The 9 Shopify Apps You Need To Grow Your Ecommerce Store

If you are an e-commerce merchant building on Shopify, you have an opportunity to access a wide range of tools on the app store. Most of the offerings here will have free plans or trials that you can access easily to test and measure results.

Having the right tools focused on specific parts of your ecommerce funnel will help you achieve better marketing, conversion, and sales results. Paid acquisition is great to get the top of the funnel engine going, but we highly recommend taking advantage of other tools to repair any leaky buckets and retain more of the customers that come into your store.

Here, we’re going to share the top few tools that are highly rated and tested by the Shopify merchant base. The categories that we are covering include tools that help you:

1. Communicate to customers (i.e. leads)
2. Convert customers at a higher rate
3. Increase the average order value (AOV) in customer carts
4. Improve the lifetime value of each customer, and how to retain more of them

Customer Communication Tools (Email Marketing)

We’re going to cover the top two email marketing tools below. Paid advertising is great for brand awareness, but email marketing is by far the most effective channel for merchants to have a cheap, consistent way to share deals and products with customers who love the brand. There are two main tools we found that merchants love that are focused on e-commerce email marketing:

1. Klaviyo: Email Marketing

Rating: 4.3 / 5.0 (1178 Reviews)

Klaviyo helps businesses create memorable experiences across owned marketing channels—email, SMS, web and in-app notifications—by listening for and understanding cues from visitors, subscribers, and customers, and turning that information into valuable, relevant messages.

2. Seguno: Email Marketing

Rating: 4.8 / 5.0 (649 Reviews)

Seguno is the only top email solution built exclusively for Shopify... Running a shop means time is your most valuable asset. Other email marketing apps that serve all commerce platforms or enterprise merchants will slow you down; Seguno was built to save you time.

Tools to Improve Customer Conversion (Social Proof and Urgency)

There are two main mechanisms to help convert customers while they are viewing your email, on your store, or in their final deciding moments at checkout. The first is social proof, which helps a lot to get people to put things in their cart and have trust in the brand/product. The second is urgency while they are at checkout, or browsing products.

Here are some of the highest reviewed social proof tools that can help build the trust that you need to sell more products. Think about when you’re buying something online yourself, and how you always read product reviews before buying. There are tools out there that can help you gather images from customers and use those to promote your products not only on each product page, but you can also use them on other pages as well!

3. Loox Product Reviews Referrals

Rating: 4.9 / 5.0 (6156 Reviews)

Loox is a fully-featured product review app that enables small and large brands to automatically collect customer reviews with photos and beautifully display happy customer content. Shopify and Shopify Plus merchants use our easy setup reviews plugin to boost trust, drive word of mouth and referrals, and increase customer retention and sales. Loox verified reviews and photo reviews are your greatest assets for increasing brand awareness and improving conversion rates.

4. Judge.me Product Reviews

Rating: 5.0 / 5.0 (3726 Reviews)

Judge.me helps you collect and display star ratings and reviews about your products and Shopify store. Social proof from reviews and other user-generated content like photos and videos increases your conversion rate, organic traffic, and buyer engagement.

Have you ever been casually shopping around and all of a sudden a count-down timer pops up at checkout, or the store is telling you there’s only a few left? These tactics are used by the top merchants to encourage sales conversions and get customers to buy now, not later. Here are some tools that you can use to convert like the best.

5. Ultimate Sales Boost

Rating: 4.8 / 5.0 (6703 Reviews)

As an eCommerce merchant, you may know that a sense of urgency, scarcity and trust can drive more sales from online shoppers who tend to procrastinate and delay their purchasing decisions. With ad traffic getting more expensive, newly launched stores cannot afford to let customers have a second thought about whether your store is trustworthy, or whether they should leave the cart and come back later.

6. Sales Pop Up - Conversion Pro

Rating: 4.7 / 5.0 (2838 Reviews)

Sales pop ups create urgency and allow you to show your visitors what items have been bought recently to build the trust and creating social proof that your store needs among new store visitors.

Tools to Increase Average Order Value (AOV) in Customer Carts

Something that Amazon does great that most merchants don’t do is a proper upsell and cross-sell recommendation to customers while they are browsing and close to paying at checkout. Everyone has definitely spent an extra few bucks on things they didn’t really need but because it was shown at the right time, and you’ve been looking at similar products for a while, you added it just to stop thinking about it. Now, you can do the same with these tools.

7. Frequently Bought Together

Rating: 4.9 / 5.0 (1649 Reviews)

You have probably browsed Amazon before and noticed that sometimes you can add a bunch of related products with one single click. The Frequently Bought Together app brings this smart upsell feature into Shopify in the most convenient way: you can have it ready in your store within seconds and with zero configuration.

8. Bold Upsell - True upsells!

Rating: 4.6 / 5.0 (1508 Reviews)

Trusted by over 1,000+ merchants to increase average order value during Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Make each customer order bigger and better. Offer and replace customers items with an upgraded version of their product. Upsell customers from a single product to a product bundle or kit. Cross-sell complementary products that are added to your customers cart.

Tools to Improve the Lifetime Value of Customers, and Retaining More of Them

Currently, there aren’t any great tools out there to increase lifetime value (LTV) of customers over time and ensure that you’re retaining them as well. Most tools outlined above are all around helping increase the top of funnel and converting that first sale on the store.

The most successful stores have great retention programs to be able to encourage customers to come back time and time again.

This is why we built Apteo. After speaking with thousands of merchants trying to grow their stores, we listened to their needs and have built the one tool needed to scale your e-commerce store. Our platform connects directly with your Shopify store, analyzes your data, and automatically creates segments of customers that you can retarget. We also analyze how much of your revenue is at risk of churning, and help you retain more of those customers through email marketing. The tool is integrated with Klaviyo, so you can use our data to send personalized messaging to customers to get them to come back to the store.

Generic blast emails are so last decade. What the top e-commerce stores are doing is segmenting out personas of customers (i.e. high value shoppers, discount hunters, etc.) and sending different deals and messaging to each cohort of customers. We can help you play like the best.

If you’re interested in trying out our product, please sign up for a demo here. We will be launching on the Shopify App Store in February, so if you’d like to be on the list please fill out this form to get notified when it’s out!

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Photo by Roberto Cortese on Unsplash