The Shopify App Store has a pool of over 3 000 apps from which eCommerce entrepreneurs can use to extend the functionality of their online retail. But with so much to choose from, eCommerce entrepreneurs need to choose only the best apps that can help to grow their businesses.
Today we are sharing with you a list of the top 10 Shopify apps as recommended by Gretta Van Riel. Gretta is the founder of 4 multi-million dollar Shopify stores and these are apps she uses in her Shopify stores to increase conversions and scale her sales.
1. Loox
Loox is a product reviews app. This app is important because it lets customers that are browsing your website see that other customers have had a positive experience with your store. This increases trust which in turn increases conversions.
Loox not only offers text-based reviews but also photo reviews. It's important to add this right from day one if you don't have any reviews of your product yet. If you have a brand new store, you can send the product out to either micro-influencers or people that you know of that target demographic and ask for reviews in return for that gifted product.
2. Photo Resize
It's a compression tool that searches through all of the photos on your site and compresses them while retaining the quality of the photos. The photos will all look the same but they'll be a lot smaller in file size. This means that your site is going to load faster, and faster load times can increase your conversions by 2x.
3. Klaviyo
Klaviyo is an email marketing software. It has far better automation and sequencing than a lot of its competitors. You can use it to set up abandoned cart sequences and welcome sequences to convert new customers. You can also create a pop-up that captures email addresses and then basically the sequence will be automated to convert that email capture into a customer.
Here’s a case study we covered of how this tool was used to increase a Shopify store’s revenue by email marketing campaigns.
4. Rewind
Rewind is an app that automatically backs up your store. If something affects your store’s data like a security breach or a bug that makes you lose all of your Shopify data, rewind can restore that for you. If you don't have Rewind, you are at risk of potentially losing all of your hard-earned Shopify data like your customer information which you've spent so much time and money building.
5. Postscript
Postscript is an SMS marketing platform where you can create SMS-based campaigns similar to how we use Klaviyo for emails. The main thing that you can use Postscripts for is to recover abandoned carts. So if your customer has gone through the order process and they've got up to where they enter their mobile number, you can follow up with them. You can use a quick reminder text saying “Hi, you know you've left items in your cart”.
The reason why you need to use SMS is that 85% of people open their SMSs within the first 15 minutes of receiving them whereas emails can take hours or even days. So SMS marketing is a great way to quickly reach your customers.
6. Aftersell
Aftersell is a post-purchase upsell app. It provides a way to sell more products and increase your store’s average order value. After the customer purchases your product, it sends a pop-up with an after-sell offer. It can be a pop-up that shows a 30% discount or buy 2 products at the price of 1 or a complimentary product that the customers might be interested in.
It's a great way to add more revenue on top of every sale without having to acquire a new customer.
7. Lifetimely
Lifetimely is a profit and lifetime value tracking app that you need to be on top of all of your metrics. It helps you to know whether you're profitable or not instead of looking at your Shopify dashboard and seeing only daily sales only.
8. Gorgias
It's just an all-around smarter and more intelligent customer service platform. The tool can also be integrated with your store's Facebook and Instagram messages so you can give your customers feedback much faster.
It also has pre-filled responses and smart answers to reply to common questions which saves a lot of time and offers great customer service.
9. Enquire post-purchase surveys
This is a tool that helps you display survey questions to your customers after their purchase. It helps you to set up surveys for example to learn which platform the customers heard about your store so that you can focus on promoting that platform to acquire more customers.
10. Back in stock
This is a restock alerts app. It's a must-have because it indicates when a particular product is out of stock and asks for the customer’s email. Once the item is restocked, the app sends reminder emails to the customers informing them that the item is back.
This helps you keep your customers especially when you have the traffic coming to your store only to find out that the product is out of stock.
Conclusion
The Shopify apps listed here are basically everything you need to have most of your store’s profits secured. One thing to note is that you don’t have to use very many apps. You should limit yourself to less than 10 apps.
This is because each Shopify app slows down your store’s load time which can affect your conversion rates. The reason why having lots of Shopify apps slows down your website is that they place javascript throughout the site’s header which makes the website slow. Make sure that you’re not adding any unnecessary Shopify apps to your store and also keep measuring your website loading speeds. A good industry benchmark for e-commerce is around the 4-second load time point.
