16 Best Shopify Apps to Grow Your Online Store

We all know the frustration of visitors bouncing away from web pages, but Shopify’s BetterReplay app lets you see exactly how users are interacting with your online store!

See Live Recordings of Shoppers’ Experiences

Whether it’s seeing how customers navigate your site’s call to action buttons, or locating the exact place users are bouncing off the page entirely, BetterReplay records live user sessions and pulls up a ton of insights in return. Here’s some of what the session insights cover:

• How long users spend on your site
• How many products customers add to the cart
• Number of orders placed
• Types of devices being used
• Returning users vs new users

You can see where users are moving their mouse around the site, and which areas are being clicked on the most.

This is helpful in finding out which elements look the most ‘clickable’ (even if they aren’t!) – and serves as an opportunity to make your site more interactive in certain places to boost conversions.

So if you’ve ever dreamt of seeing your website through the eyes of your visitors, then BetterReplay is a great add-on to your Shopify store.

Google’s Shopping Channel is a separate area of its search engine, with products appearing at the top of the results page for browsers.

Get Your Products Discovered Across Google

The main difference between this channel and regular Google product listings is that products in the shopping channel are displayed with a photo, enticing visitors to start shopping.

The good news is, being featured in this part of the search engine isn’t hard. When installing the Google Channel app into your Shopify store, you’re able to list your products for free across Google and create Smart Shopping campaigns.

The great thing about dropshipping products is that you save a ton on inventory, and you don’t have to spend any money on manufacturing. It’s an impressive way for new entrepreneurs with limited time on their hands to set up shop with small investments!

Source a Dropshipping Supplier

The dropshipping business model is a popular but highly competitive method of managing inventory. When installing DSers, you can easily import any AliExpress dropshipping products onto your Shopify store, so you can start selling in a matter of minutes.

Omnisend is an email, newsletters, popups, and SMS marketing automation platform.

Automate Your Emails to Recapture Potential Customers

You can create automated campaigns for free, including cart abandonment recovery emails and ready-to-send AI written emails. This makes it a much easier process for keeping subscribers engaged.

The editor itself might be confusing for beginners in email marketing campaigns, but it’s nothing a few tutorials won’t show you. It’s ideal for those familiar with creating automated email workflows, as it offers 150+ pre-made templates, insights, and click rate statistics. This makes it simple to let the platform do the work of recapturing subscribers or just informing them about news, announcements, and product launches.

If a close friend or family member tells us just how good a specific product is, chances are we’ll want to know more about it! As an ecommerce store, it’s good to know that your customers are more likely to buy products if they see real user reviews and ratings.

Receive Customer Product Reviews and Ratings

The Judge.me app makes this process a little easier for you. Once a customer has bought from your store, Judge.me lets you send out a customized email to that person, prompting them for real feedback. They, in return, can send images of the product in use along with text reviews, which you can go ahead and display on your site.

If you want your impressive ratings to reach even further, Judge.me has a ‘Rich Snippets’ feature which lets you show stars under your store title in Google Search. This is a good call if you’re looking to boost click-through rates and organic traffic.

Don’t worry if you need to migrate your store at any point – Judge.me easily imports any existing reviews onto other platforms, so you won’t lose the brand credibility you worked hard to build up!

Although there are a ton of email marketing platforms out there, Shopify’s own email app uses a drag-and-drop editor to make customization simpler.

Build Beautifully Branded Emails and Campaigns

By selecting from its large template collection, you can decide which type of email you want to send to subscribers. For example you can create weekly newsletters, product launches, and announcements.

Once an email has been created and published, Shopify Email helps you track just how well each campaign is doing with email insights and accurate click rate stats! This way, you know what type of emails are a hit, and which ones need a bit of tweaking to boost engagement.

Online quizzes are a great way to pass time, but you’d be surprised to know there’s actually some deeper psychology behind them. Consumers take part in quizzes because they want to know more about themselves – so it’s a perfect way for store owners to get to know their customers, too!

Create Interactive Online Quizzes for Your Site

Jebbit lets you create personality quizzes, product quizzes, and surveys, which are helpful in painting a picture of customers’ interests. You can choose from a handful of templates to create beautiful branded questions with the drag-and-drop editor.

With the free version of Jebbit, you get:

• One live quiz
• Quiz templates
• Quiz design controls
• Quiz outcomes
• Survey analytics

For anything beyond this, such as high engagements, you’ll want to check out the premium paid version starting at $70 per month.

Finding new ways to maximize website revenue is a burning thought in the minds of many store owners – but it’s not an unrealistic goal! Setting up recurring subscriptions is one way to go about this.

Maintain Subscriptions

Whether subscriptions are monthly or weekly, you’ll have a consistent income and, in return, your customers can receive exclusive deals and discounts as a reward for subscribing.

PayWhirl removes the hard work of having to code subscription features. The app manages all subscriptions for you, allows customers to create their own accounts, and handles payment plan setup. It’s an awesome way to get started with recurring payments – just bear in mind that transaction fees start from 0.5%.

Further Information

• See how Shopify’s built-in payment processor can support your business and your customers.

Promo.com is a free Shopify app that lets you create your own videos to enhance brand awareness and consumer engagement.

Create Product Videos

Promo.com videos help show your product or service in action! You’re able to select from templates what kind of video you want to create, and select whether it’s portrait or landscape depending on the platform you want to put your video.

