If you’re like me, you have likely spent endless hours exploring the huge global of eCommerce. In my quest to set up a successful online shop, I stumbled upon Shopify. It was like finding the holy grail of e-commerce. The platform’s user-friendly interface and effective features made it easy to set up my online store and start selling. However, after a deep dive into Shopify, I realised that the real magic lies inside the awesome array of Shopify apps.
These apps are like the secret sauce that will take your online store to the next level. They can help streamline your operations, enhance your website’s overall performance, and grow your sales. With thousands of apps to select from, it could be difficult to find the right one for you.
In this article, I’ll share with you the Shopify Apps that I found to work best for my online store ospekastraps.com. These Shopify Apps have helped me improve the performance of my online store and increase sales. So, I hope whether you are a skilled Shopify user or just beginning I hope that these apps will help you optimise your e-commerce store, save time and enhance your customers’ experience.
The Store Theme
When you sign up to Shopify and start building your online store there are a few default themes that you can use. If you are wondering what is a theme – in simple terms, it is how your online store will look. However, if you are an advanced user and are knowledgeable in CSS you might try to build your own store design from scratch. However, using a pre-build store theme from the Shopify Theme Store will help you save time and have a fully optimised online store.
Shopify store themes come in various styles and prices – there are also free ones. Based on your budget and requirements you can choose the one that fits you best. So, when I started my online store I chose to go with one of the free themes provided by Shopify called “Dawn” because I was working with a small budget. It is a good theme with a chic and minimalist design with options such as a mega-menu, sticky header, etc. It is a very simple theme and is easy to set up.
However, as my business grew I opted for a premium theme called “Motion”. It cost about £290 (US $360). And it includes a plethora of functions and customisations. After looking through many similar themes this one struck me as the best one to display my products through my online store.
Judge.me Reviews – Shopify App for Reviews
For any successful online store, it is key to having verified product reviews from customers. After exploring a bit on the Shopify App Store I settled with “Judge.me Reviews”. One of the first things that attracted me to this app was its 5-star rating on the app store plus the fact that you can start for absolutely Free. This app helps you collect reviews on autopilot by sending customised emails requesting customers to review their purchases. Your customers will have the option to add both photos and videos to their reviews.
Social proof is important to any successful e-commerce business and “Judge.em Reviews” will help you do it easily. At the same time, it will also help with your online store’s SEO. In my store, I’m still using the Free version as it seems to fit my needs perfectly. However, if you would like to build a database of Q&A, add site review options, create custom forms, etc then you can opt for the paid version that is only about £12 (US $15).
Sorted Returns Center – Shopify App for Returns
I believe that another important aspect of a successful e-commerce business is its user experience. In other words, how easy it is for your customers to use your website and get things done. As a result one of the key places where most new e-commerce businesses fail is in how they provide the customers with returns and exchanges.
I solved this by going with the “Sorted Returns Center” Shopify app. It is easy to set up and automates and simplifies the process of returns and exchanges while providing your customers with a great experience.
This app has some really great features such as auto return label generation for your customers, simplified refund and exchange processes, easy-to-use UI, etc. For example, if a customer wants to return an item for a refund or an exchange they can go to the return portal, enter their order details and the reason for the return and generate a return label without any hassle. You can set if these requests need to be approved by you, set time limits or auto-approve requests giving full control over the return and exchange process while at the same time providing your customers with a great experience. This Shopify App has a 14-day free trial and a starting price of around £16 (US $20) which covers up to 100 returns a month. Return Label charge is also reasonable – just £5.22 for Collect+ and you can choose for this to be either paid by the customer or by yourself.
PreOrder Globo – Shopify App for Pre-Orders
As my online store grew slowly, one of the first problems I came across was stock management. Since I was working with a small budget I was limited in the number of items I could have in stock at a time. This resulted in products selling out and losing sales that were driven to my store with Google Ads. I was losing money. The workaround I found was to enable my customers to pre-order a product. This helped me on two fronts. First, even if a product is sold out customers have the ability to pre-order the item. Second, I was able to test new items in my store and see how they fair before investing a large sum of money in new stock.
PreOrder Globo is one of the best pre-order Shopify Apps I found. It has a user-friendly interface and gives you total control over the pre-order criteria. Additionally, the app provides a powerful solution for setting up pre-orders, restock alerts, coming soon alerts, presales and backorders. It has a 7-day free trial and the basic plan starts from just around £8 (US $9.90).
Rebolt – Shopify App for Bundling Products
One of the most difficult parts about running an online store is bringing customers to your site. E-commerce business owners employ a few different methods to get traffic to the website. For example, I personally use Google ads, email marketing, influencer marketing and social media to bring traffic over to my store. As a result, I want to make sure this traffic gets converted to sales. Otherwise, my effort will be wasted. One way I found to help convert traffic and increase the value of each order is to bundle items together.
Rebolt helped me do just that. It is a bundling app that does a whole lot more. This Shopify app for bundling products helps boost sales with product bundles, upsells, cross-sells and bundle discounts. Using this Shopify app has helped increase my average order value (AOV). This is a very important aspect of the growth of any e-commerce store.
This Shopify app has an easy-to-use interface and setting it up doesn’t take much effort. The app provides valuable analytics about your sales performance as well. The Shopify app provides a 14-day free trial to try it out and pricing starts at around £10 (US $12.49).
Payment Options on Shopify
As I mentioned previously, the success of an online store depends on how efficiently you are able to convert the traffic into sales. So it is important to provide your customers with as many payment options as possible. This will also enhance the customer experience. Because the last thing you want is to lose a customer due to the lack of payment options.
Apart from the obvious payment options such as credit cards, PayPal, Google Pay, etc, I use a few other payment facilities. These allow customers to pay for the orders in interest-free instalments. I use three apps called Klarna, LAYBUY and Clearpay. These apps have helped my store increase its revenue as well as the AOV.
Final Thoughts
There you have it, my personal picks from my own Shopify store. I use these apps and I am happy to recommend them to you. However, when you are starting Shopify offers you all the necessary tools. All these apps will add to your monthly cost and if you are anything like me and start with a tight budget every penny counts. I hope these Shopify apps will help you grow your store. If you already have a Shopify store which apps are you using? Don’t forget to leave a comment below. Till next time.
