The Best Shopify Apps to Rapidly Grow your Online Business

Today we’re going to dive into what I consider to be The Best Shopify Apps you should install to rapidly grow your business.

New to Shopify? Check out our eCommerce platforms review and our Shopify Pricing guide to get you up to speed asap!

Growing a new online store is one of the greatest challenges you’ll face as an eCommerce entrepreneur. While Shopify on it’s own will let you get an online store up and running quicker than pretty much any other platform, it can come up a little short when it comes to driving revenue growth on an online store.

The Best Shopify Apps from the Shopify App Store

But fear not, those clever people over at Shopify know full well they could never build every single feature for an ever changing eCommerce world so they created the Shopify App Store which allows some of the smartest eCommerce developers in the world make apps which let you enhance your Shopify store easily.

There are currently over 15,000 apps on the Shopify App Store – so chances are high that there’s an app for pretty much anything you want to do to grow your online store.

We’ve used a ton of Shopify apps over the years and while many are awesome you’ll also find a ton of duds in there too. So let us guide you through a run down of the Best Shopify Apps you need to get your hands on to accelerate the growth of your eCommerce business.

Best for Size Guides – CommerceGurus Size Guides

Adding accurate and well-designed size guides to your store is an effective way to reduce costly bracketing — the practice of buying multiple sizes online with the plan to return them in bulk.

Helpful size guides also enable shoppers to buy from your store with confidence rather than go elsewhere in search of an outlet that provides more useful sizing information.

When it comes to adding size charts to your store, there are a few key elements you need to get right. One is that the guide must be well designed so that it’s easy to read, including being mobile-friendly and accessible.

Another is that it contains all the information shoppers are looking for, such as measurements that are relevant to the product being viewed. The size guides must also be lightweight to avoid slowing down your store.

When creating size guides, it’s also important that the charts are quick and easy to produce. You should have lots of control over how they’re displayed on your site and be able to create multiple guides for the different types of products you sell.

When it comes to finding the best tool for adding size guides to your store, our CommerceGurus Size Guides Shopify app meets all of the above criteria and more. Thanks to the free option and free trial for the paid plan, you can try before you buy.

Best for T-shirt Printing – Printful

If t-shirts are your thing you should check out Printful, which is another great way of dipping your toes in the eCommerce water for the first time.

In a nutshell, Printful takes care of everything you need to run an online t-shirt printing business – you just decide on your profit margin (typically a minimum of 30%) and they’ll do the rest.

With printing facilities in both the USA and Europe, Printful would be my top recommendation for starting an online t-shirt printing business.

Best for Pre-Orders – Pre-Order Manager

If you’re inventory isn’t quite ready to sell but you still want to start monetizing your eCommerce business you should consider launching via a pre-ordering service. Pre-Order Manager is the best Shopify pre-order app by far, amassing over 800 5-star reviews.

After the app installation, a pre-order button with shows up on a product page that is out of stock. A customer clicks this button and goes through the regular order procedure, which allows you to sell the product even if it is out of stock. The full list of pre-orders is shown in the admin panel of the app, so you can easily control and handle them.

Best for Email Capture and Exit Offers – Privy

When you launch a brand new eCommerce business you’ll end up spending a ton of time (and sometimes a ton of money) trying to acquire traffic and your first customers.

Acquiring traffic is hard – really hard. So it’s vital from day one that you to start building equity in your online business. And your number one asset in any online business is the humble email address. Not building your email list from day one is one of the biggest mistakes new eCommerce entrepreneurs make.

That’s where Privy comes in. Privy is a powerhouse of the best email capture tools including popups, spin to win, banners, flyouts, announcement bars, exit intent detection and much more.

I can’t think of a more feature packed Email capture platform for Shopify – and it would seem the Shopify community agree wholeheartedly. Privy is used by over 200,000 businesses and currently has over 9,900 5-star reviews on the Shopify App Store.

Privy integrates with all the big Email Service Providers like Mailchimp, ConvertKit, Klaviyo, Drip and many more.

