We’ve all heard stories of Shopify millionaires transforming tiny online stores into million dollars businesses, we’ve also heard many stories of low-growth business or the difficulties in launching a new Shopify store.
One of the key reasons is that they spend a good amount of time as well as concentration on setting up the store and choose the best apps which suits their need in a money-saving way!
That’s right. You are a store owner, not a technical man, you’re busy and sometimes you may get stuck in a lot of business activities, and you just want to find out the best Shopify app which suits your need, to help you run the store smoothly without spending your golden time trawling through all of the apps on Shopify App Store.
To help you find out the tools to achieve your stellar growth, we’re here and list the most unique, inventive and cost-effective Shopify apps, which will be ideal for your Shopify store, whether you’re new to Shopify or have years of experience. The apps are listed by the successful Shopify sellers who have experience examining, testing and using some of the best Shopify apps out there.
To make the list a bit easier to navigate, we’ve broken it down into the four crucial topics of running a Shopify store:
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Find & Import Product
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Shipping & Orders
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Email Marketing
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Build Contact Form to Enrich Your List
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Social Media
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Conversion Optimization
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Customer Support
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Store Design
Here are the most selective 22 Shopify Apps for you to choose from, you can click on the app’s name to view them on the Shopify App Store.
Find & Import Product
- Price: $29.90 ~ $79.90/mo, Free Plan for main features until you reach 50 orders/month.
- Best Used For: Find the best product and import to your store from AliExpress, fulfill the orders.
If you are looking for a business idea, or don’t know where to find a product to sell, Oberlo can help. You use Oberlo to import products from the suppliers on AliExpress and Oberlo Marketplace with your own customization.
Moreover, it can help you fulfill the orders automatically. If you’re a dropshipper, we recommend using this app because you will never worry about packaging, shipping, out-of-stock product or above the retail price.
With nearly 2000 positive reviews on the App Store, Oberlo deserves to be first mentioned for importing product from AliExpress. It has received significant praise for its ease of use and ability to streamline the process of uploading new products to a Shopify page. There are also some difficulties reported by users, but these complaints are just the minority.
You can learn how Oberlo can optimize your Dropshipping store by reading the reviews on eCommerce Platform here.
- Price: $29 ~ $199/mo - Free Plan for main features and unlimited orders.
- Best Used For: Find and import the products from US, Europe.
While Oberlo allows users to link their Shopify accounts to AliExpress and import products from this marketplace, Spocket lets dropshippers add products from US, European, Canadian and Africa sellers.
Like Oberlo, with the diversity of features, Spocket has done much of the grunt work on your behalf. Some merchants, however, are discouraged by the amount of “Premium Products,” which you must pay to access. But take a look at their Pro plan which charged you only $29/mo, dropshippers who sell the products from US, Europe, and even Canada and Africa, will benefit from it more than what they paid.
If it comes to Shopify dropshipping, you will have quite a few options to choose from. You can research more about Shopify dropshipping apps which are recommended by some successful e-commerce entrepreneurs here.
Shipping & Orders
3. After Ship + Track + Engage
- Price: Comes with the number of shipments per month. Free plan: max 100 shipments per month.
- Best Used For: Order tracking, automated delivery updates.
AfterShip is one of the most popular shipping apps on Shopify App store when you browse the Shipping & Orders Category. It automates your shipping processes through their cloud-based solution. AfterShip automatically imports your orders from your Shopify store and your marketplaces. The order’s status and tracking information are then sent to your stores and customers.
There are many other shipping apps on Shopify which provide you with the same great solutions above, but AfterShip is a little different from the rest of the shipping apps. It lets you filter your shipments by dates, statuses, couriers, and destinations, offers you a way to monitor whether or not your shipments are delivered on-time and when there are not. The tracking results can be displayed on your Shopify store where your customers can input their tracking numbers.
By the same token, with a premium account, you can use AfterShip to notify customers when their orders are in transit, out for delivery, delivered, or whether there are exceptions.
To learn more about how AfterShip is compared with the other shipping apps on Shopify, you can check this post Top 8 Shopify Shipping Apps later.
- Price: $9/mo with all main features and 20 returns, free plan for 5 returns. Check its pricing on the app store here.
