The 27 Apps Every Shopify Store Owner Needs to Know About

With literally thousands of applications in the Shopify App Store, it can be a bit overwhelming trying to figure out which tools your business will benefit from the most. From collecting customer reviews, to fine-tuning your marketing emails, to improving on-site SEO, there’s an app to help you with every aspect of running your business.

Our clients often ask us what apps we recommend, so we decided to compile a list of every tool we’ve found to be the most beneficial for Shopify-based ecommerce stores. This list will cover the top 27 tools that we frequently recommend to our clients.

Note: Although this article focuses on apps for Shopify users, many of these tools are available for other ecommerce platforms (BigCommerce, Magento, Woo Commerce, etc). 

Use the filters below to sort through the complete list of applications…

Application categories:


  1. Marketing
  2. Store Design
  3. Checkout
  4. Reviews / Loyalty
  5. User-Generated Content / Social Commerce
  6. Customer Support
  7. Productivity

Only see apps that are:


  1. Free
  2. Paid
  3. Freemium

Klaviyo

Marketing Paid

Klaviyo is an email marketing tool that makes executing personalized email marketing campaigns a breeze. The tool collects data on every important action that customers take on your site to help you create laser-focused segmentation. Klaviyo makes sending out personalized emails easier than ever before, and there are a multitude of useful features that make this one of the best apps for online store owners.

Klaviyo has integrations with every major ecommerce platform.


Privy

Marketing Paid

Privy is a great pop-up creator and email marketing tool that integrates seamlessly into Shopify stores. Grow your email list with exit intent pop-ups, embed forms, and announcement bars, all inside this easy-to-use app. Target campaigns based on exit, cart abandonment, cart value, scroll, timer, geography, device type, page, number of visits, number of orders, referral site, language & more. If your website is struggling with high cart abandonment rate, you’ll likely benefit from using this tool.

Privy features a long list of integrations, including most major ecommerce platforms and CRMs.


Sumo

Marketing Freemium

Sumo is an application that helps ecommerce businesses reduce cart abandonment through exit intent pop-ups and banners. Grow your email list by collecting email addresses with sleek opt-in forms as visitors browse your site, then follow up with them later with personalized product recommendations and unique discount codes. We recommend Sumo to many of our clients because it’s very simple to install and start using immediately.

Although Sumo is a Shopify exclusive application, it features integrations with Klaviyo and a number of the major CRMs.


Benchmark Hero

Marketing Free

Benchmark Hero is a free plugin that performs a thorough SEO audit of your website and compares it to thousands of 7 and 8 figure ecommerce stores. The audit will analyze every aspect of your website performance, looking at mobile/desktop site speed, and the efficiency of your SEO efforts. The app will then provide you with actionable steps you can follow to begin improving your site if you don’t meet the benchmark set by other brands in your niche.

This application is exclusive to Shopify users.


Omnisend

Marketing Freemium

Omnisend allows you to automate your purchase funnel with fully automated, personalized emails and SMS messages that help you to win more customers and reduce cart abandonment. They provide a variety of great email templates for you to use, and offer highly customizable segmentation so your marketing emails get sent to the right customer segments. Omnisend goes beyond just email marketing tools as well, offering customizable signup forms, pop-ups, and landing pages.

Omnisend integrates with every major ecommerce platform and app, as well as with a variety of other marketing tools like Privy, Smile.io, and Yotpo.


Kit

Marketing User-Generated Content / Social Commerce Free

Kit is a useful marketing application that acts as a virtual store employee that communicates with you through instant messaging (Ping, SMS or Facebook Messenger). Through simple text commands, Kit can handle a variety of marketing activities to help grow your store, including: running Facebook/Instagram ads, setting marketing goals, and keeping track of your ad spend so you stay within your budget. It’s a useful application that can help take some of the marketing weight off your shoulders, especially if you’re a smaller ecommerce business and are handling marketing/advertising activities yourself.

Kit is a Shopify exclusive app, and features integrations with Facebook, Instagram, Customer Reviews by Yotpo, SEO Manager by Venntov, and Kit Karts by ShopPad.


Filter Menu

Store Design Paid

Filter Menu is a great tool to help optimize the navigation of your website. It allows you to easily create, modify and maintain a filter menu on your product category page or any other page on your site that requires advanced filtering. If your website doesn’t already have a filter system for your products, this app is a great place to start.

Filter Menu is a Shopify exclusive application.