Once you select the type of video you want, Promo.com pulls up a template with existing footage and images, so you can easily edit it and make it fit your brand. We’d recommend displaying these videos on your store’s homepage for instant traction. Otherwise, you can publish directly onto social media channels to maintain brand consistency across all platforms.

While Shopify is great for selling with large inventories, the Easyship app helps you connect with over 250 shipping partners like DHL, TNT, DPD and Hermes.

Simplify Shipping

Because different shipping courier companies are good for different needs, Easyship lets you pick which one works best for your store. For example, DHL is the usual go-to for international shipping, so if you have a lot of customers overseas, this could be the one for you!

Something that caught our eye when reviewing the app was that Easyship lets customers pick the kind of delivery they want, depending on price. When a customer clicks on “Checkout,” it pulls up multiple shipping options alongside additional taxes. This allows consumers to feel in control of their purchase, and maintains your brand’s transparency!

Further Information

• Check out our guide to Shopify Shipping if you’d prefer to opt out of third-party apps
• Learn more about Shopify Shipping Rates

Did you know that 87% of shoppers are likely to purchase a product because the business advocates for a social issue they care about?

Collect Donations

This is where the Change Commerce app comes in! When you install this Shopify app, it tells customers which products are eligible for an ‘X amount’ donation to the cause of their choice. 100% of donations are sent to the non-profit organizations that you choose to promote, and all compliance and regulations are handled for you!

Taking a stance on global challenges is a great way to give your brand a personal touch and engage with consumers on a wider scale.

We know the frustration of planning your day around a parcel delivery just to make sure you’re home to receive it – it tends to throw us off our normal routine! Chances are, you won’t want this to be the case for your customers, and will want to provide a seamless shopping experience from start to finish.

Optimize Local Delivery Processes

Shopify introduced the Local Delivery app to help you set a delivery date and time that suits your customers. You can simply choose specific delivery areas and pickup locations with assigned schedules.

Say you’re only able to deliver to a certain zip code on Mondays. Customers will be notified of this, and will have a better understanding of when and where to expect their delivery!

Customers can only choose from the delivery areas and times you have available, which offers you a lot more flexibility as the store owner. It’s good to know that delivery rates will apply when using the Local Delivery app, compared to normal shipping.

Create and Manage Loyalty Programs and Referral Schemes

The Gameball app turns your online store into an online game, helping users earn rewards, climb up levels, and complete missions. The more money users spend, the more rewards they earn and the higher up the ranks they go! Designed to offer a playful twist to the shopper’s journey, Gameball lets you give out special badges and flash discounts for each milestone a user hits.

You can personalize every widget to match your brand theme, and increase customer return rate by sending branded emails – even when the game has ended. 

Gameball offers a seven-day free trial via Shopify to help you get started risk free.

Design Sales Landing Pages Based on Season

PageFly is an app that gives you access to extensive elements, page sections, and media to help spruce up your store’s appearance. And although there is a wide range of Shopify themes to choose from when building your store, PageFly easily adapts to these themes to maintain a streamlined experience.

With PageFly, you can create anything from product pages to collection pages, and even FAQs. The aim is to turn them into higher-conversion pages by tweaking the design and overall layout depending on the industry of your business.

If you want to integrate your PageFly designs with other popular Shopify apps, like Shopify Email or Judge.me, you can do that, too! 

Neutralize Shipping Emissions to Help Fight Climate Change

Do you want to be more environmentally friendly, but aren’t sure where to start? Offset makes it easy to reduce your store’s carbon footprint, and prioritize the planet.

When installing Offset (free of charge), you’ll receive calculated insights into the total emissions generated by your shipped orders. Offset deducts a few cents or so from each order and donates this money to forest protection initiatives, meaning your business can help the world become greener – pretty impressive work from you! 

If you want to keep track of your shipping emissions, and see how many trees you’ve helped protect, just head over to the Offset dashboard. Oh, and don’t forget to share this progress with your customers, too.

Further Information

• See more on the World’s Digital Carbon Emission and find out how you can reduce your store’s carbon footprint.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can seem really daunting at first – but it’s easy with the Smart SEO app, which automatically generates meta tags and alt tags, and fixes any broken links detected on the site.

Creating meta tags to display on search engines can be a time-consuming process, especially when you have so many other elements of the business to cast your eye over. This is why Smart SEO prides itself on generating these tags in a matter of seconds, as well as offering sitemap support.

The app also goes the extra mile to provide Google with structured data to improve your SEO further. This structured data gives search engines more context to help you rank higher and drive more organic traffic.

While this list doesn’t come close to reflecting how many Shopify apps are out there, it does show our 16 must-have apps! Shopify offers an array of in-house features to help get your ecommerce store off the ground. But if you want to add functionality to make your store stand out from the crowd, browsing through the Shopify App Store is a good place to start!

Most of the apps in the market are free to install, but just remember that upgrading fees may apply if you want more out of them, so it’s always good to double check in the individual pricing tables.

The apps on this list will help you optimize your site a little better, increase customer engagement with interactive quizzes and games, and work towards a greener planet. Time to install and play around with your favorites – head to the Shopify App Store to get started!

Find Out More

Read about a real Shopify store using apps to improve user experience! In our interview with Cameron Heinz, founder of Mobility Nest, he told us about using the Accessibly app, which allows visitors to change text size, color contrasts, and more, to make his store more accessible.