2019 is right around the corner, and as Shopify plus merchants, you know you must be prepared for everything and stay updated with the latest, cutting-edge technologies and services that'll help your business grow - FAST!
In this post, I'll give you 15 of the best apps to have in your Shopify Plus store in order to take it to the next level in 2019.
These apps are StilyoApps’s team top picks, but every store has its own needs, and every merchant has his own preferences, so I’d love to hear your thoughts and recommendations in the comments.
To make it easier to find what you are looking for, I’ve decided the apps into 5 categories.
Our 5 categories are:
Top apps to improve cart recovery
Top apps to increase CVR
Top apps To improve repeat customer rate
Top apps to improve Customer support
Top apps increase average order value
1. Top apps to improve cart recovery:
I'm a true believer in the idea that cart recovery is a game you play on all fronts, each customer responds to a different channel, and the more ways you have to catch him, the better your chances are to get him back to complete the purchase.
Not only that, every customer will respond to a different offer and will subscribe to a different list, so you MUST have the tools in place to:
Capture the customer as a subscriber
Get him back to your store using that channel
Recart
Recart is one of the first players on the Facebook messenger scene in the Shopify app store, and they have the experience and results to show for it.
Recart allows you to collect your messenger subscribers using a variety of growth tools- all the way from an opt-in checkbox next to your add to cart button, to a live support chat on your website.
Once you have the customers in your subscribers’ list, you can market to them and get them back to your website using automated flows like abandoned carts and messenger receipts, as well as instant campaigns allowing you to advertise a new sale or product.
The really neat thing about Recart is that they actually allow you to create abandoned cart flows and not just abandoned checkout flows.
A lot of tools using emails for abandoned carts only have the customer’s details after he reached checkout and entered his email, but with Recart you get the new subscriber once he adds a product to the cart, so you can actually market to him and get him back even if he abandoned the cart before checkout.
WooHoo
Who said pop-ups can’t be fun?
Games are a wonderful way to add a playful spirit to your store’s popup and provide a gamified email capture process that can boosts subscriptions and sales.
It can be a win-win situation. You get to build your marketing email list and close more sales, while your customers get to enjoy a fun and engaging email capture process.
WooHoo is the most advanced platform in the field of gamified popup games, with an offering of four different games and an advanced backend customization platform, it will make your customers feel special and enjoy a fun and engaging email capture process.
Gaming is one of the best ways to get customers to not only give you their emails, but also get excited about the process, and WhooHoo makes it very easy to do.
PushOwl
Push notifications are powerful because they pop up on your customer’s desktop or phone, regardless of what he is doing at the moment. He doesn't have to log into Facebook, his email or any other tool to see your message.
There are a lot of push notifications apps in the market, but PushOwl is the strongest one, and that is why they are in this list.
With PushOwl, you can collect push subscribers using the app's popup growth tool, and then send a variety of automated messages: shipping updates, browse abandonment and more.
They also allow you to create campaigns advertising any one-time promotion that you want your customers to know about.
And to top it all, PushOwl’s analytics will help you see exactly what marketing messages are working and what not, and adjust accordingly.
SMSBump
SMS marketing is particularly effective in getting your customers back to your store after abandoning their cart, because most of us still open each and every SMS message we get.
The downside of using SMS is that you have to pay for each message you send out, but the upside is that the ROI for this marketing medium is over the roof, and the rate for a single message is usually not very high.
With SMSBump you can actually limit the amount that you are willing to pay for one SMS message, so that your SMS campaigns will not be sent countries more expensive than your maximum rate.
You can send SMS messages to customers who left their phone number at checkout, whatever they completed a purchase or not, or you can use one of SMSBump’s subscription forms to collect customers phones, regardless of whatever or not they reach check out.
SMSBump, just like all good marketing apps, allows you to send both automated messages and one-time campaigns to your customers' phones, to get them back to your store.
