10 Essential Apps in a Shopify Store

on 11 Nov 2024, by , in Blog, Shopify, Guides

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Now that there’s a Brizy builder for Shopify, we’ve put together a list of 10 essential Shopify apps that can turn your online store into a high-conversion sales machine this year.

The Shopify App Store offers store owners thousands of apps. These Shopify apps function like plugins, extending a store’s functions, streamlining operations, and improving customer experience. Vendors can select a Shopify app to integrate with their store and be up and running with new functionality in no time at all.

Finding that one in a thousand Shopify app options that promise optimized outcomes in all sorts of categories is no easy feat.

We’ve compiled a quick list of essential Shopify app categories and our favorites in each category.

Let’s take a look.

Quick overview of essential Shopify apps (with top choices included)

Multiple Shopify app categories exist for store design, sales channels, marketing, shipping, inventory management, social media integration, SEO & analytics, customer support, etc.

Here’s a quick overview of the Shopify app categories we love and the overall winner for each

Sales and conversion optimization: These Shopify apps are designed to help increase sales by optimizing product pages, creating urgency (e.g., countdown timers), and promoting upsells and cross-sell opportunities. By focusing on these tactics (and more), stores can maximize every visitor's potential to purchase.

Top choice: Vitals

Marketing and customer engagement: These are Shopify apps that focus on engaging customers and building long-term relationships, often by automating email marketing, retargeting ads, promotions, or showcasing social proof. They’re essential for retaining customers and encouraging repeat purchases.

Top choice: Smile and Omnisend

SEO and analytics: These apps enhance SEO performance by optimizing store content for search engines. They also provide analytics on traffic, and conversions, and help improve the visibility and ranking of products and pages.

Top choices: Plug-In SEO

Store design and customization: There are the apps you go for if you want to design and personalize your store's appearance. It includes drag-and-drop landing page builders and visual adjustments without coding.

The top choice: Brizy

Inventory and product sourcing: These apps simplify sourcing and managing inventory to help store owners in dropshipping find products and stack stock without holding physical inventory,

Top choice: Sprocket (provides access to a range of products from US and EU suppliers).

Customer support and reviews: These apps streamline customer support processes, often through live chat, automated responses, and review collection, which can improve customer satisfaction and credibility.

Top choice: Stamped and JivoChat

In no particular order, we’ll go over each of these top choices to explain why they’re the best choice over the rest.

Vitals

Category of the app: sales and conversion optimization

Vitals is an all-in-one Shopify app that's "vital" to your store's success if you're looking to improve conversion rates efficiently. It bundles up over 40 conversion-boosting apps into a single platform that integrates seamlessly with your store.

This includes everything from countdown timers to product reviews, upsell builders, and cross-sell features in one app.

By bundling so much functionality into one app, users get all the multi-app perks for less.

What It’s Best For

This Shopify app is geared toward creating a sense of urgency and driving conversion through features like countdown timers, social proof popups, and upselling/cross-selling tools. It also has customer reviews, trust badges, currency converters, a sticky add-to-cart bar, and other essential features for stores that want to increase sales.

Particularly, its wide range of features is useful for smaller stores that need multiple tools without the hassle of managing them separately.

It works with Checkout, Facebook Pixel, Instagram, Geolocation, AliExpress, Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, Omnisend, PageFly, Klaviyo.

Pricing

Vitals costs $29.99/month on the lowest end. But for each pricing plan, there's a 7-day free trial to explore the app, test available features, and see how it impacts conversion before committing to the paid plan.

Brizy

Category of the app: Page builder

You can’t sell your products or services online without a well-designed website that commands attention and turns visits into sales. With Brizy, you can easily create mobile-friendly landing pages, homepages, product pages, collections, and other page types from the ground up or start from our impressive pre-designed templates. Brizy is user-friendly, with a drag-and-drop builder that makes it accessible for non-designers, and it integrates well with Shopify, allowing for a seamless design experience.

What It’s Best For

Brizy is best suited for store owners who need a compelling website but lack coding skills. You'll have access to a library of high-quality templates to quickly create stunning landing pages, unique product and collection pages, etc that convert. In addition, the app's drag-and-drop builder makes it easy to adjust page elements, add videos, and use interactive features.

At the same time, you can boost sales with marketing integrations, countdowns, counters, onClick popups, alert bars & forms, and so on.

Pricing

Brizy offers both free and premium plans. The free plan includes 3 published pages, a landing page builder, template libraries, marketing integrations, etc., so you can test the core function. The Pro pricing plan starts at $49/month.