Best for SEO – SearchPie SEO

There are many ways to acquire traffic for a new eCommerce business. Without question, the best long-term source of traffic for your online business will be good old organic search engine traffic.

The challenge with organic search engine traffic is that it can take years to become authoritative enough to drive substantial organic traffic to your online store. Plus, it can be challenging to know exactly what to do to improve SEO, not to mention staying on top of the latest trends and best practices.

However, choosing a good SEO app can really boost your Shopify store’s search engine optimization efforts.

SearchPie SEO is one such app. It does an excellent job of helping you ensure that your on-page SEO is in tip-top shape. Instead of juggling a long, ever-changing mental list of on-page SEO tasks, SearchPie SEO gives you a straightforward checklist to work through.

You also get a full SEO report for your store, broken link detection, a keyword research tool, and keyword rank tracking, plus an AI-powered SEO assistant.

With over 4,500 5-star reviews, SearchPie SEO is a popular and well-respected Shopify SEO app.

Best for Upsells – LimeSpot AI Bundles and Upsells

Once you start selling online, one of the most important numbers you’ll want to track religiously is your Average Order Value (or AOV) for short. Two of the best ways to drive growth in your AOV are Cross-selling and Up-selling. In case you’re confused as to what both mean, here’s the quick explainer:

• Cross-selling = Pair of shoes in my cart, try to cross-sell me some shoe polish
• Upselling = Pair of mid-priced end of season shoes in my cart, try to upsell me the just launched new edition shoes.

In case you’re wondering which one is more lucrative, Predictive Intent found that upselling outperforms cross-selling by a factor of 20. But cross-selling can still be incredibly effective depending on your products. (e.g. batteries when selling items that don’t come included with batteries). It is said that cross-selling accounts for up to 35% of Amazon revenue.

LimeSpot AI Bundles & Upsells is the Best Shopify App for Product Recommendations. Limespot does Cross-sells and upsells for Shopify better than anyone else. LimeSpot creates Intelligent Recommendation Boxes that can be placed in your store and will showcase the products your specific customers are most likely to buy.

You can make sure you know what is going on by taking a look at LimeSpot’s robust analytics dashboard where you can see how LimeSpot is helping to grow your store. Compass completed a study that found that stores using Limespot increased revenue by 18-67%

Best for All-in-One Marketing – Growave

Growave is a complete marketing platform that can replace tonnes of separate apps with just one. With features such as loyalty, rewards, sales notifications and social sharing it really is a fully featured solution.

The sales notification in particular has been shown consistently to work really well.

Growave has more than 2,000 reviews on Shopify with an average rating of 4.9, and more than 5,000 merchants are already using it. In addition to a free plan, you can also use the 14-day free trial to try the paid plans, which start at $49/month.

There’s something very comforting about seeing little notifications pop up telling you other people have just bought the same thing you’ve got your eye on. In some cases, sales notifications can also inject a nice passive sense of urgency, helping to convert some customers who might have been on the fence.

Best for Sales – Bold Discounts – Flash Sales

You’ll most likely be running flash sales sooner rather than later on your online store. Black Friday, Cyber Monday are two big ones. When you do you’ll want to get Bold Discounts – Flash Sales.

With this powerful app you can run sales the same way a brick and mortar store does: by reducing the price! PLUS, what’s even better is you can run a sale on just certain collections, brands, product types, hand picked segments, or even store wide! Product Bold Discounts – Flash Sales has over 900 5-star reviews on the Shopify App Store.

Best for Abandoned Carts – Amplified

Implementing a well-thought-out abandoned cart recovery process for your online store is vital to eCommerce success. Read our in-depth Abandoned Cart Recovery tutorial.

To help you with this, Amplified Email & Abandon Cart is a feature-rich app for recovering lost sales at Shopify stores. Once installed, you’ll be able to automatically send SMS and emails to recover abandoned carts. As the app comes with over 80+ professional templates, you can get started right away.