- Best Used For: Return management, when the returns and refund need to be processed often.
AfterShip Return Center is best known as the Shopify return management app for small and medium merchants.
While the larger merchants usually will care more about the on-site brand experience, smaller merchants are ok with a basic, generic-looking return portal. So the AfterShip provides the small merchants as well as new seller an easy-to-install app with the most necessary features for these types of users.
With AfterShip Return Center, you can allow your customer to submit returns in just a few clicks without emailing your customer support. You use the app to track and manage all returns requests in one place. Set advanced returns rules to match your returns policy and reduce costs.
Email Marketing
- Price: $9.99 ~ $19.99/mo based on features, free plan for forms & popups, landing pages, unlimited users.
- Best Used For: create converting popups with or without coupon and offers, sending targeted email campaigns based on the buyer's behavior.
MailChimp is known as a leading email marketing platform, when talking about email marketing, it’s impossible not to mention them. By using MailChimp, you can connect your email list and purchase data, segment based on purchase history and create abandoned cart automated campaigns.
The impressive email templates collection which consists of hundreds of ready-made, responsive templates – you can send a friendly welcome email, cart abandonment email or product recommendation email to grow your sales.
Moreover, if you are new to Shopify or small merchants, you can be confident to use its free plan to experience some starting features, then you’ll decide to purchase a paid plan later for the more advanced features (from only $9.99)
- Price: Based on how many contacts you have. Free up to 250 contacts.
- Best Used For: Segment your audience and send automated campaigns. Integrated with Facebook Custom Audience for running best PPC campaigns.
Klaviyo automated email flows let you target messaging based on real-time behavior. You are able to use the customer segments to run your promotional campaigns, build the engagement with your customer and turn them into loyalty by sending the impressive look & feel emails (which are selected from custom email templates).
Now you may wonder why this app is a little bit more expensive than MailChimp. The app is not as cheap as Mailchimp which can be off-putting, especially for importing larger mailing lists. But with the integration with the most leading platforms such as Facebook Ads, Smile.io, AfterShip, etc, this app can help you run your campaigns with the high-peak conversions by driving more sales for Facebook PPC Campaigns.
The integration with Facebook Ads can help you:
- Sync lists and segments to Facebook Custom Audience so that you can advertise to these users on Facebook, as well as create Lookalike Audience (a powerful tool from FB Ads you’ve known)
- Add subscribers from your FB Lead Ads forms into Klaviyo lists.
You can read more about this integration how to practice this powerful tool by reading Klaviyo tutorial.
- Price: Free
- Best Used For: Thank you email for new subscribers or first orders.
Happy Email helps to create a personal touch and gain customers trust by sending them a thank you email, just 30 minutes after they make their first purchase. When customers sign up on your store or place an order, a thank you email will be sent after 30 minutes.
If you haven’t thought about using automated email campaigns by customer segments, or you are new to Email Marketing, it’s considerable to use this Free app to build the engagement with your new subscribers or customers after they place an order, make your new customers instantly feel immediately valued and respected right the first time.
You can custom the receiver name by their username, edit the sender info as a store owner, or company name.
Sounds cool, huh?
Build Contact Form to Enrich Your List
Price: $4.99/mo, 7-day free trial
Best Used For: Create email opt-in form, affordable for new sellers or newbie to email marketing.
This app allows you to create and implement a customizable opt-in window. Email Pirate allows you to create visually captivating opt-in forms from its templates. You can customize the opt-in forms extensively to have it match the look and feel of your Shopify store. It also provides some amazing features such as target individual pages, specific categories or even user behaviors: who are new to your website, where they are on your website, when they’re about to leave.
You can also use this app to offer the visitors coupon codes to keep them at your store. The contact segments can be integrated with other leading email marketing platforms like MailChimp, Aweber, iContact, GetResponses, Campaign Monitor, Constant Contact.
In short, if you are small merchants, or new to Shopify or email marketing, this app is an appropriate tool for growing your list. Only $4.99 per month, affordable, right?
- Price: $24 ~ $299/mo based on features, free plan available for basic popups and coupon (no specific audience targets included in free plan)
- Best Used For: Advanced Email Opt-in campaigns and audience targeting.
