Must-Have Shopify Plus Apps of 2019 to Streamline Your eCommerce Empire

The right Shopify Plus apps can add functionality that enhances the customer shopping experience, builds trust, and develops loyalty among your audience.

Here’s our list of the must-have Shopify Plus apps of 2019 that should be a part of every growing retail enterprise.

Shogun Page Builder

The Shogun Page Builder app allows you to easily edit the design, layout, and content of pages on your Shopify store. With the help of this app, you don’t need to know HTML, CSS, or Shopify’s Liquid code to create beautifully customized landing pages.

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Smile.io

Customers love to opt into loyalty programs for the benefits they receive as a loyal shopper. As a retailer, a loyalty program is one of the best ways to build trust and engagement, keep customers interested, boost revenue, and even build customer referrals.

Whether or not you have a loyalty program can have a significant impact on the customer making a purchase. In fact, 69% of consumers say the decision on where they shop is greatly influenced by where they can earn loyalty and rewards points.

There are numerous Shopify and Shopify Plus apps for reward program integration. At the top of the list you’ll find Smile.io. It’s an ideal choice for offering customers multiple personalized rewards so you can encourage different activities. Some of the built-in functionality includes:

• Bonus points for signing up to help eliminate guest checkouts

• Advanced visual customization to help you brand your rewards program

• VIP programs that encourage customer loyalty and streamline customer segmentation

• Customizable point levels and rewards to help you meet the needs and wants of your audience

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UserGems

Influencer marketing continues to be a cost-effective method of generating a lot of new customers while lifting revenue. It works so well because consumers value and trust the recommendations of their peers over brands.

When an influencer is authentic, and talks about your brand or your products, then audiences are more likely to engage and turn to you when it’s time to buy.

According to a report from Linqia, brands rank engagement as the most important goal of influencer campaigns. And on top of a lower cost for influencer marketing, the return can be significantly higher. Some studies show influencer marketing returning as much as $6.50 for each dollar spent.

UserGems is one of the leading apps for connecting with influencers, and not just random strangers who you hope to use to reach a new audience. Instead, this Shopify app lets you find influencers among your customers who are actively promoting you and your products.

Through the app, you can connect with your influential customers to build a deeper relationship and transform them into brand ambassadors.

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Photo Resize

It takes more than a good product description to get customers to buy a product. Since they can’t physically hold and examine a product, having high quality images is the best way earn their trust in the product.

How you present those images is also important.

In fact, 93% of consumers consider visual appearance to be the key deciding factor in a purchasing decision.

When you’re regularly updating photos over the life of your business, you’ll likely wind up with images that are different sizes. Rather than waste time having to manually edit your images to ensure a uniform display, just grab the Photo Resize app.

Photo Resize checks all your images to ensure they’re the right size. Any of the images that need to be resized will automatically be replaced by the new correctly-sized image. That can be a huge saver when you’re dealing with hundreds of products (or more) in your store.

Convert Window Shoppers

It’s easy to get caught in the cycle of running discount campaigns to make sales, but all that does is train your customers to wait for the next promotion. Another way to generate revenue is to target the customers you already have based on their shopping and browsing behavior.

You may already have an abandoned cart campaign setup, but you likely don’t have one for window shoppers who are just browsing.

Convert Window Shoppers is an amazing app for Shopify and Shopify Plus stores, designed by Sumo to automatically trigger an email based on the products they view the most.

If you’ve got a customer that checked out a product two or three times but hasn’t ordered, Convert Window Shoppers will automatically generate a dynamic email showing them the product they viewed.

Emails are sent automatically, so it’s one more app that takes some of the marketing work off your shoulders and can help reduce some of that customer acquisition spending.‍

Messenger

Offering live chat on your eCommerce site is a great way to expand customer service. Customers love being able to reach someone quickly when they have a question or concern.

But did you know live chat can also boost your sales?

According to Kayako, 79% of businesses say offering live chat had a positive effect on sales, revenue, and customer loyalty. Likewise, 38% of consumers are more likely to buy from eCommerce retailers who offer live chat support.

After Intuit added live chat to their site, they increased average order values by 43%.

Messenger is a Shopify App (developed by Shopify, even) that creates a direct connection to your customers using Facebook’s Messenger program. Best of all, it’s completely free. You won’t find a better way to communicate with current and prospective customers in real time.

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Trust Hero

There are a number of reasons why customers abandon their carts before finalizing a purchase. In most cases, it has to do with hidden charges, but a major reason for abandonment has to do with trust.

Or rather, a lack of it.

If customers don’t trust that their data is safe, they’ll take their money to another retailer.

Research from the Baymard Institute found that 48% of customers abandon their carts due to hidden fees, while 18% will leave if they don’t trust the site.

Trust Hero allows you to integrate a Trust Panel in your store that displays all your supported payment methods. You benefit from the borrowed trust that comes with brand logos from the likes of Visa and American Express while also showing your customers all the different ways they can securely pay for their purchases.

Wishlist Plus

When a customer knows they need to get a product, but they don’t need it yet, the best option is to add that item to a wishlist so they can come back later.

Don’t assume that items added to wishlists are just forgotten. Data shows quite the opposite.

Metrilo reviewed consumer purchase behavior across 50 stores both before and after wishlists were implemented.

Those stores saw a 19.3% average increase in sales after adding wishlist functionality.