Limespot Personalizer

Store Design Freemium

Personalizer is an excellent product recommendation tool that enables you to upsell and cross-sell at scale across web, mobile, email and ad channels. You can customize the layout, design, content type, and placement of every recommendation box on each page with no technical coding expertise required. You can also run A/B tests of different recommendation boxes to identify what your customer engage with the most.

Personalizer offers integrations with Shopify, BigCommerce, and Woo Commerce, as well as a variety of other marketing tools like Yotpo, Spently, and LoyaltyLion.


Free Shipping Bar

Store Design Free

This is the best shipping bar plugin you can download for your Shopify store. It allows you to display progressive messaging for when customers put more items in their shopping carts, and notifies customers when they become eligible for free shipping. The tool provides a very simple WYSIWYG editor for you to design and implement your free shipping bar that doesn’t require any coding expertise to operate.

Free Shipping Bar is a Shopify exclusive plugin.


Sales Pop Master

Store Design Paid

We often recommend you don’t use countdown timers on your website because they can be a distraction for the user, but if they’re used in a subtle way to add value to the customer experience (for example, displaying a stock countdown timer if a product is almost sold out) they can benefit the conversion rate of your site.

Sales Pop Master is a Shopify exclusive application.


Bolt

Checkout Paid

Bolt is a checkout application that helps ecommerce businesses provide their customers with a simpler, and more secure checkout experience. Their approach to the checkout process eliminates any extra steps and moves customers through the path to completing a purchase much faster than the traditional Shopify checkout page. If you’re struggling with high cart abandonment or just generally want to improve your website’s UX, Bolt is a powerful tool that can help you do that.

Bolt offers integrations with most major ecommerce and digital payment platforms.


Slide Cart

Checkout Freemium

Slide Cart is a cart drawer application that can help elevate your website’s checkout experience, improve your conversion rate, and increase your average order value. Slide Cart works by replacing the default cart page with an on-page enhanced version. Slide Cart makes your cart accessible from anywhere on your site and looks great on both desktop and mobile. You can use the cart drawer to notify customers if they qualify for free shipping, provide product recommendations, or announce an upcoming sales promotion.

Slide Cart is a Shopify exclusive application.


CartHook

Checkout Paid

CartHook a customizable one-page checkout application that streamlines the checkout process for your customers. This tool is perfect for ecommerce businesses that are struggling with a low average order value, and high cart abandonment.

CartHook offers a variety of integrations with every major ecommerce and payment platform, as well as with marketing tools like Klaviyo, Omnisend, and Postscript.


Yotpo

Reviews / Loyalty Freemium

Yotpo is an eCommerce marketing platform that helps collect and showcase reviews throughout the customer journey and across social platforms to build social proof, and increase conversion. If your business is looking for a way to build buyer trust and reduce cart abandonment throughout your site, Yotpo is easily one of the best tools to help you do that.

Yotpo offers integrations with every major ecommerce platform, and can easily connect with any other marketing tools your company may be using.


Annex Cloud

Reviews / Loyalty User-Generated Content / Social Commerce Paid

Annex Cloud is a customer loyalty tool that we recommend for ecommerce businesses that want to improve customer engagement and retention. Their tool can help you develop an effective omni-channel loyalty program that meets the customer where they’re at. If you’re looking for an all-in-one tool to start building your company’s loyalty program we recommend you check out Annex Cloud.

Annex Cloud offers integrations with all of the major ecommerce platforms and marketing CRMs.


Loox

Reviews / Loyalty Paid

Loox is a photo review application that’s great for building social proof on your website. You can use Loox to easily import reviews from other shopping platforms (like Amazon, or Alibaba), create discount incentives for customers to complete a review, and display photo reviews on any page of your site.

Loox is a Shopify exclusive application and features integrations with a host of different marketing tools like Klaviyo, Pushowl, and Google Shopping.


Smile

Reviews / Loyalty Freemium

Smile is a rewards and loyalty program tool that works to improve customer loyalty and retention. The application allows you to design a loyalty program with points, referrals & VIP tiers. You can create, launch and make adjustments to your rewards program quickly, without any coding expertise required.

Smile offers integrations with every major ecommerce platform, as well as most major marketing CRMs.


Curalate

User-Generated Content / Social Commerce Paid

Curalate is a social commerce platform that helps brands leverage user generated content, particularly on social media. Using their platform, you can quickly make your Instagram social feed shoppable. The tool also makes it easy to bring user generated content onto any page of your website.

