Top 10 Shopify Apps That Will Supercharge Your Store
December 29, 2020
At IWD, we love Shopify.
And as it turns out, we’re far from alone.
The popular eCommerce platform owns roughly 20% of the market.
One of the many reasons it enjoys this kind of popularity is that Shopify is both extremely customizable anduser-friendly.
Look no further than the crowded Shopify app store for proof of this. There’s an app for just about any goal you have for your store.
The 10 Best Shopify Apps to Quickly Skyrocket Your Results
That said, withwell over 4,000 Shopify apps to choose from, I thought I’d recommend the ones I like the best. And if you don't see the perfect option for your unique needs, we are a full-service Shopify app development company.
Otherwise, I chose the following top 10 Shopify apps because each of them can produce significant results for your online store in a relatively short period of time and without breaking your budget – most even come with a free plan.
1. Bulk Image Edit to Keep Your Images from Slowing Down Your Site
One of the many reasons I think Shopify is such a great platform is that you don’t have to be extremely tech-savvy to build, run, and optimize a fully-functioning eCommerce store.
Case-in-point: Shopify will automatically resize your images before they go live on your site. You don’t have to go through the painstaking process of adjusting image sizes until they look perfect.
The problem is that a lot of great images can quickly become too much of a good thing.
They look great, but they slow your site’s load time, something customers and Google hate. So, while your images may look nice, fewer and fewer people actually see them.
The antidote is to use Bulk Image Edit.
As the name suggests, it lets you bulk edit your site’s images, so you can immediately reduce their sizes to something more manageable. It’s one very simple step to significantly drop your load time and improve both UX and SEO – fast.
You can even use it to edit alt tags and file names to gain even more attention from Google.
Check outBulk Image Edit to see everything else it has to offer, including a free plan.
2. Better Reports for …well… Better Reports
Just about everyone who works in sales or marketing knows the famous Peter Drucker quote that, “What gets measured gets managed.”
Nowhere is this truer than with your website.
Once you start generating traffic, making sales, adding products, and everything else that goes along with running an online store, it’s easy to become overwhelmed. It’s easy to let some metrics fall by the wayside while you try to stay focused on the “most important ones.”
But in eCommerce, everymetric is important.
Enter Better Reports.
It comes with hundreds of reports and metrics for you to pick from to create a single, customized report that will quickly show you the data you need to make the best decisions for your business. Add charts, pivot tables, and any other visuals to make this even easier.
Even then, you probably don’t have time to do a deep dive into all of your data every single day. Between you and me, I actually like to sleep every now and then.
With Better Reports, you can schedule different types of reports to run every day, week, and month. The app will even email them to you or load them into Google Sheets.
This makes it easy to stay on top of the metrics that matter most every day, the ones you want to keep an eye on every week, and the numbers that don’t mean much until you can see them with a 30-day view.
It connects right to Shopify, but you can also connect it with other popular eCommerce apps, like:
- Stripe
- Help Scout
- SendGrid
- Xero
- QuickBooks
Better doesn’t have to mean bigger and bulkier. With Better Reports, you have one user-friendly Shopify app pulling together all the information you need to hit your eCommerce goals.
Download Better Reports and try it for free for 14 days.
3. Buddha Mega Menu for Customer-Friendly Navigation That Boosts Conversions
Ensuring that your site is easy to navigate isn’t just good for SEO.
It turns out that customers also like being able to quickly find the products they want.
Who knew?
Unfortunately, your Shopify store’s inventory may have grown to the point that it’s begun making navigation difficult.
Customers don’t like “difficult.”
So, if you’ve noticed many of your shoppers are giving up before they make it to your actual product pages, I recommend using Buddha Mega Menu to turn things around ASAP.
This Shopify app lets you design customized menus that make it easy for customers to quickly explore your entire inventory. Instead of just showing product names in the menu, you can display images and prices, too.
