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Grow your business with 10 must-have Shopify plugins
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Once you’ve registered your store, picked a theme, and personalized your Shopify website to your desired branding, it’s time to enhance your online shop’s functionality with custom features. Aside from its user-friendliness and great customer support, entrepreneurs turn to Shopify for its built-in tools to optimize their e-commerce business.
More than 500,000 active stores are running on Shopify and have collectively driven over 40 billion worth of sales, drawing almost 20 percent market share globally. If you’re looking to move your business online, Shopify is the way to go – you get to enjoy a lot of options when it comes to developing your e-commerce site.
Whether it’s adding customer reviews, product testimonials, Facebook synchronization, email marketing, or in-depth analytics, Shopify plugins can take your store to the next level. Not only plugins are fancy accessories you can add to your website, they are also incredibly helpful and can be used to increase engagement, drive sales, and pull in more revenue.
In this article, we will discuss 10 of the best Shopify plugins recommended to help you get started with your new online store or enhance your existing shop:
Frequent online shoppers are fond of wishlists, especially since it is one of the most widely used added features among e-commerce platforms. Creating a wishlist lets customers keep track of the products they’re interested in by bookmarking them. They can conveniently go back to their selected items and make a purchase.
Wishlist Plus can exactly do just that at the customer’s utmost convenience: they don’t have to be signed in to use the feature. While it offers device synchronization, another appeal of Wishlist Plus is that it shows the number of times an item has been added to the wishlist, which motivates the customer to buy on your Shopify store. By this alone, statistics show conversion rates are up by 20-30 percent and shoppers spending 30-50 percent more than usual.
- Free Shipping Bar by Hextom
Free shipping is what drives customers to buy online – that’s 34 percent of shoppers make purchases online if free shipping is included, according to Shippo’s 2018 State of E-Commerce Shipping. Furthermore, in its 2019 study, 21 percent of small and medium-sized online retailers offer free shipping with returns, alongside same and next-day delivery, continuing the pattern of living up to consumers’ expectations.
Adding Free Shipping Bar to your Shopify store can help boost your delivery policy. Most buyers expect free shipping especially after placing bulk orders in their cart. In fact, a driving factor to rising cart abandonment rates is shipping costs. For example, if a customer is paying $20 for a pair of pants, they’re likely to hesitate to proceed with the purchase cause of the extra $4.99 for shipping. Free Shipping Bar, on the other hand, allows you to display and adjust your personalized bar as customers add items to their carts.
The best thing about this plugin is that it offers built-in metrics for developers to determine which shipping goals are boosting sales.
The Product Reviews plugin allows you to add customer reviews to your products. Whether it’s positive or negative feedback, it encourages a healthy engagement between your customers and Shopify website. More importantly, it motivates shoppers to purchase after reading about your products.
While it’s prone to spam and bad publicity on the entrepreneur’s end, product reviews are extremely beneficial when you consider that only 2 percent of consumers don’t bother to read them at all. In a report published by the eMarketer, comments and testimonials written by customers can also serve as great SEO materials.
Online shopping proves to be even more rewarding than purchasing at a physical store like malls and boutiques. The reason? Customer loyalty and rewards programs.
According to a 2019 study, 58.7 percent of internet users globally stated earning rewards and loyalty points “one of the most valued aspects of the retail shopping experience.” A rewards-based promotion can also increase customer retention and loyalty. If you’re looking to consider a customer rewards and loyalty program for your Shopify store, Swell Loyalty & Rewards should be at the top of your list to try.
This awesome plugin provides you easy ways you can reward new and frequent buyers including referring a friend, making bulk purchases, spending on featured items, and interacting with your brand through social media. It also serves as an effective campaign tool: you can customize the look of your rewards pages by choosing from the theme gallery and receive well-informed analytics so you know the results of the program.
You can give your customers the ultimate experience of personalizing their chosen items during the purchasing process. Infinite Options, built specifically for handicrafts & memorabilia stores and makeup brands (among others), allows shoppers to create an unlimited amount of custom product options including engraving, monogramming, printing, and more.
Their easy-to-use backend system helps a great deal in building customization from text, numbers, calendars, color swatches, checkboxes, and dropdown menus while still having control over placeholder and default values. One of the best things about this plugin is its product bundling functionality, which drives additional charges for services or add-ons offered with your products.
We’ve learned the importance of product reviews with the Product Reviews app, now you can have them displayed on your Shopify store product pages in high-definition thanks to Loox. It is completely user-generated and requires zero effort on your end since it’s regularly updated.
This is a game-changer in terms of design as it allows you to show your reviews in a more sophisticated manner. Not only does it meet aesthetics expectations, customer feedback can also help spread the word about your brand by sharing them on social media posts, galleries, and pop-ups.
Shopify stores thrive better with a great search engine presence and engaging with your customers in a more organic way. If you’re considering starting a blog for your brand, Blog Studio makes it easier to manage a blog for e-commerce entrepreneurs.
Like with many benefits brought by content marketing, Shopify websites with built-in blog pages allow brands to develop a referral network by creating guest-posts written by famous personalities and collaborating with affiliate brands to bring more traffic and buzz to your website.
One way to boost long-term sales is by generating product or promotion “nudges” on your Shopify store. Nudgify uses live data for its engaging notifications through its built-in effects like Social Proof and FOMO, nudging customers to make purchases of new products and recently sold items.
Apart from increasing your store’s conversion rate, Nudgify elevates customer engagement with real-time information that first-time visitors may be encouraged to explore some items on your online shop, which means enhanced website traffic on your end.
With all the technology we have today, running an online store is pretty much the same as managing a physical one due to the amount of paperwork to be done. From invoices, return forms, to packing slips, these documents are important in fulfilling orders and shipping them to customers.
Order Printer is one of the most convenient plugins available on the Shopify app store. It’s free, easy to set up, and frequently used with Shopify Shipping for packing slips, shipping labels, receipts, and more.
Not only does it allow you to print in bulk, Shopify users can make the most out of this invoicing app by showcasing their respective brands with personalized templates through HTML and Liquid coding.
Track your total business profits automatically with SimplyCost. This popular Shopify plugin provides monthly reports on advertising spend, expenses, support additional costs, and more while still considering discounts, refunds, shipping, and taxes.
Aside from being an incredible time saver plugin, it also allows you to focus on other important tasks like making informed business decisions based on valuable overall reports for sales (by month, day, channel, and more), inventory, products, variants, and vendors.
Shopify apps can create new business opportunities for your online store. These plugins unlock new functionalities for your website to improve customer experience and drive more profits. While most of these plugins are up on the Shopify App Store for free, it is still important to invest in email marketing, time management apps, product upsell or cross-sell, and many more to leverage your brand.
For more questions about enhancing your Shopify experience, let Webinopoly’s Shopify experts guide you by requesting a quote today.