8 Great Shopify Apps to Add to Your Store

Over the last several months, Shopify has seen explosive growth in its popularity. Indeed, it only makes sense for one of the world’s biggest eCommerce platforms to grow along with eCommerce in general during the coronavirus pandemic. That’s why a lot of people are starting up Shopify stores right now and are taking advantage of the Shopify App Store.

The Shopify App Store is staggering in scale. Much like the Apple App Store in the late 2000s, apps are part of why Shopify is such a popular platform. They make it very easy to run sophisticated online stores. Of course, knowing which apps to pick, especially if you’re new to the platform, can be overwhelming.

To help us decide which apps to recommend, we looked on a bunch of different websites. When then made a tally of how many different websites recommended a particular app. Everything that you see on this post was recommended on at least half of the following six posts:

1. 29 Best Shopify Apps to Increase Sales Instantly by OptinMonster
2. The 44 Best Shopify Apps to Increase Sales in 2020 by ReferralCandy Blog
3. The 30 Best Shopify Apps to Sell More by Omnisend
4. 10 of the Best Shopify Apps for a Brand-New Store by CodeInWP
5. 10 Best Shopify Apps in 2020: Create a Better eCommerce Store by ThemeIsle
6. Top 15+ Shopify Apps to Boost Sales by Beeketing

1. Smile

We’ve talked before on this blog about how customer retention is a more effective way to generate revenue than finding new customers. One great way to convince customers to come back again is by implementing a loyalty platform.

Smile makes it easy to do this. Their loyalty points program includes features such as:

• Earn points for actions like creating a customer account, placing an order, celebrating birthdays, or leaving reviews
• Create urgency with bonus points & points expiry campaigns
• Save abandoned carts & invite customers back with points reminders
• Customers can redeem points for coupon codes or free gifts at checkout

They also have a referral program that includes features like:

• Create social proof with word-of-mouth marketing
• Encourage customers to refer a friend using personalized referral links through pop ups and emails
• Easily monitor referral traffic and sales with in-app analytics

The feature lists above are directly from Smile’s Shopify App Store page.

2. Kit

One of the techniques that Shopify store owners like to use to market their stores is Facebook advertising. Makes sense, too, because Facebook advertising can be very effective. Unfortunately, there’s a learning curve.

Kit’s purpose is to smooth out the learning curve for marketing. Kit uses data about your products, visitors, and customers to recommend marketing strategies.

According to Kit’s Shopify page, they can:

• Set up Facebook dynamic ads and retarget shoppers most likely to buy
• Build lookalike audiences to ensure the best targeting for your ads
• Create Facebook and Instagram ads that drive sales
• Post Facebook updates to drive customer engagement
• Send personalized ‘thank you’ emails to generate repeat purchases
• Create and promote discount codes to acquire and retain customers
• Generate quick reports to provide insights on sales and marketing performance

3. Oberlo

Oberlo was easily one of the most popular apps mentioned in our research. That’s because it’s a popular app for dropshippers. To refresh your memory, dropshipping is a business model where you can sell items that you never touch. They go straight from the manufacturer to the customer.

Oberlo allows dropshipping store owners to find good products, add them to their store, and arrange shipping. Put simply, Oberlo can take care of almost all dropshipping-related responsibilities.

4. Printful

Printful is a popular online store that allows customers to create custom t-shirts, leggings, swimwear, posters, hats, and more. They have locations all over the globe, so it’s very easy for them to create products and ship them to their customers quickly.

Their app on the Shopify store allows Printful to connect directly to Shopify. This allows creators to come up with their own designs. Customers will then buy products bearing those designs, which are then manufactured and shipped by Printful.

This is another great option for dropshippers.

5. Referral Candy

One great way of generating leads is by asking your customers to refer their friends! Doing this in an organized way can be complicated, and that’s where Referral Candy comes in.

Referral Candy allows you to create emails and pop-ups designed to convince customers to refer their friends. Through Referral Candy, you can also reward customers for referring their friends with rewards like cash, coupon codes, and gifts.

6. Plug in SEO

We’ve talked about SEO before on this blog. SEO, or search engine optimization, is an important way to generate sales because it determines how well your store will rank in Google search results.

Unfortunately, SEO can be fussy and complicated. Plug in SEO removes a lot of the guess work and helps users with common SEO tasks, including:

• Structured Data (JSON-LD Schema Markup) aka. Rich Snippets
• Bulk Edit SEO Data
• SEO Meta Title and Meta Description Templating
• Fix Headings, Image ALT tags, Filenames
• SEO For Special Pages Including Collection, Search, Filters, Tags
• Blog Optimizer
• Fix 404 Broken Links
• Keyword Tools
• Multilingual – Non-English Language SEO
• Google Search Console (Webmaster Tools) integration
• Help To Fix SEO Issues
• Constantly Updated As Search Engines Change

The feature list above is directly from Plug in SEO’s Shopify App Store page.

7. Yotpo

Most shoppers look at product reviews before they make a purchase. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to convince customers to leave reviews, especially when you’re just getting started. Yotpo helps Shopify store owners with acquiring those reviews.

According to Yotpo’s Shopify App Store page, the app can do the following:

• Collect reviews, ratings, photos, and Q&A from your customers
• Increase conversion by showcasing customer content onsite
• Leverage our official partnership with Google to boost brand discovery and increase traffic from search on Google Shopping
• Share your best customer content on Facebook & Instagram
• Build a powerful brand community
• Make better business decisions using analytics and customer feedback

8. Growave

If you do enough research on Shopify apps, you’ll find no shortage of high-quality review and loyalty apps. Smile is a popular one, as is Referral Candy. Growave gets mentioned a lot, too, and while it doesn’t do anything we haven’t already covered, it has quite the fanbase!

Much of Growave’s appeal comes from its status as a “all-in-one” app, with features such as:

1. Loyalty & Rewards: strengthen the customer-brand relationships, increase repeat purchases, boost engagement using convertible loyalty points & VIP-tiers on your site. Use loyalty program offline with Shopify POS
2. Referral program: grow your community by rewarding them for sharing on social media, email. Choose different rewarding options.
3. Reviews: collect more photo reviews, product reviews, and site reviews on autopilot, drive more shoppers to your site through search and social, and build trust with visual product reviews, Q&A, and boost sales via UGC.
4. Wishlist: reduce shopping cart abandonment and send targeted emails to fulfill sales from customers who showed intent but didn’t end up purchasing.
5. Social Login: easy login in 1 click using Facebook, Google, Twitter, Yahoo, Tumblr, and Amazon account, or by an email address.
6. Instagram: shop Instagram feed and UGC is fully compatible with a NEW Instagram API. Turn your Instagram feed and user-generated content into shoppable galleries and allow your customers to shop directly from an Instafeed.
7. Social Sharing: offer visitors sweet discounts for sharing your store reviews and products on social media. Increase sales, email subscribers list, loyalty.
8. Automated Emails: automate sending personalized emails to your customers based on what they’ve added to wishlists, bought, and reviewed.

The feature list above is directly from Growave’s Shopify App Store page.

Bonus: Fulfillrite App

Shipping your own orders can get old after a while. We can take care of that for you. Our app integrates directly with Shopify so that your orders go right to us, where we’ll ship orders and handle returns on your behalf. Couldn’t be easier!

Want to learn more about our services? Request a quote today.

Much like the Apple App Store in the late 2000s, apps are part of why Shopify is such a popular platform. They make it very easy to run sophisticated online stores. Of course, knowing which apps to pick, especially if you’re new to the platform, can be overwhelming.