SEO Manager, Shopify merchants can take control of how search engines see their store and review live feedback on the successes (and failures) of their SEO strategy.
SEO Manager makes it considerably easier to understand and implement SEO measures that’ll help your brand achieve higher rankings across the board. In other words, you’ll not only get your storefront noticed, but you’ll also drive site traffic and create conversion opportunities.
Key Features:
Pricing: Paid plans starting at $20/month
Use Case: Social media
App description:
Social media apps connect your Shopify store to social platforms for two-way communication and customer insight. Octane AI is an all-in-one software for quizzes, data collection, and personalized Facebook Messenger and SMS automation for Shopify and Shopify Plus.
What’s more, the Octane app interacts with your customers and prospects through Facebook Messenger to answer frequently asked questions, remind shoppers about their abandoned carts, announce new promotions, or provide transactional data (like order confirmation).
Key Features:
Pricing: Paid plans starting at $49/month
Use Case: Website Optimization
App description:
The Shopify app store has plenty of options when it comes to website optimization, but Lucky Orange continues to stand out. Lucky Orange knows why someone left your ecommerce store, and it gives you the opportunity to know the same. The app allows you to view your website through the eyes of your visitors and customers by digitally watching over their shoulders.
This app comes with form analytics, live chat, surveys, conversion funnels (and more), all of which add up to a powerful resource for connecting with customers and boosting conversions.
Key Features:
Pricing: Paid plans starting at $10/month
Use Case: Behavioral marketing
App description:
Customer behavior apps have a myriad of benefits — like tracking and monitoring engagement with your Shopify site, offering insight into customer interactions, and identifying areas that need improvement or deliver strong conversion rates. Not only is Hotjar the most used customer behavior app on Shopify, but it’s relied on globally across 184 countries.
The Hotjar platform is known for its heatmap and conversion rate funnel technology, which helps merchants identify reasons for cart abandonment and low conversion.
Key Features:
Pricing: Paid plans starting at $31/month
Use Case: Retargeting
App description:
Retargeting apps focus on regaining ‘lost’ customers by serving ads that feature products they've either clicked on or placed in their cart. This sets retargeting apart from traditional digital marketing apps because the goal isn't to acquire new visitors, but to convert existing ones.
Using the Shoelace platform, online stores can deliver engaging retargeting experiences while also decreasing cart abandonment through automation, human touch, and insights from thousands of digital marketing campaigns.
Key Features:
Pricing: contact Shoelace for a custom quote
Use Case: Conversion marketing
App description:
Conversion marketing apps get site visitors to take action. By giving insight into the messaging and channels that resonate with your visitors, these apps can also inform your overall business strategy. Justuno leverages artificial intelligence and billions of user sessions to create intelligent lead captures, personalized messages, and on-brand website content.
On top of that, Justuno offers exit-intent messaging to decrease cart abandonment, push notifications for sale reminders, and even gamification to increase conversions.
Key Features:
Pricing: Paid plans starting at $25/month
Use Case: Upselling & cross-selling
App description:
Both upselling and cross-selling identify opportunities to sell complementary (or superior) products. This way, your brand can drive more revenue and create a smarter shopping experience for every product in your online store.
Bold Upsell allows Shopify store owners to display upsell, cross-sell, or post-purchase pop-up offers that customers can quickly add to their cart with just one click. Plus, it's the only Shopify app to upgrade and replace the original item in the cart, while also offering a unique post-purchase upsell that allows customers to add a final deal after they've placed an order.
Key Features:
Pricing: Paid plans starting at $9.99/month
Use Case: Customer support
App description:
Customer support apps enable Shopify store owners to communicate with customers across a spectrum of messaging channels. However your customers prefer to contact you, it's important to have an open channel to address their questions, complaints, and concerns.
Gorgias allows Shopify customer support teams to manage all their channels in just one place. By seamlessly integrating with Shopify Plus, Facebook, Instagram, and email, Gorgias easily connects the dots between each channel to deliver a holistic view of your customer interactions.
Key Features:
Pricing: Paid plans starting at $50/month
Use case: Customer support
App description:
Tidio is an AI-powered customer service platform designed to enhance customer support and boost sales through its AI Agent Lyro, live chat, automation flows, and help desk ticketing. With Tidio, businesses can automate customer interactions, provide real-time support, and deliver a seamless AI-powered omnichannel experience through live chat, social media, and email.
Tidio's AI Agent, Lyro, resolves an average of 64% of customer inquiries, with peak performance reaching 90%. It is fast, personalized, and secure, becoming more intelligent with each customer interaction.