Curalate offers integrations with every major ecommerce platform.


Instagram Shop

User-Generated Content / Social Commerce Free

Instagram Shop is a plugin you can use to make your Instagram feed instantly shoppable. It allows you to embed shoppable Instagram galleries and user generated content into any page of your website (homepage, product pages, blog, etc).

Instagram Shop offers integrations with all major ecommerce platforms.


Recart

Customer Support Paid

Recart is a tool that helps automate your Facebook Messenger usage. Use Messenger to help improve your retargeting campaigns and engage with customers offsite. If you’re looking for a way to reduce cart abandonment on your site and grow your email list, Recart is a great option to look into.

Recart offers integrations with Shopify and WooCommerce, as well as a host of different marketing tools like Privy, Justuno, Optimonk, and more.


Drift

Customer Support Paid

Drift is one of the best chatbot solutions for online businesses right now. The application offers a wide array of customization options including progressive profiling and detailed chat flow automation, so you can deliver a highly personalized customer service experience to your customers.

Drift offers integrations with all of the major ecommerce platforms and marketing CRMs.


Tidio

Customer Support Freemium

In contrast to Drift, Tidio offers a free option for their chat service. Tidio merges live chat, bots, and marketing automation into one platform that works surprisingly well for its price point. Respond to customer questions instantly, or create highly detailed chat sequences if you want to automate your customer service experience. If you’re a relatively small ecommerce business with a limited marketing budget, consider looking into Tidio to improve the customer experience of your website.

Tidio offers integrations with every major ecommerce platform and a host of popular marketing tools like Mailchimp, Hubspot, Zendesk, and more.


Hubspot

Customer Support Freemium

Hubspot is highly regarded as one of the best CRM platforms, but they also offer an excellent live chat and bot tool that is free to use for smaller online businesses. Similar to other chatbot services featured in this list, Hubspot allows you to create customized automated chat flows and utilize progressive profiling to deliver a personalized experience to your website visitors.

Hubspot offers integrations with every major ecommerce platform.


AfterShip

Customer Support Freemium

Aftership is an application that helps ecommerce businesses simplify their returns process. The app offers a variety of return methods, including: pre-paid labels, return to store, and customer’s choice of carrier. It also simplifies the refund process and offers users a number of different refund options.

Aftership offers integrations with most major ecommerce platforms and marketing software.


Back In Stock

Productivity Paid

Back in Stock is a useful tool that does exactly what the name implies. If you’re out of a specific product on your site, Back in Stock will automatically notify them when the size or color they want is restocked. If you often find yourself losing sales because products sell out quickly, this application can help solve that problem for you.

Back in Stock is a Shopify exclusive application.


PushOwl

Marketing Productivity Freemium

Pushowl is an excellent marketing application that engages with customers via push notifications. Instead of relying on email or SMS text to notify customers of an upcoming promotion, send a push notification directly to their home screen. Pushowl is one of the best tools to help increase engagement with your audience, and it’s extremely simple to set up for a Shopify store.

Pushowl is a Shopify exclusive application.


Bulk Product Editor & CSV Import

Productivity Free Freemium

If you’re managing a high volume of SKUs in your online store, it would be smart to have a bulk editor that can help you manage discounts and sitewide price changes. Bulk Editor is a great (and free) tool you can use to quickly make changes to groups of products on your website. All product/variant details can be bulk edited with this tool, including: price, compared price, tags, title, description, vendor, product type, weight, inventory, description, and many more.

Bulk Product Editor is a Shopify exclusive application.


Apps Can't Replace CRO

Hopefully this list of applications and tools can be of some benefit to your online business. We know how hard it is to find a tool that fits the specific needs of your business, but from our own experience, these are the applications that our clients have had the most success using.

Here's the thing: No amount of apps or tools that you add to your site will replace the effectiveness of a dedicated optimization program. These apps are designed to make your job easier, but if you're looking for a way to organically grow your business, you should consider Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO).

If you're interested in learning more about how CRO can help your online business, request a free landing page teardown, where we'll look at one page of your site and provide actionable feedback on how you can start to improving your customer experience.

About the Author

Rudy Klobas

Rudy Klobas is a former Content Marketer at The Good. He regularly works to produce insightful, informative content and copywriting designed to help digital leaders improve the user experience.