Top 11 Add-Ons For Shopify

If you’re an established Shopify merchant, you already know that — although Shopify is a great eCommerce platform — in order to make your store function at a higher level, you’ll need to install add-ons.

Add-ons (free or otherwise) increase the functionality of your store by providing features Shopify doesn’t offer. For example, you can use add-ons to monitor customer engagement, send abandoned cart notifications, or streamline your shipping process.

Happily, Shopify has one of the largest app marketplaces I’ve ever seen. There are over 1500 different options available! That said, with so many options available, it can be difficult to decide which applications to use.

For your convenience, I’ve compiled a list of 11 of the top Shopify add-ons. I wish I could say with certainty that these are the best Shopify applications, but that would be asserting too much. Suffice it to say that these apps stand out among the other 1500 and rank highly in the Shopify community. Most of the following products have received hundreds (and some, thousands!) of customer reviews, and nearly all of them have an overall five out of five star-rating.

Without further ado, I present to you the Top 11 Add-ons for Shopify:

Best Shopify Integrations For Marketing

IF you’re ready to expand your business’s marketing, here are the best marketing services that integrate directly with Shopify.

MailChimp For Shopify

MailChimp is a überpopular email marketing system. Be aware that the connection between your Shopify account and your MailChimp account is free, MailChimp’s services are often not.

MailChimp does offer a free plan if you have 2,000 or fewer subscribers and plan to send fewer than 12,000 emails per month. If you have more subscribers, or you’d like to benefit from additional features, you’ll have to purchase a plan.

Here are few things MailChimp can do for your email marketing.

• Automated Emails: MailChimp lets you set up and automatically send out emails. For example, you can send a “welcome” series to your new customers. Autoresponder emails (like “Your Order is being Processed” notifications) give customers peace of mind and are no trouble to you.
• Adds Customers At Checkout: MailChimp captures new customers’ emails as they check out.
• Targeted Campaigns: Use MailChimp’s advanced segmentation tools to separate your customers based on buying trends. You can then tailor emails to each customer group.

In short, MailChimp makes sending emails easier and is a great way for small business owners to manage their email marketing strategy.

eCommerce Email Marketing By Omnisend

eCommerce Email Marketing from Omnisend provides another approach to email marketing but comes with slightly different features than those offered by MailChimp.

Like MailChimp, Email Marketing by Omnisend has a free plan available to those who send 15,000 or fewer emails per month. This free plan comes with limited features. If you’re planning on sending more emails (or want to benefit from the full feature set), you’ll have to pay for a premium plan.

Note: When you sign up for a free plan, you’ll get to try out Omnisend’s premium features for the first 14 days.

Omnisend lists Email Marketing features on their page in Shopify’s app store, but it’s difficult to determine which features apply to the free plan and which are premium features. Here’s what is listed:

• Import Subscribers: Connect Omnisend’s Email Marketing to other applications that house your contact list.
• Collect New Subscribers: Use popup ads to increase your email list. Set up a welcome series to introduce those new customers to your brand.
• Cart Recovery: Send autoresponder emails to customers who have left items in their carts.
• Campaign Booster: Resend emails to the customers who haven’t yet opened those emails.

eCommerce Email Marketing by Omnisend lets you bulk up your email list with popups and automatically send marketing emails to that list, making it a great option for small business marketing.

Loyalty Reward Points By Smile.io

Smile.io (formerly Sweet Tooth) helps build customer loyalty by rewarding interactions with your brand. With Smile.io, you can set up a reward system and connect it to your email marketing service.

Like many services, Smile.io comes with a free plan for a limited number of customers (500 loyalty program members). After that, Smile.io charges based on the growth of your loyalty program.

Smile.io gives you the power to tailor your loyalty program to your liking. You can:

• Award Points To Customers Based On Actions: Give points when your customers create an account, share your products on social media, follow you on social media, or refer another customer to your site. You decide which actions earn points.
• Sync Smile.io To Email Marketing: Use Smile.io’s API to connect your email list to Smile.io’s system.
• Decide How Customers Spend Points: Allow customers to use their points for a $ discount, a % discount, free shipping, or a gift card.