Privy also allows you to create beautiful displays with easy to use targeting and triggers designed to get people to join your list and buy from your store. But more than Email Pirate, Privy provides more advanced features to help you drive more sales with advanced targeted segments:
- Targeting your Privy campaigns based on the page a visitor to your site is on can be incredibly powerful. It allows you to speak directly to the point in the shopper journey that they are and feature a specific product or offer in your message. For example: Recommend similar products to the one they are looking at, Offer a discount that only applies to a specific product or product set, Inform blog readers about a specific piece of new content.
- In Reporting and Analytics features, Privy also allows you to set up automated split tests (A/B tests) to understand how display type, messaging, triggers or visuals impact opt-in rates.
- And more advanced features you can take a look at its features lists
In short, more than an email-capturing platform, Privy provides Shopify sellers advanced solutions like a mini-apps built-in platform to optimize your conversion.
Social Media
10. Facebook Product Feed by Flexify
- Price: $29/mo Premium Plan, free plan for up to 1000 products
- Best Used For: Sync your Product Catalogue to Facebook's Business Manager, for running Facebook Dynamic Ads
With Facebook Product Feed you can sell products directly on your Facebook Page, and customers can checkout quickly without leaving Facebook on desktop or mobile. This feature was also developed by Shopify, included in Facebook Channel App by Shopify. But Facebook Product Feed by Flexify can help you sell Facebook Product better through FB Dynamic Ads. Your Shopify product can be synced directly into your Facebook Business Manager, then you can promote multiple products or your entire product catalog on Facebook, across all the devices your customers use.
Facebook Dynamic Product Ads is an advanced and powerful tool which helps you promote relevant products to shoppers browsing your product catalog on your website or mobile app. If you haven’t visualized how it can turn your Facebook Ads into a conversion generating machine, see how it works on Facebook Business.
Here is a step-by-step tutorial for setting up a FB Dynamic Ads Campaign which you can cover later.
Conversion Optimization
- Price: Free
- Best Used For: Countdown Timer, Stock countdown for the one-product page.
This app helps you to create the scarcity as well as the popularity of your products on the one-product pages. You can use this free app to create the countdown timer to make your customer buy the product as soon as possible, create the stock countdown to show how many items left, and the social proof feature will show the number of visitors who have viewed your products and how many of them were sold, real time.
That sounds cool for a free app, right?
If you only need a beautiful countdown timer as well as stock countdown as mentioned above to increase the conversion rate and drive more sales, this free app is considerable to try. It has nearly 7000 positive reviews from Shopify sellers.
Want more advanced features or a multi-function app, the next app may be for you.
- Price: $9.99 ~ $29.99/mo, free plan for basic features such as countdown, promo messages
- Best Used For: Advanced Countdown timer, low stock warning, message labels, for many pages.
This app also provides you the amazing features like Countdown Cart app above. But this app Ultimate Sales Boost is a little different from the others and it is really worth money so we list it in this post. It not only allows you to create countdown timers, low stock warning, social proof at the one-product page. These warnings are also on the collection and cart pages to increase conversions on every page of the checkout flow.
You can also design a message label on every product (on both collection page, one-product page, cart page) and show what you want to encourage the visitors to place an order, such as the message about Free Shipping, New Arrival, Limited Quantities, or any messages you want.
- Price: $9.99 ~ $59.99/mo
- Best Used For: Upsell and Cross-sell in many pages.
The Bold Upsell app lets you display pop-up upsell and cross-sell offers that promote other products. Your upsell offers can be shown at the product page, cart page, checkout page, easy to custom where you want to show and how it is shown.
You can also add one-click post-purchase upsell offers to the thank-you page with countdown times for urgency.
One of the plus points for this app is with the Bold Brain Free app integrated, it can help you make smart recommendations about which products will work best together in cross-selling and upselling offers.
- Price: $19.99 ~ $49.99/mo based on your Shopify plan
- Best Used For: Discounted upsell
If you want an app for upsell when your customer hitting the add-to-cart button, this app can help. An upsell product will be more likely to be purchased if it is discounted. By using this tactic, you can get more sales through upselling products at discounted rates.