2. Top apps to increase CVR:
I'd say that this field is divided into a few areas, and in my experience trust and speed are two really big factors in improving conversion rates.
The following apps will either improve your website's speed, make it easier for the customer to understand the purchase process, or help him trust you before making the purchase.
Swave
Swave is an app that gives a new angle of social proof. With Swave you can turn your customers into Instagram advocates for your store.
The app basically allows you to display an Instagram story strip at the top of your website, featuring customers who shared your products on their Instagram story.
Displaying these stories on your website is just another level of social proof, allowing your customers to connect with your brand and product in a way that they are familiar with and already enjoy.
Swave helps you to incentivize your customers to actually upload their products after they've received them, by offering them a cash back or a discount on the next purchase.
BEST Currency Converter
With a currency converter, you can let your customers shop with their own currency, making it easier for them to see with a glance the prices of the products in a context that is familiar and relatable to them.
Displaying your customer's local currency lowers some of his resistance on the route to purchase, by allowing him to see exactly how much a product will cost.
Customers viewing products in a currency different than their local one sometimes get a nasty surprise when they convert the price to their currency. By allowing them to see their currency form the first moment, you prevent this issue by being transparent from throughout the purchasing process..
Best Currency Converter allows you to display a currency picker at the top of your store easily, and if you are using the elite membership, you can enable an auto-detect currency feature, allowing you to display your customer's currency based on location.
LOOX
Reviews are one of the most popular forms of social proof- they encourage trust with your customers by showcasing the experiences of past customers.
With photo reviews, customers can actually see what the product looks like in real life and outside of the studio, which strengthens their trust in your store.
Loox is one of the best customer reviews apps for Shopify, allowing you to not only display your photo reviews, but also collect new ones with emails synced with delivery times.
But Loox teaks at a step farther by offering you a reviews popup- similar to the “just bought” popup that is so popular. This one lets your customers know that someone left a review on a product, and allows them to see exactly what he thought in real time.
3. Top Apps to Improve Repeat Customer Rates:
This is where I believe automation comes into place.
After a customer made a purchase, you already have so much information about him- you can now make his experience with your brand much more personal, and make it worthwhile for him to come back (and yes, this is also where we promote our app).
ReConvert
I feel very comfortable promoting my own app here, because I truly believe that it can give you massive value in increasing your customer retention and repeat customer rate.
Your thank you page is a superpower retention tool, allowing you to target 100% of your customers, and get them back to purchase again or engage with your brand in other ways.
You can use the thank you page to offer some upsells and discounts, collect new information about your customers, re-establish yourself as an authority in your niche and get more social engagement and shares. And all of that is done before the customer even left your store!
With ReConvert- you can do all of that and more, with some powerful integrations with autoresponders and marketing apps like Klaviyo and SMS bump, and even a tracking integration with 17track, allowing you to create the perfectly optimized thank you page and order status page.
Klaviyo
Klaviyo is an email marketing tool, and I could not possibly talk about all of the features it offers in a few short paragraphs.
People are saying emails are dead, open rates are low, and conversion rates even lower. And while there is some truth to it, email marketing is by no means dad, and hundreds of merchants getting incredible ROI from email marketing can attest to it.
Klaviyo has full integration with Shopify, allowing you to sync customers’ emails from the Shopify customers list, and market to them in a variety of different ways: abandoned cart reminders, birthday email, inactive customers and one-time campaigns, just to name a few.
So while email open rates are lower, which means you should be looking into other channels of communication with your customers, they are still a powerful tool to use in your marketing even in 2019.
Smile IO
Reward programs are a very effective tool for improving customer retention, they help you reward your existing customers for purchasing, and encourage continued loyalty.
Smile.io allows you to create an advanced rewards program, building specific rules around activities that earn your customers points, and how they can redeem these points.
With Smile you can also build a referral program, to turn your customers into your advocates and advertisers, as well as a VIP program, to give an extra incentive for your most loyal customers to stay with you.