Take a look at three of their menu types in action:
The Tree Menu
The Simple Menu
A Tabbed Menu
Best of all, there’s no coding required. In fact, it’s the only app on the market that lets you create the menus you need without using Shopify Navigation.
No more customers getting lost, having to click back, starting over, and eventually giving up.
Just create the perfect menu for your unique store.
Need to add submenus?
Easy!
How about submenus that automatically update for your newest or best-selling items?
No problem.
You can even add other features like contact forms and blog posts to specific menus if you find they’re helpful for converting shoppers.
Buddha Mega Menu offers a completely free plan, so there’s no reason not to give it a try.
4. Judge.me for Effortless Customer Reviews
One of the easiest ways to increase your Shopify conversion rate is to add product reviews to your site.
Customers love product reviews.
Now, Shopify has their own product review app, so you could use that to show off how much customers love your products.
However, I want to highlight another option: Judge.me.
Waiting around for customers to leave you reviews is usually a losing strategy. With Judge.me, you can schedule emails to be automatically sent to your customers. They can just provide their review right in their email. You can even schedule reminders or offer them coupons for providing their thoughts.
Getting more customer reviews on your Shopify site is only half the battle, though.
You also want to make sure as many people as possible see them.
Once again, Judge.me is here to help.
It will integrate those reviews into rich snippets, so they show up in Google Search. That will improve your clickthrough rate and your Google rankings, both of which will bring you more conversions. The app makes it easy to share your rave reviews on Facebook, too.
Try Judge.me for free and see what a difference it makes to your bottom line.
5. Referral Candy for the Easiest Referrals You’ve Ever Had
Referrals are arguably the most underrated form of traffic – and profits – for eCommerce websites.
So, why do referrals usually go underutilized?
It’s not that shop owners don’t love free business.
It’s that getting referral business is often more trouble than it’s worth. Getting consistentreferral business is almost unheard of.
But it doesn’t have to be.
Referral Candy is a really simple Shopify app that will encourage your customers to tell their friends about your store on social media and even share special offers with them – giving them one more reason to pay you a visit.
That’s all there is to it.
You can set up Referral Candy on your Shopify site in just minutes and then add any branding or custom features you want. After that, it’s completely automated.
You’re literally just a few minutes from setting up a reliable referral program on your eCommerce store and reaping all the benefits of effortless sales.
Check out Referral Candy for yourself. Plans start at $49/month.
6. Wiser to Give Your Customers Personalized Recommendations
Product recommendations will skyrocket your sales.
Unfortunately, as with referral business, it’s impossible to manually go out and make those product recommendations to each and every customer who visits your Shopify store.
Fortunately, I also have an app recommendation that will automatically handle product recommendations for you.
All you have to do is install it to start seeing more sales on your site.
Wiser is an AI-powered app that will make unique product recommendations to each shopper based on behaviors like browsing, past purchases, developing trends, and more.
I love this approach because if you only link to the same two or three “similar” or “recommended” items on each of your product pages, you’re leaving out the majority of your inventory. And, at best, you’re only able to recommend products based on what most of your customers have preferred in the past.
With Wiser, more of your inventory gets attention, which means a greater conversion rate andaverage order value.
Combine Wiser with Judge.me and Referral Candy and you’ll have three of the top Shopify apps skyrocketing your store’s conversion rate – automatically.
Test out Wiser for free for up to $50 in associated sales. After that, Wiser charges on a tiered system, so you only pay when it makes you money.
7. Klaviyo for Everything Email
If you’re not already enjoying the ROI of email marketing, I can’t recommend this channel enough. The overhead is almost nonexistent, but the returns can be amazing for your Shopify store.
I also can’t recommend Klaviyo enough for creating your marketing emails. We use this platform for one of our largest marketing clients and it’s proven incredibly effective.
It’s also impressively user-friendly. Create personalized emails for shoppers based on what they’ve bought in the past. No technical skills required. Even if you’ve never created this kind of customized email before, your customers will never know.
