Utilising apps for your Shopify website can help manage, organise and grow every part of your e-commerce business; from marketing to shipping, to sales. But with over 2,000 to choose from, deciding on the best Shopify apps often gets put in the ‘too hard’ and ‘too expensive’ basket.
To ensure you have can use the latest and greatest of Shopify’s offerings, we’ve done researched the most popular apps that are easy to install and even easier to use.
In fact, it doesn’t have to cost you anything at all. Behold our list of the best free apps, guaranteed to enhance your customer experience, streamline your operations and propel the growth of your business to meteoric levels.
Marketing
Plugin SEO
Increasing your store’s organic traffic by ranking high on search engine results pages, is a cost-effective way of making more sales and an alternative to advertising. But with constant algorithm changes and a certain level of tech-knowledge required, SEO can be a difficult art to master.
Boasting 1368 5 star reviews, Plugin SEO has come to the rescue of many a confused e-commerce retailer, providing suggestions on how to improve web pages and correct image labelling, as well as checking site speed and reviewing web content for keyword favorability. This is an app with a serious return on the $0 investment.
Product reviews
56% of online shoppers read product reviews before they make the decision to buy, so backing up your product pages with this type of customer-generated content, is a must to build trust and encourage sales.
This app allows you to add a customer review feature to your products, meaning more engagement and increased social proof. You can also customise the design to fit in with your store’s branding and add the review scores to your Google search results – which is also great for SEO.
Social media stream
Sometimes a visitor will land on your site to window shop but aren’t quite ready to commit to a purchase, so providing the option to engage with your brand in a different environment is a savvy move.
With Social media stream, you can showcase real-time updates from your social channels, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, Pinterest and Tumblr directly on your website, making it easy for customers to follow you. Voila – you have a way to engage and nurture the relationship into a sale at a later date before they bounce off your site.
Sales
Instagram shop
Installing the Instagram shop app should be firmly placed at the top of your to-do list. Your customers are dipping in and out of iInstagramcontinuously throughout the day, so why not make your posts act as a shop?
Forget putting links in your bio, with this app you can link specific products in your Instagram images to product pages, allowing customers to ‘shop the look’ and make a purchase then and there.
Recover Cart Pusher
Cart abandonment is the bugbear of any ecommerce retailer and an abandoned cart on the site is traditionally followed up with a reminder email. The limitation is that by the time the customer checks their email, the potential purchase can be a distant memory.
This app allows push notification pop-ups to appear on their desktop, after they have left your site. They can then click through from the notification to their cart and complete the purchase.
And for added bonus points, free persistent cart app ensures their cart appears on all devices, so if they started shopping on mobile, but click through from desktop, their cart remains intact.
Personalised Recommendations
Cross selling and upselling are sales 101, but what really brings these age-old sales techniques into the 21st Century is the power of personalisation.
Using browsing behaviour and sales history, this apps analyses the data and displays relevant product recommendations to customers. Such as Customers who bought this also bought, Best sellers, Recently viewed and Recommendations based on cart, inspiring every site visitor and creating an experience completely unique to them..
Shipping
Free shipping bar
One of the main reasons shoppers cite for cart abandonment is not having adequate information about costs, until they get to the checkout.
Free shipping bar, shows your store’s shipping information in a top bar on your site, so it’s clear, simple and transparent. If you offer free shipping, this is the place to display it. The app can also track how a customer’s order is progressing towards a free shipping minimum order threshold, helping to increase average order value for your store.
Shipping Rates Calculator Plus
If you’ve crunched the numbers and offering free shipping, or a flat shipping rate isn’t a viable option for your store, there’s still no excuse for a lack of transparency when it comes to costs.
And on that note, this app isn’t exactly free, it’s $6.99USD a month…but you can get a free 15 day trial.
Using the geolocation of your customer, the app calculates their shipping costs in real-time in the shopping cart, before they get to checkout. The customer’s location will be shown on a map and they have the option to change the location, depending on the delivery address. So no more nasty surprises resulting in abandoned carts.
Shippit
When it comes to shipping, costs are not the only factor that’ll sway your customers decision on whether to buy. They are also looking for options. This might be delivery location options, specified time slots, or the speed in which they receive their order – either way the customer wants to be in control.
Shippit’s Shopify app means you can offer multiple delivery speed options (standard, express or 3 hour), allow your customers to track their order, resulting in less customer service time for you, and always get the best rates for your customer and your store. The result is a more satisfactory buying experience for your customer and increased brand loyalty.
Shopify apps are not just nice-to-haves, they can be powerful growth tools and instrumental to the success of your store. Whatever your business challenge, customer need or e-commerce weak point – there’s most certainly an app for that.