Key Features:
Use Case: Customer rewards
App description:
Loyalty programs are one of the best tools for driving retention, because they incentivize customers for ongoing engagement. Swell is an incentive-based Shopify Plus loyalty platform whose highly-customizable software helps thousands of merchants build engaging rewards, discounts, and referral programs (resulting in 9x ROI on average).
Swell turns shoppers into loyal advocates, by motivating them to build meaningful relationships with brands through social engagement, repeat purchasing, and product reviews.
Key Features:
Pricing: Paid plans starting at $19/month
Use Case: Loyalty program
App description:
Growave is an all-in-one marketing automation platform that helps businesses reach, engage, and convert their customers. This app offers a wide variety of tools, such as Reviews, Wishlists, Q&A, Loyalty and Referral, Instagram galleries, and more.
The incredible multifunctionality of Growave makes it the ultimate platform for online store conversions and sales. In fact, it’s as much as six times more cost-effective than any of the other loyalty apps on the market right now. Growave can help your brand replace 4 to 6 different apps you’re currently using — and save you a ton of money at the same time.
Key Features:
Pricing: Paid plans starting at $9/month
Use Case: Shopify inventory management
App description:
Having profitable products to sell online is the most critical aspect of your ecommerce business, because without products, there can be no sales. Today, consumer brands need to be everywhere potential customers are shopping, whether it's marketplaces, brand websites, or their Instagram feeds.
Extensiv was built to synchronize fulfillment, inventory, and product intelligence, giving consumer brands a unified view of their overall operations. Its robust product functionality automates redundancies and allows brands to sell across multiple sales channels, while also managing your inventory, purchase orders, and fulfillment processes.
Key Features:
Pricing: contact Extensiv for a custom quote
Use Case: Dropshipping
App description:
Dropshipping allows you to partner with suppliers and display their products in your store. With a dropshipping approach, you sell the supplier’s goods while they keep inventory in their own warehouse until an item is ordered.
Oberlo is perhaps the best known dropshipping app available on Shopify. The Oberlo platform has been used to sell more than 100 million products, and continues to be a leader in its industry. If you’re in search of a product to sell, Oberlo is ready to help you source a reputable, reliable supplier.
Key Features:
Pricing: Paid plans starting at $79.90/month
Use Case: Product reviews
App description:
Reviews are a pivotal part of the ecommerce customer journey. Yotpo, our app of choice in this category, says the average conversion rate of visitors who saw a piece of user-generated content was 161% higher than those who didn't.
The Yotpo platform enables you to collect user-generated content and showcase it across the buyer journey via your website, email campaigns, digital advertisements, and social media channels. Yotpo's visual marketing tools allow Shopify sellers to repurpose reviews, social posts, product feedback, and even an FAQ or two to build trust and boost conversion.
Key Features:
Pricing: Paid plans starting at $19/month
Use Case: Shopping feed
App description:
DataFeedWatch is a leading feed marketing solution available in over 50 countries and across more than 1,000 ecommerce channels. The goal of DataFeedWatch is to help merchants grow both locally and globally. Their dedicated Shopify integration opens the door to multichannel product listings and comprehensive data feed optimization.
Intuitive and easy to use, DataFeedWatch gives merchants the tools needed to achieve greater visibility and ROAS from their ecommerce campaigns on Google, Facebook, and Amazon.
Key Features:
Pricing: Paid plans starting at $59/month
Use Case: Profit tracking
App description:
As an ecommerce owner, it's important to have a complete understanding of your profits and expenses to keep track of your finances and measure your store's overall health. BeProfit is Shopify’s best profit calculator app, as it lets users track and analyze everything between expenses and profits, all in one intuitive dashboard.
The BeProfit platform presents data snippets in easy-to-digest project charts and graphs, so understanding complex business metrics is as easy as it gets.
Key Features:
Pricing: Paid plans starting at $20/month
Use Case: Customer value optimization
App description:
Customer retention is key to a company’s growth and profitability, as a 5% increase in retention can increase profits by up to 95% for your company. For you to have an effective retention strategy, you need to understand your customers and what makes them act the way they do.
Reveal is a customer data software that analyzes your customers’ behavior across different platforms. It presents real-time data of your customers’ buying activity in an easy-to-understand format, which helps you understand how to acquire better customers and retain them while reducing CAC in the process.
Key Features:
Pricing: Paid plans starting at $99/month
You can’t grow your revenue without the right tools, which is where Shopify apps really come to the rescue. Regardless if you’re starting a new business or updating your existing site, Shopify apps make it simple to sell anything online and improve the performance of your store.
Utilizing these tools offers a wide range of benefits, from promoting your brand and selling your products, to rewarding your customers and streamlining your inventory processes. Whether you want to test out a free plan or you’re ready to invest in one of the many available premium plans, Shopify apps can help you grow your business in no time at all.