- Price: $16.99/mo
- Best Used For: Create price breaks based on how many products a customer buys on your store.
Let your customers get a quantity break if they buy a certain amount of one specific product OR of a number of products in a group. This tactic help you encourage your customers to buy more than one product.
You can customize everything about the way your quantity breaks & price tiers display. It can be a table, a grid, a custom sentence or more, what you can customize to make the beautiful and high-converting design.
This app can be compared with the Quantity Breaks by Lions app (you can click on it and take a try). But we like the Bold’s dashboard because you can use a Search Filter which filters your products by vendor, by product type, collection, etc, which takes only seconds to add price tiers to your store!
- Price: Free
- Best Used For: Add a customer review feature to your products
This is a free app by Shopify which allows you to add a customer review feature to your products. This provides a way for your customers to engage with you, as well as each other to encourage sales. You can unpublish the reviews, export data or import reviews. Use app by Shopify can improve your SEO results.
If you are a new seller on Shopify and just need a review module on your store, this app is appropriate. Use it free until you want to find another app for more advanced functions (So why don’t you try this app once?)
If you are thinking about an advanced app for product reviews, consider Yotpo app. More than showcasing customer reviews on site, this app can help you automatically send Review Request Emails - Collect reviews with a single frictionless request.
Yotpo can also showcase product reviews, site reviews, ratings, photos, and Q&A on your homepage, product pages, at checkout, and on your social channels, drive traffic from Facebook and Twitter, Google Ads integration can make your site high rating on the search results.
Customer Support
- Price: Free
- Best Used For: real-time support to your customers via Facebook messenger window
This is a free app for you to communicate with your customer when they come to your website, via Facebook messenger chat box. The window is revealed at the right down corner. One plus point for this app you can custom welcome message for guests or for logged users.
- Price: $9.99/mo
- Best Used For: real-time support to your customers via Facebook messenger window with advanced settings
With this app, you can set the display rules flexibly based on your visitors’ behavior or geographics such as their areas, page, screen size, type of visitors. The app will track them and you can decide when and where to display the chat box based on these results. Sounds cool for a chat box, huh?
- Price: Based on your activities and how many visitors you support, 14-day free trial.
- Best Used For: send automated campaigns, manage inbox, live chat, multi-task for bettering customer support.
Intercom is a multi-products platform. Unlike most other platforms which only provide the live chat or conversation management solution, Intercom products built in one app can also help you send target messages, email, in-apps, push the messages to leads and customers, do as a team with a number of members.
Moreover, this customer data platform can help you target visitors by their browsing behavior, choose who to show your messages to, where and when it is shown.
Intercom is a powerful tool which leverages your customer success system including many mini-apps, so there are many ways to use this app as your core customer support software. You can take a look at this article about 12 ways to use Intercom as your core customer success software.
Store Design | Page Builder
22. GemPages Page Builder
- Price: $9 ~ $39/mo
- Best Used For: Drag and drop to design high-converting store, pages, use or customize templates.
This helps you design your beautiful and high-converting store with a really friendly editor. GemPages idea came from the difficulties of Shopify sellers who want to design the store themselves but get stuck with not-friendly editors. Because you are not a technical man, using a tool may seem boring and you have to spend much time to get along with the tool (even just drag and drop, no coding required, almost page builder apps claim this features but using a tool to build an online store is never easy to you when you are a business owner - not a designer).
The plus point for this tool is very clean and user-friendly editor, when you visit the dashboard and the editor, you can quickly get along with this tool because its user experience design and interface design is very clean, highly optimized. So the elements and modules you want to put on the designing page are more likely to be picked in just a few clicks.
Whether you are a new Shopify seller, or you have years of experiences, this app can save you money and effort to find, install & setup some necessary apps.
Take a look at some powerful mini-apps built-in: Email Form, Social Media (FB ads, Instagram,...), countdown, stock numbers,... and a lot of highly optimized elements, which is designed by successful Shopify sellers who understand the difficulties in designing a high-converting Shopify store.
There are over 50 proven high-converting templates which are considered as your own online-designers, you can use them directly, or custom for your needs, use and reuse.
View GemPages on Shopify App Store