Amplified Email & Abandon Cart includes some other useful marketing features and tools to help make your store more profitable. Don’t just take our word for it, though; the 3,000+ 5-star ratings at the Shopify App store show that this is a powerful tool for recovering abandoned carts.

Best for Cart Drawer Optimization – UpCart

UpCart is a powerful app for upgrading your store’s shopping cart experience. The app lets you add many conversion-focused features to your cart while ensuring that the extra functionality matches your store’s design and branding for a consistent user experience.

UpCart aims to deliver a user-friendly experience while also boosting average order value (AOV) at your store. By adding upsell and cross-selling blocks to your cart, as well as shipping-related promotions, you can use this app to encourage shoppers to add more items to their cart.

Other elements you can add to your cart, such as shipping insurance promotion, cart expiry timers and announcements, and trust badges, will all help increase AOV and promote your store’s trustworthiness. The express pay buttons should also boost conversions by facilitating a smoother payment experience.

UpCart has a free plan as well as paid plans with free trials that let you see for yourself what this app can do.

Best for Email Marketing – Klaviyo

Remember a little bit earlier when we talked about how important it is to start building your email list? Well, the Klaviyo app is another key aspect of your list-building apparatus that is a must-have right from day one of your new Shopify store.

When it comes to email marketing features, Klaviyo definitely isn’t lacking. The app makes it easy to collect emails and then segment your list for improved marketing personalization. You get plenty of email templates to work with, too, plus useful A/B testing features to optimize your communications.

Other features, such as AI-powered assistance, price drop, restock, cart abandonment notifications, and SMS and WhatsApp support, help to explain why this app has over 2,700 5-star reviews.

Best for Live Chat – Crisp

I think we’re nearly at a point where customers almost don’t trust an online store if they don’t see a live chat option in the footer.

Yes, a live chat can be a significant overhead to manage for an online store, but one of the reasons I like Crisp so much is their mobile apps work great for store managers who might be on the go a lot but still want to be able to reply quickly to prospective customers in real time.

In fact, after checking out a selection of live chat apps, we use Crisp for our CommerceGurus Size Guides app, embedding it in the admin area.

Also, thanks to its AI chatbot, you can let Crisp handle the initial live chat interactions and answer questions that are covered by your FAQs before users are passed over to human operators if necessary. There’s support for multiple channels, including email and WhatsApp.

Best for Reviews – Judge.me

Reviews are the lifeblood of any modern eCommerce business. Think about it, when was the last time you purchased something online without making sure you checked out the reviews first?

When it comes to managing reviews for your store, the Judge.me app is one of the best review platforms for Shopify and WooCommerce. The app makes it easy to collect and display reviews from your customers, including support for photo and video reviews.

To help encourage reviews, Judge.me can automatically send out discount codes. Importing existing reviews from Amazon, Etsy, and other platforms is straightforward, too. The app can also push reviews to other sites, such as Google Shopping and social media.

Another reason for the rise in popularity of Judge.me is its flat rate pricing. For $15/month, you get access to all of its features and unlimited reviews, making it much more affordable than the competition.

Judge.me currently has over 40,000 5-star reviews on the Shopify App Store – a phenomenal number!

Best for Loyalty Rewards and Referrals – Smile

Running a loyalty program is an effective way to boost sales at your store. It’s ideal for turning new visitors into customers and encouraging existing customers to make repeat purchases. However, it can be time-consuming to implement and manage.

Using the Smile app to implement your loyalty and rewards program is a smart move. The service handles loyalty and referral-based rewards, including points, discounts, and VIP programs. You can even give rewards to those who promote your store on social media.

The analytics tool makes it easy to see how your loyalty scheme is performing, allowing you to make data-driven decisions when optimizing your rewards program.

Wrapping things up

Today we’ve explored what we consider to be the Best Shopify Apps available today. The quality and diversity of the Shopify App ecosystem is truly phenomenal. I think it’s the jewel in the crown of the Shopify ecosystem and in my view is what makes Shopify truly stand out from every other eCommerce platform today.

Do you have a must-have Shopify App recommendation that you think we should on this list? Let us know in the comments below.