Looking at all the different apps on the Shopify app store can be a bit overwhelming. Without some guidance, you could end up with too many apps, too little apps, or apps that aren't the right fit for your store.
In this post, I'm giving you the top apps I install on my clients sites and have organized them by function. But, before you jump into it, I suggest making a list of some of the functionality you NEED your store to have. It's still important to remember that these apps can slow down your site and you want to keep them to a minimum - for your site speed AND your wallets sake!
If you're not even sure where to start this list, I recommend starting out by checking out my post on Shopify Themes, Improving User Experience, and How to Make your Shopify Site Fast.
These previous posts will give you more of an idea of what Shopify already gives you out of the box and what your customers are expecting from your site.
Once you're ready, dive into this post and don't forget to save it for later reference. These apps are my tried and true, and I highly recommend checking them out!
Over 30,000 Shopify stores use this tool. Plug in SEO is the complete package to optimize SEO, fix all of your shops SEO issues, and drive more traffic. Once installed, this app automatically detects all of the SEO aspects of your store - including keywords, speed, blog content, broken links, and other SEO problems.
Features:
Why users love it:
This app gives you full control over the SEO of your online store without a lot of extra work. The easy to use interface allows you straightforward tools to help your site rank higher in organic search results.
Price:
20/month - 7-day free trial
Shopify Email gives users ready-made designs to send branded emails to subscribers from the Shopify admin and track the results along the way.
Features:
Why users love it:
Shopify Email makes it easy to connect with customers with this email marketing tool. You’re able to quickly create emails, send emails, and track the results along the way.
Price:
Free to install. Additional charges may apply.
Another great tool that has similar capabilities is Flodesk. Check out my blog post on Shopify and Flodesk here.
Pop-Up Window is an easy and quick way to add a professional looking pop-up to your website.
Features:
Why users love it:
Pop-Up Window is a great tool to have if you want to boost your email subscribers. You’ll have full control over the design of the pop-up and how frequently they reappear for visitors.
Price:
$5.95/month - 7-day free trial
One of the best ways for Brands to grow and increase sales is by having some type of social proof on their website. People are more likely to buy from a brand if they are getting lots of praise from happy customers. Loox makes it easy to collect and organize customer reviews with photos.
Features
Why users love it:
Loox is an easy way for brands of all sizes to automatically collect customer reviews and increase brand awareness and improve conversion rates.
Price:
$9.99/month - 14-day free trial
A sense of urgency, scarcity, and trust can drive more sales from online shoppers who tend to procrastinate and delay purchasing products. This app adds countdown timers and low stock countdowns, get-it-by shipping timers, reserved timer on cart pages, and buy one get one upsell messages.
Features:
Why users love it:
Ultimate Sales Boost optimizes your conversion funnel. It allows you to moderately or aggressively target your customers with promotions, countdown timers, and low stock warnings.
Price:
Varies by plan
With no monthly subscription fees, OrderlyEmails upgrade your store’s default email notifications with professionally designed emails that are effective and attractive.
Features:
Why users love it:
Default emails from Shopify can be boring and plain. With this app, you’ll be able to include your company branding, send product recommendations to your customers on order confirmation emails, and be able to analyze how your emails are performing.
Price:
Varies by plan
After your customer adds a product to their cart, Product Accessories automatically creates a list of like accessories to complement their product. And with one simple click of a checkbox, they can add additional accessories to their carts.
Features
Why users love it:
This app makes it easy for customers to add additional products to their cart - ultimately boosting the value of each order.
Price
$6.99 month / 10-day free trial
This app allows you to offer your products in a bundle and promote the bundles to customers at a discount. For example, set up a “Skin Care” bundle, where a customer can pick a cleanser, moisturizer, and mask, and get a 15% discount off each of the items. When a customer takes one of these items out of their cart, the discount goes away.
Features
Why users love it:
With bundled pricing and discounts, customers are more likely to buy more products. This app helps you increase sales easily.
Price
$19.99 month / 14-day free trial
Easily organize your product information into tabs making your product page cleaner and better to navigate.
Features
Why users love it:
Easy Tabs displays product information in a much cleaner and easy to read way. Since the tabs are already made to be mobile responsive, users can design their tabs any way they want without worrying about specific screen sizes.
Price
$5/month - 7-day free trial
This app lets you add color swatches to your Shopify products without any coding. Instead of adding variants to create the colors, you create your colors in separate products and the app will combine them with the swatches.
Features:
Why users love it:
This app gives users the ability to easily and quickly add color swatches of each product. There’s no need to worry about the 100 variant/product limit that Shopify has, because with this app you do not have any limitations!
Price:
$7/month - 7-day free trial
This app allows you to create filters for customer to be able to search products by type, vendor, size, color, and custom options.
Features
Why users love it:
Shopify limits the way Store Owners can give their customers flexibility around filtering. With this app, you can change that. You’ll be able to create filters of any type to better serve your customers.
Price:
$4.99/month - 14-day free trial
Outfy is a fantastic way to boost the social reach of products, drive traffic, and overall sales. This app helps product promotion in 12+ social networks under a single platform.
Features
Why users love it:
Outfy gives shop owners a single platform to market their products across multiple social networking sites. With the autopilot feature, your posts can be published automatically - saving you time and money.
Price:
Varies by plan
Oberlo is a favorite among Shopify apps. It’s a dropshipping service that allows you to find products from their virtual warehouse from thousands of suppliers directly to their store with a few clicks.
Features
Why users love it:
This app is a great way to get your foot in the door with dropshipping instead of an inventory model. You can expect an easy interface, thousands of products, and an easy way to track all of your orders.
Price:
Varies by plan
Over 40,000 brands use Smile to build a loyalty platform for their customers. With this app, you can build a loyal program that gives customers access to exclusive perks and discounts.
Features
Why users love it:
Smile is a great choice for businesses that want to start and run a loyalty program on their Shopify store. It’s easy to set up and maintain, and encourages new and existing customers to purchase more.
Price
Starts out free, but you can upgrade your plan to include even more customizations and features.
With PushOwl Web notifications, you can entice the customers to return to your web store with push notifications sent to their desktops or mobile devices.
Features
Why users love it:
PushOwl makes abandon cart recovery a better pill to swallow. By using this platform, you can recover an order without any of your users personal information. Instead, you reach them with an automatic sequence of push notifications that brings them back to their cart.
Price:
Varies by plan
Recharge is a simple way to manage your subscriptions and reoccurring payments.
Features
Why users love it:
Subscription based companies are becoming more and more popular. This app reduces shop owners work load by managing and tracking products and payments.
Price:
$60/month - 60-day free trial
SendOwl automatically sends Digital files such as videos, ebooks, photos, patterns, audio, software, podcasts or any other type of file to customers after each purchase.
Features
Why users love it:
SendOwl is a great tool to sell digital products. You’re sure to save time and money by using the automatic emails with download links after each purchase is made.
Price:
$9/month - 30-day free trial
When deciding what apps to install on your Shopify site, I recommend making a list before you even check out this post or the Shopify app store. Sometimes apps can look like a really good idea but they are just slowing down your site without providing much functionality. There's no harm in getting some ideas for what other Shopify Store Owners use and love, but try to remind yourself that you want to keep apps at a minimum. That's where this post comes in - all of these apps have been tried and loved by many Shopify users and provide a lot of functionality.
If you need help creating the perfect Shopify site, fill out a project inquiry here. I would love to hear from you and see if working together would be a good fit for both of us.