The design for each widget Smile offer is clean and mobile optimize, to keep your store looking good and professional.
4. Top apps to improve Customer support:
Customer support is shown to be one of the best ways to improve customer retention. It could also be the defining factor on whatever a customer finishes a purchase with you or not.
So this is a part of your business you should definitely take care to optimize if you haven't already. The apps I recommend here help you automate your customer support, and give your customers what they're looking for as far as possible.
Chatfuel & Mannychat
While these two are competitors of each other, they are both very similar and extremely useful for improving customer support.
Chatfuel and MannyChat are Facebook bots, allowing you to automate your conversations with your customers on Facebook.
Using either one, you can automate your customer support with almost human-like responses that save your customers the need to wait for a support representative, while allowing you to minimize your support team without hurting customer experience.
One key principle to note when you move to a bot based customer support model, is to have an easy way for your customers to reach a human representative in case the bot does not answer their needs.
Both bots also act as a marketing platform, subscribing customers to your Facebook messenger list with their growth tools, and allowing you to market to them and get them back to your store later.
The main difference between the two tools is in the process used to create automated responses, with Chatfuel allowing you for a slightly more sophisticated AI and MannyChat offering a simpler mechanism for merchants.
Gorgias
Gorgias is probably one of the most promising apps when it comes to customer support.
This amazing help-desk app centers everything from emails, phone calls, Instagram comments, Facebook post comments and live chats.
With Gorgias, you can automatically recognize the customer, and create powerful macros- automated actions (like order refund or sending an email) and messages that are customized to him. You can also use different variables like tracking number, agent name, customer name etc to give your customers the answers they are looking for as fast as possible.
This app also offers multiple integrations, and automatically updates customer information every time new information is available.
If that’s not enough, you also get advanced analytics on your support performance divided by agents, with post-service satisfaction surveys!
AfterShip
In a way, this app is very unique. It lets you keep a “birds-eye” view on all of your shipments, supporting over 450 carriers worldwide, and keep track on all your shipments with great analytics and reports.
Not only that, it allows you to send notifications via SMS or email to customers in certain cases- like delivery exceptions and failed deliveries, allowing merchants to proactively solve issues before they happen.
AfterShip also allows you to create a beautifully designed and branded tracking page on your website, where customers can track their orders, while displaying different upsell options.
And if that’s not enough, the app integrates with over 20 different apps and shopping carts.
5. Top apps increase average order value:
Increasing your AOV is a must if you want to make sure you get a positive return on your marketing investment.
One of the best ways to increase AOV is to upsell to your customers with products they would find interesting, based on the products they are looking at, or purchased.
Frequently Bought Together
Frequently Bought Together app creates an “Amazon-like” upsell experience for Shopify stores. With advanced AI machine learning, it calculates what the best products are to offer for each product, according to past purchases on your store.
It also allows you to manually pick upsells for certain products, enable quick load which injects the code to your theme and makes sure it won’t take forever to load, control the number of recommendations and customize the upsell widget to fit your brand.
You can also add a percentage discount to your upsells, and like any good app, it allows you to view the stats for the app’s performance and gain some powerful insights.
Bold Upsell
Bold has already been established as one of the best apps manufacturers in the Shopify ecosystem. Bold upsell is one of the best examples for the great work they’ve been doing.
This app is just a great example of how everything can be customizable to fit your needs.
Not only you can use this app to upsell basically ANYWHERE on your website, but you can also make sure that you’re doing it in your terms. You can upsell on the product page, with an add to cart pop-up, in the cart, and on the thank you page.
Combined with the free Bold Brain app, it’ll make sure that your upsells and recommendations will improve over time and will convert better. You can’t go wrong with Bold.
Wrap it up
These are our favorite apps to help you grow your business in 2019- but we’re excited to see what new apps will come up next year!
What are your favorite apps? Do you think we’ve missed anything in our recommendations? Let us know in the comments.
Have a wonderful, successful 2019!