Wishlist Plus is one of the leading Shopify Plus apps offering rich customization of the look and feel of wishlists. Not only is the wishlist functionality optimized for the mobile shopper, it also doesn’t require them to log in.

On the upside, if they are logged into their store account, you can create personalized campaigns and reminders since Wishlist Plus is integrated with email.

Free Shipping Bar

According to RetailDive, “About 91% of 1,400 consumers surveyed said being offered free shipping from a seller would make them more likely to become a repeat customer, while 90% said they found a free returns capability to be important or very important.”

Surprise shipping costs are also one of the top reasons for cart abandonment.

When you use a tool like Free Shipping Bar, you can display a “free shipping” message in a highly-visible slide-out bar. It also includes progressive messages that help entice customers to make a purchase, like letting them know how close they are to a free shipping threshold if you have one in place.‍

Shopcodes

QR code use continues to rise each year. In fact, Statista forecasts the use of QR codes to reach and be scanned by 11 million households in 2020 – up from 9.76 million in 2018.

There’s great potential to use these codes in your marketing material to make it easy for customers to return to your site, refer friends, and more.

With the Shopcodes app for Shopify and Shopify Plus stores, customers can easily scan the code with their mobile device to make a purchase. The best part about QR codes is how easy they are to include in your marketing material.

• Share them on social media

• Insert them with customer packages

• Print them on coupons

• Embed them in emails and display

• Use them in print marketing and brick-and-mortar store displays.

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Compass

One of the things we love about Shopify is the data and reporting that’s available. You can dig deep into customer history, merchandising reports, and more to check on the health of your store. That’s important for making data-driven decisions that will help you thrive and grow.

The hard part is staying on top of the data and sorting it quickly. That’s where Compass can help.

Compass helps you analyze over two dozen different metrics for your store. In addition, it benchmarks your performance against the competition so you can see how your performance stacks up.

Based on the data, Compass will even provide custom recommendations to help you continually improve your business, so you’re not left scratching your head over data you don’t totally understand.

Loox

Product reviews have been proven time and again to boost conversions thanks to the benefit of social proof. Reviews can also boost visibility in organic search results. You can make your product reviews even more impactful by including visual media.

The Loox app collects reviews on autopilot with automated review request emails, prompting them to share photos alongside their review.

You can even integrate product and return-customer discounts for submitting photos.

This app makes it easy to showcase your reviews in a beautiful gallery with additional popups that reinforce social proof and eliminate the worry over fake or questionable reviews.

Gorgias

Data shared by Vonage shows that U.S. companies lose an average total of $62 billion annually solely due to poor customer service. In this case, it’s not how you view your customer service performance, but it’s the perception of your customer and how well they feel they’ve been taken care of.

Gorgias is a Shopify app that will keep you on track for delivering stellar service. This helpdesk app, designed specifically for Shopify, allows you to engage with customers across all channels all from a single app. It even includes live chat so you can work with customers actively on your site and close more sales.

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Shoelace

No matter how hard you try, how great your customer service is, and how perfect your messaging is, you will lose customers. Cart abandonment is a natural occurrence, and it happens to every eCommerce store owner.

Even among the largest and most trusted brands, the average cart abandonment rate sits at nearly 70% year over year.

But just because those customers leave doesn’t mean they’re lost forever. Some customers get distracted or are just window shopping and gathering information for a later purchase. To keep your brand in the front of their minds, use retargeting.

Shoelace is a popular Shopify app giving you more control over customer retargeting to help you create memorable brand experiences, win back more abandoned carts, and continue to grow sales. You can even set up automated triggers to create retargeting ads based on activity and engagement with your brand.

Carson

Many apps in the Shopify marketplace add functionality to a store to help streamline store operations. But some of the best apps in Shopify are the ones that reduce your workload.

Automation apps can be helpful, but what about an app that actually expands the size of your team so you can do more and tackle more projects without physically hiring in-house or freelance contractors?

That’s where Carson can make scaling your business a lot easier.

With Carson for Shopify, you can submit and manage small tasks within the dashboard. These task creations allow you to describe what you need done and fire it off to the folks at Carson to get it done for you.

Once completed, you can review all the work to ensure you’re happy with it before finalizing and publishing or using the finished work. The team at Carson has a complete task catalogue along with affordable task-based pricing, so you only pay for the work you actually get done.‍

Task Husky

Need more advanced or expansive work done? Task Husky offers scalable, enterprise-level task management and outsourced support to get the work you need finished, done fast.

Task Husky provides affordable help for any Shopify store that’s completed quickly and professionally. The perks are huge and with affordable pricing they can be a game changer for a growing Shopify brand. Their integration services include:

• Access to developers and designers with over a decade of Shopify and Shopify Plus experience

• No minimums for any project, so don’t sweat the scale of your needs

• An always-available team working around the clock to get your project done now

• Unlimited revisions to ensure whatever they do is done to your satisfaction.

Skubana

‍Skubana acts as the central nervous system of your operations. It unifies all the tools you need to run your business, automates repetitive tasks, and even thinks for you on profitability, forecasting, and demand planning.

With automated fulfillment and auto-generated purchase orders, true unified multi-channel inventory management, and a collection of detailed reports you’ll gain access to an integrated platform that is centralized and provides a wealth of data already used to power thousands of high-volume brands and retailers.