Omnisend

Category of the app: email and SMS marketing

Brizy builds your landing pages, forms, popups, and other web projects, but Omnisend makes it easy to grow your email list with landing pages and popups without spending a fortune. It’s the ultimate email and SMS marketing platform designed to drive sales through personalized and automated campaigns.

What It’s Best For

Omnisend is the ideal Shopify app for e-commerce businesses that want to take their email and SMS marketing to the next level. It provides tools that can help you increase customer retention, recover abandoned carts, or boost overall conversions. Plus, other capabilities to achieve your marketing goals.

For instance, it has features that can help you turn visitors into subscribers with popups and signup forms, or create and send personalized email and SMS campaigns tailored to your customers’ preferences and behavior.

It offers a range of automation workflows that let you send targeted messages at the right time to the right audience. Once you start using the app, you'll discover a lot more.

Pricing

Smile

Category of the app: marketing and customer engagement

Smile is a loyalty, referrals, and VIP rewards app that focuses more on building meaningful, lasting relationships with your customers, unlike Omnisend. You can do this in different ways. For instance, you can encourage repeat purchases by rewarding every order with points, reward social sharing, referrals, and more, encouraging them to return and engage with your ecommerce store.

The app is easy to use and the setup process is straightforward.

What It’s Best For

Customers are the lifeline of any business. Putting a smile on their faces with the Smile app lets you win them over by incentivizing customers. That’s what it’s best for.

For instance, by enrolling first-time customers into a loyalty and reward program you can turn them into forever customers. Or build long-term relationships with them at the same time. Some of the rewards you can offer include points, coupons, discounts, free shipping, free products, early access, exclusive access, membership perks, custom orders, and so on.

The goal is to increase sales, encourage repeat purchases, save on acquisition costs, and boost brand/customer loyalty.

Pricing

Their pricing looks like this:

Stamped

Category of the app: reviews and ratings

Stamped helps you grow your online store by managing and generating product/customer reviews and ratings. You can gather reviews, photos, videos, and questions from customers. Then, easily share authentic feedback to encourage new buyers.

What It’s Best For

This Shopify app is the best choice for businesses that want to enhance their credibility and increase sales through social proof. With Stamped, users can share reviews and get points through email, SMS requests, social media, and directly on your website.

It also has a dashboard where you can get smart insightful analytics of your reviews, analyze them, make informed decisions, and upgrade accordingly.

Pricing

Stamped offers a free plan with basic review functionalities, while the premium plans start at $23/month. Paid plans include advanced features like photo and video reviews. Such plans make the options scalable for small to large businesses.

Plug In SEO

Category of the app: SEO and analytics

Plug In SEO provides the tools you need to understand where your SEO is at and how to improve it. With this tool, you can automatically check for SEO issues, such as broken links, missing tags, or slow page speeds, and get practical recommendations to improve search engine rankings.

Why did we choose it?

Technically, because Plug In SEO is accessible to non-SEO experts as well to develop a strong SEO strategy. In addition, some of the key features include automatic SEO audits, optimized metadata, keyword targeting, and blog optimization tools. The app also offers meta titles and descriptions that can help you streamline content for better search engine performance.

The overall goal of this app is to help you improve your shop’s search rankings, conversions, page views, and overall customer satisfaction.

Pricing

There’s no free plan for Plug In SEO.

Spocket

Category of the app: USA & EU dropshipping

Spocket is a dropshipping marketplace for a vast network of reliable suppliers, primarily based in the US and Europe. But you can sell products globally to countries like Australia, Brazil, China, Japan, Bahamas, etc. The app basically allows you to easily add quality products to your shop and offer faster shipping options.

Spocket’s Shopify integration makes it straightforward to manage and fulfill orders directly through the platform.

Why you should use it

To simplify your dropshipping business with one-click product imports, automatic inventory branded invoicing, order fulfillment, real-time order tracking, and flat-rate shipping. Cross-sell new products to increase average order value. The app gives you control over the customer experience.

Not to mention, Spocket also has a diverse catalog, including fashion, home decor, and beauty products, making it suitable for a wide range of niches.

Pricing

There are both free and paid plans:

HubSpot CRM

Category of the app: Analytics

Having a customer relationship management tool like HubSpot CRM enables you to organize, track, and nurture leads and customers. Besides, it lets you keep track of customer information, interactions, and sales activity in one central platform.

What It’s Best For

This app lets you connect your online store data to HubSpot to personalize and automate marketing campaigns. Improve your sales and marketing strategy by sending targeted emails to visitors who’ve abandoned their cart items, encouraging them to complete their purchases.

It automatically syncs Shopify customers, products, and orders into HubSpot to create new audience segments, generate out-of-the-box reports, and set up automated marketing campaigns.