Smile.io lets you reward customers and build customer loyalty, which is a must for running a successful Shopify store.

Privy—Free Email Popups

Privy is one of the more widely used Shopify apps (with over 12,500 customer reviews). Privy lets you design and implement popups on your site, and it does so in a way that’s easy to use.

Privy offers a free plan (surprise, surprise!) that comes with just the basic features. More features are included with the paid rates, which start at $24/month.

Features you can expect from Privy include:

• Customizability: This is what I was talking about when I mentioned ease of use. Privy lets you design your own popups using their drag and drop editor. You don’t have to know any code at all to create popups that fit your brand. Very cool.
• Campaigns Based On Engagement: You can set your Privy account to trigger different popups depending on customer engagement with your site. For example, you can set one popup to appear the first time they appear on your site, and another popup to appear the tenth time they visit your homepage.
• Integrates With Email Marketing: Privy has already developed connections to the most popular email marketing systems, including MailChimp, Bronto, and Constant Contact.

Privy lets you easily create custom pop-ups that react when you want them to. This is a great way to advertise sales or products and encourage shopping on your eCommerce store.

Best Integrations For Displaying Customer Reviews On Your Shopify Store

Customers want to see what other buyers have to say about your store and its products. Having an app to help manage customer reviews is a must to help you run a successful online store. Here is your best option.

Yotpo

Yotpo’s focus is User-Generated Content (UGC). They know that genuine customer reviews can increase your store’s validity in the eyes of your future customers. Yotpo helps you harness the power of customer comments.

Using Yotpo, you can allow customers to leave reviews, post pictures of your products, and answer other users’ questions.

Yotpo offers a (quite limited) free plan. In order to really benefit from Yotpo, you’ll have to pay for the service.

A couple of features to note:

• Community Q&A: Allow customers to post questions in reviews and product pages. Automatically send those questions to past buyers.
• Coupons: Offer coupons to customers who leave reviews on your products.
• Comments: Reply to reviews to engage with your customers.

Yotpo lets customers review your products and services which increases future customers’ confidence in your brand.

Best Shipping Integrations For Shopify

While Shopify offers a shipping service, Shopify shipping isn’t for everyone. If you’re looking for a way to manage your store’s shipping, here are the integrations to check out.

Tracking & Delivery Updates By AfterShip

AfterShip’s Tracking and Delivery Updates feature helps you guarantee your customers’ ease of mind by alerting them about the progress of their shipments.

A few features are available for free, though you can purchase a premium plan (with every feature) for only $10/month.

Tracking and Delivery Updates does precisely what its name implies. While this app doesn’t handle every aspect of shipping, it does provide you with a way to track your shipments and notify your customers about their packages’ progress.

Here’s a quick summary of what Tracking and Delivery Updates can accomplish:

• Send Email Notifications: Email your customers when their orders have shipped and when their packages arrive in their city.
• Send Tracking Links: This feature is only available on the premium plan. You can send tracking links to your customers, which they can view on your branded tracking page.

All in all, AfterShip’s app lets you increase customer satisfaction by tracking shipments and notifying customers about their packages’ status.

ShipStation

ShipStation is a complete shipping integration. Using ShipStation with Shopify, you can integrate with major shipping carriers and quickly print shipping labels, ultimately streamlining your order processing.

ShipStation’s services range from $9/month–$159/month depending on the size of your company and the number of shipments you send per month.

Here are a few of the things that ShipStation can do:

• Print Shipping Labels & Packing Slips: Spend less time clicking “Print”; you can print full batches of shipping labels and packing slips.
• Access Admin Via Mobile App: Work from anywhere.
• Multichannel Order Processing: ShipStation can manage your orders from eBay, Shopify, and Amazon, all in the same place.
• Mix FBA & Self-Fulfillment: Have some orders fulfilled by FBA and fulfill others yourself.
• Free USPS Postage Account: Benefit from discounted shipping rates from USPS.

At the end of the day, ShipStation helps you get shipments out the door faster. View our full review of ShipStation to learn more.

Best Accounting Integrations For Shopify

Every business needs accounting software. The good news is that you can find accounting software that integrates directly with your Shopify store to help you balance the books and manage inventory at the same time.

