Shopify is one of the most popular e-commerce platforms, powering over 1 million online stores. Its simplicity, flexibility, and vast app store make it an appealing choice for entrepreneurs and small business owners looking to sell online.
But even with all of Shopify’s built-in features, some areas could benefit from improvement. This is where Shopify apps come in. The Shopify App Store hosts over 6,000 apps that allow you to add additional functionality and features to your Shopify store.
In this post, we’ll review 8 of the top and most useful Shopify apps every e-commerce store needs to optimize operations, boost sales, and scale your business. If you are looking to hire Shopify developers, ensure they have experience using these Shopify apps.
Oberlo
Oberlo is hands-down one of Shopify stores’ most popular and essential apps. With just a few clicks, you can import products from AliExpress and Oberlo Supply into your Shopify store. This means you don’t have to add products one by one manually.
With Oberlo, you can quickly build and maintain your catalog by importing thousands of products from these trusted suppliers. It’s a massive time and effort saver.
Oberlo also automatically syncs product inventory between your store and suppliers. This means you don’t have to worry about overselling products that are out of stock. The app handles it all for you seamlessly behind the scenes.
The basic Shopify Oberlo plan is free, so there’s no reason not to try this app. It’ll quickly become an indispensable tool in your e-commerce arsenal.
Privy
Privy is a highly effective app for increasing sales through scarcity and urgency messaging. It lets you easily create popups and banner displays that notify customers of your Shopify store’s sales, discounts, and low-stock warnings.
These subtle urgings have been proven through neuromarketing research to trigger emotional responses that incentivize visitors to purchase rather than abandon their cart.
Privy comes with tonnes of customization options – you can customize colors, themes,
fonts, designs, and more to ensure your popups and banners blend seamlessly with your
brand.
Pricing starts at $39 per month for the Professional plan. But you can test the Basic free plan to see if it fits right.
SMTP
Setting up a custom SMTP provider is crucial for ensuring your transactional and marketing emails reach your subscribers’ inboxes reliably.
Shopify’s default email service has average deliverability rates. But pairing it with an SMTP provider like SendinBlue, Mailgun, or SendGrid vastly improves the rate at which your emails reach the inbox rather than getting lost in spam.
These custom email providers give you dedicated IPs, top-tier deliverability technology, detailed email analytics, advanced targeting and segmentation tools, and more. These are all things that Shopify’s default email service lacks.
We recommend SendinBlue as the best SMTP app for Shopify – it flawlessly integrates with your Shopify dashboard, allowing seamless email campaign creation and sending. Pricing is also very reasonable, starting at free for 300 emails per day and going up to $75 per month for 50,000 emails.
Judge. me
Judge.me is the #1 app for driving better conversions using social proof and user-generated content like customer photos and reviews.
It’s been shown that displaying genuine images and reviews of your products significantly increases visitor trust and likelihood to buy.
Judge.me makes collecting and showcasing authentic customer content like ratings, Q&As, and imagery easy through advanced review management and UGC photo features.
With Judge.me, you also gain access to powerful analytics, allowing you to identify which products are performing best and receive the most positive praise. This intelligence can inform inventory and production decisions better.
Pricing starts free for core features or $29 per month for the full suite, including analytics, review import, and UGC photos. Either way, it’s definitely an invaluable app for conversion uplift!
Tidio Chatbot
No e-commerce store is complete these days without an AI-powered chatbot to handle common customer queries 24/7. Research shows over 50% of visitors prefer chatting to calling customer support.
Installing Tidio instantly gives your store always-on conversational support via chat on both mobile and desktop. Its smart chatbot uses NLP to understand questions and then provide accurate answers from your Shopify knowledge base around the clock.
When the chatbot reaches its limit, Tidio seamlessly escalates complex questions to your sales reps via live chat handover. This means queries are always addressed.
Other Tidio perks include web push notifications to recapture abandoning visitors and flexible customization of chat box design to match your branding.
Pricing starts free for core features or $15 monthly for the full business suite with unlimited chats.
Kit
Kit is a rising star app that solves one of the most frustrating issues online stores contend with – abandoned carts.
Research indicates that over three-quarters of shopping carts are abandoned, pointing to billions in lost revenue for merchants.
Kit creates a hyper-targeted re-marketing sequence, sending customized emails and notifications to shoppers who have left items in their carts.
Early stats show stores using Kit recover up to 25% of their abandoned carts, resulting in tangible sales growth. Kit offers a free 14-day trial and paid plans from $10 monthly.
Recommendify
Cross-sells and upsells are key for pushing order values higher. Recommendify takes guessing what complementary or premium products to show customers out of your hands.
Its advanced artificial intelligence scans all your products and stores traffic to determine which items logically go well together from a customer perspective.
You can choose Recommendify’s automatic suggestions or manually group products – either way, and it will embed tailored recommendations across your site, including:
- On product pages
- In the shopping cart
- On checkout
- Post-purchase
- In marketing emails
Recommendify acts as an always-on, hyper-intelligent sales associate, suggesting the best pairings and deals to each customer tailored to purchase history and browsing.
Plans start free for one recommendation unit or unlimited units for $9 monthly.
BleepBleeps
Cart abandonment struck again? Before throwing in the towel, one last app you should deploy is BleepBleeps.
This customizable retargeting software enables you to essentially “stalk” visitors with ads across channels after they leave your site.
Bleepbleeps secretes cookies on site visitors and then shows tailored ads when they access platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Google. Each ad directs users back to the product they previously viewed or added to the cart.
Think of it like a digital bloodhound tracking down abandoning shoppers with personalized messaging informing them:
“Still interested in those red sneakers you checked out yesterday? They’re still available in your size and on flash sale!”
Early data indicates stores using BleepBleeps recover 2X the number of customers. Pricing starts free and then scales up to mid-tier packages from $39 monthly for more advanced capabilities.
Final Words
Adding any of the 8 apps above will elevate your Shopify store’s performance and capabilities to the next level. Each one targets a specific need, whether it’s streamlining product catalogs, improving email deliverability, increasing conversions, or recovering abandoning visitors across multiple touchpoints.
Get custom e-commerce solutions for a dedicated Shopify development company, and get proper consulting about what apps to use. They can then suggest you take free trials or entry-level plans for the most promising apps. This can help you validate their value and ROI before you upgrade to more premium versions.
Within 6-12 months, you should have 5-7 high-impact apps enhancing every aspect of operations. This sets you on the fast track to exponential e-commerce success this year and beyond!