Pricing

Their pricing structure looks like this:

ReConvert Upsell & Cross-sell

Category of the app: upsell and cross-sell

Upselling and cross-selling to your customers is a great way to increase cart size and average order value. With ReConvert, you can build a custom thank-you page to strengthen your post-purchase funnel and get shoppers to spend more.

What It’s Best For

It lets you leverage upsell and cross-sell tactics after a sale. You’ll be able to collect birthday dates on your thank you page, upsell, bundle upsell apps, offer bundle products cross-sell, and more to hit new sales records.

ReConvert also allows you to customize your landing page with a drag-and-drop website builder and access features such as countdown timers, personalized recommendations, post-purchase surveys, and reorder buttons that help you automatically re-engage customers who bought in your store.

Pricing

ReConvert has both free and paid plans as well:

JivoChat: LiveChat & WhatsApp

Category of the app: customer support, live chat

JivoChat is a live chat app that allows you to communicate with customers in real-time. You can also receive messages from multiple contact channels including WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook, and manage them within the built-in CRM. It also lets you send marketing messages and notifications to your current and potential customers.

Add new customers to the CRM at any time to start an active interaction, leave reminders, and create new deals on the sales funnel.

Why you should use it

It’s always best practice to offer multiple contact channels like live chat, social media, email, etc., as part of your customer service. JivoChat doesn’t only support these channels. It also consolidates all contact channels in one place. Where you can engage customers with their preferred channel should a problem arise.

Most importantly, it allows you to offer instant support, follow up with offers after support, and immediately handle requests. Doing this can help you build trust, improve conversion rates, and grow your customer base.

Pricing

JivoChat has one free and paid plan as follows:

How to Choose the Right App for Your Shopify Store

The following are some of the things to consider when looking for a new Shopify app:

Determine your business needs: Think about what you actually need—whether it’s help with marketing, customer support, design, or something else. Choose an app that directly addresses that need.

Then, make sure the app is lightweight. Keep in mind every app you add can slow down your site. Generally, try to install multiple apps. Instead, find one good app that covers all your needs for that feature.

Focus on user-friendly apps: Pick an app that’s easy to use and doesn’t require a lot of technical skills. A complicated app can waste time and make things harder.

Reviews and ratings: What do other Shopify app users say about the app? It's one of the biggest questions you'll have to ask yourself to find the right app. So, check other users’ reviews and ratings. They can give you an honest view of how well the app works and if it’s worth the price.

Customer support: Look for apps that offer good support. If something goes wrong, you’ll want quick help from the app’s team.

Test free trials and pricing: See if there’s a free trial so you can test the app before paying. During this test, ensure the app works well with your other apps (to avoid incompatibility issues). Also, check if the pricing fits your budget, especially if you need it long-term

That’s it.

Conclusion

Getting the right Shopify apps is an excellent place to start to make your Shopify ecommerce store work.

The ten apps we’ve highlighted are just a sampling of the tools available thing the Shopify App Store, so your options are extensive. Regardless of your budget, you’ll find at least some, all, or one, app that can help improve your store’s functionality and increase sales, customer experience, or marketing reach.

Remember to focus on your specific business needs, keep your store lightweight by avoiding redundant apps, and ensure compatibility.

Selecting tools that align with goals is critical for creating a well-rounded Shopify strategy that can win a customer or two and keep them coming back.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does every Shopify store need?

Every Shopify store needs a few basics: a template (and theme that fits your brand), products and descriptions, payment gateway, shipping details, secure checkout options, legal pages, etc. Some extra things that help are email signup for marketing, clear contact info, and a few trusted apps for things like SEO, analytics, customer support, and upselling.

Are Shopify apps necessary?

Shopify apps aren’t strictly necessary, but they make things a lot easier (e.g. if you can’t code from scratch). Apps can handle things like marketing, SEO, customer service, and design, which helps your store grow and run more smoothly. If you have specific needs—like better product reviews or live chat support—apps can be really useful.

How many apps are recommended for Shopify?

Generally, try to keep it simple and only add 5–10 apps that really benefit your store. Too many apps can slow down your site and make it harder to manage. Choose only the ones that help your store's main goals.

How to start a Shopify store for beginners?

To start a Shopify store, follow these steps:

Sign up on Shopify and choose a plan.
Pick a store name and a theme that fits your brand.
Add products, including good photos and descriptions.
Set up your payment options and shipping details.
Test your site to make sure everything works.
Launch your store and start promoting it through social media or email marketing.

Shopify has a lot of resources and guides to help you get going if you’re new to it. Other considerations can be a business plan, branding, product sourcing, legal and tax considerations, etc.