An example of how easy it is to set up an abandoned cart series in Klaviyo
Use Klaviyo to email past customers about new product launches or upcoming sales. You can even segment your list to make recommendations based on what different groups have bought in the past.
Seeing a lot of abandoned carts?
Use Klaviyo to create abandoned cart emails and turn your conversion rate around. Like I said, it’s incredibly user-friendly.
With Klaviyo, your first 250 email recipients are totally free. Then, it’s tiered pricing after that. Try Klaviyo to either jumpstart your email marketing or supercharge your current efforts.
8. Tidio to Chat with Customers While They’re on Your Shopify Site
Yet anothergreat way to improve your Shopify store’s conversion rate is to invest in the power of a chatbot.
Specifically, I likeTidio for this important job.
First, it’s another user-friendly app you can download and start using right away. The next time a customer visits your Shopify site, you can be on the other side of the screen ready to answer any questions standing between them and making a purchase.
Of course, you won’t always be able to man your bot. With Tidio, your chatbot will recognize common customer inquiries and automatically provide preprogrammed answers.
Another automated task I love is that Tidio’s bots can give a specific greeting for any returning visitor, which will help them pick up where they left off or continue with their abandoned cart. The bot can even offer this returning visitor a discount to help seal that conversion.
Tidio has a completely free option with different features adding to the price – all very affordable.
Download Tidio today to see how much of a difference a chatbot can make to your Shopify site’s ROI.
9. Exit Intent Popup to Convert Shoppers Before They Leave
No matter how much you optimize your Shopify site – fast load times, great product descriptions, etc. – some shoppers are always going to leave before making a purchase.
Many of them intend to come back later, but what if they don’t?
What if they forget?
What if a competitor is able to get to them first?
With Exit Intent Popup, you don’t have to worry about these questions.
As you can tell by its name, this Shopify app recognizes when a shopper is ready to exit your website and triggers a popup before they do.
What this popup offers is completely up to you.
Yours could tell them about any sales you’re currently running or even offer them a special deal if they order during their current visit. It could just prompt them for their email address to join your list.
Whatever the case, the reason I love exit-intent popups is that they onlyshow ads to shoppers who were going to leave your site anyway. There are no popups interrupting people who have just arrived on your site or are already well on their way to making a purchase.
This is easily the best way to drop your bounce rate while boosting your conversions.
It’s also one of the most affordable.
Exit Intent Popup is completely free for up to 3,000 page views/month. After that, plans start at $29/month.
Leverage Exit Intent Popup today to start converting more of the people you’re already bringing to your site.
10. Smart SEO for Managing Your Essential SEO Tasks
Speaking of the people you bring to your site, it wouldn’t be a list of must-have Shopify apps if we didn’t cover one for SEO.
After all, if you don’t consistently generate traffic for your website, these other apps aren’t going to be very helpful.
So, while I definitely recommend hiring a Shopify SEO expert (hint, hint) to reach your most ambitious traffic goals, I’m also happy to recommend Smart SEO.
Smart SEO takes all the heavy lifting out of a number of different SEO tasks that are essential to success online.
Among manyother things, this list includes:
- Generating meta tags
- Adding alt tags
- Fixing broken links
- Managing your sitemap
These can all be done automatically.
The app will also give you SEO scores for those all-important product descriptions, so you know they’re making Google just as happy as your customers.
Take a look at all of your product descriptions’ SEO scores at a glance
Smart SEO can even help with more complex tasks like submitting your structured data to Google in JSON-LD format.
You can test out this Shopify SEO app for free, but plans go for as little as $4.99 after that.
For my money, that’s an incredible value for an app that handles such an important aspect of your site. Give Shopify SEO a try to see for yourself.
Need Help Selecting the Top Shopify Apps for Your Store?
While I love the 10 Shopify apps I recommended above, I know you may have questions before deciding to install any of them. So, if you’d like help making your decision, you can always contact us.
We can make custom Shopify solutions for your site, as well. Whatever you need to see better results from your store, our team is up to the task.