Intuit Quickbooks Online

Quickbooks is an integral part of many online businesses. The primary merit of QuickBooks Online’s accounting program is its price. The integration is free for merchants syncing under 30 orders per month, and goes up to $30/month for unlimited orders.

You’ll benefit from regular automated syncing of your Quickbooks account to your Shopify account. The trouble is that many customers have reported problems with that syncing. They say that not all of the important information transfers over.

On the other hand, you could pay for another syncing service. They typically start around $30/month and go up into hundreds of dollars. That’s a lot to pay for just the connection. It makes me wonder if it’s worth working past the bugs.

You may have some trouble if you use Quickbooks for your accounting, but this might be the best option.

Best SEO Integrations For Shopify Sellers

eCommerce stores are only as good as their SEO — that’s where SEO integrations come in. Check out these SEO integrations for Shopify.

SEO Image Optimizer By Booster Apps

The SEO Image Optimizer lets you boost SEO rankings by creating custom ALT tags for your images. You can choose their default ALT template or create your own.

The SEO Image Optimizer is one of the most widely reviewed applications in the Shopify App Store (with over 5,000 reviews!). Very likely, the app’s popularity is related to its price. The SEO Image Optimizer is free, now and forever.

The SEO Image Optimizer lets you:

• Draw In More Traffic From Google Images Searches: ALT tags (which are small bits of text featuring your products’ keywords) help image search engines locate your products.
• Set & Forget: The SEO Image Optimizer boasts a one-click installation.

The SEO Image Optimizer helps you quickly and easily gain more search engine traffic using ALT text for your images. It’s also free forever.

Best Shopify Security Integrations

When customers trust your site, they are more likely to buy from you, so having a strong security integration for Shopify is a must.

McAfee SECURE

McAfee SECURE’s application lets you calm your customers’ anxieties by displaying McAfee’s trusted seal of site security.

If your site gets 500 or fewer visits per month, you can take advantage of McAfee’s free plan. Otherwise, you have to purchase a plan.

Here’s a quick summary of McAfee’s free plan:

• Site Scans: Your site will be scanned for viruses, malware, and other security hazards.
• Trustmark: You’ll be able to display the McAfee SECURE trustmark on your site, which helps increase your customers’ confidence in the security of your site.

McAfee SECURE scans your site for security breaches, and when your site is found to be clean, you’ll be able to display a logo verifying its security.

Best Recurring Billing Apps For Shopify

More and more, online subscriptions are becoming a staple in the online shopping scene. So how do you offer recurring billing to your customers? This Shopify integration can do the trick.

Recurring Orders & Subscriptions By BOLD

Not surprisingly, Recurring Orders & Subscriptions gives you the ability to sell subscription products on your store. You can set up recurring orders to be billed as individual products or as entire carts (like a product bundle).

BOLD offers a generous Free 90-Day Trial to test out the app. If you like it, you can continue for $19.99/month + a 1% transaction fee on all subscription billing.

Below are some of the benefits of BOLD’s app.

• Frequency Rules: Control frequency rules or allow your customers to decide how often they’d like to receive an order.
• Customers Can Manage Their Orders: Give your customers the power to edit, pause, skip, or update their orders.
• Easy To Get Started: BOLD offers a free setup call along with free installation and a free theme update.

If you’d like to see BOLD’s app in action, you can try their demo of a recurring product order or their demo of a recurring cart order.

If you’ve ever wanted to try a Dollar Shave approach to selling, this might be the app for you.

Building The Perfect Shopify Store With Add-Ons & Integrations

We’ve talked about the top 11 add-ons for Shopify. Now it’s your turn to go forth and install! Fill the holes in your Shopify platform with these reliable apps.

But before you do so, I suggest taking a second look at your budget. While most of these applications offer a free trial, those trials eventually end. Determine how much you can invest in added functionality, and then pick the apps that meet as many of your store’s needs as possible.

If you need to, explore beyond this list. Just make sure that the add-ons you choose are well-rated by the Shopify community, and take advantage of every free trial before you commit.

Best of luck!