Shopify is a powerful platform you can use to run your e-commerce store. But with the addition of free Shopify apps you have the chance to take your store to new capabilities and the best part about it, you don't have to spend any extra money.
The thing about running an e-commerce store is you constantly need to think about your business expenses. If you spend more than you make, you run the risk of having to close your store early due to insufficient funds.
However, if you utilize the free apps that Shopify and its partners have to offer, you'll find that there are many ways to improve all aspects of your business without spending another dime.
In this post, we'll look specifically at a free Shopify app to help you with the following:
- A free app to help you reward your most loyal customers
- A free app to help you boost sales
- An app to help you streamline your order receipt process
- An app to help you increase your rankings on search engines like Google
- An app to keep your customers happy through live-chat.
Free Shopify app for rewards and loyalty
Your customers are your lifeblood. After all, if you don't have customers, you don't really have a business. What's more, your customers aren't yours for good once you have them. With new competition cropping up every single day, you need to find a way to stand out from the crowd.
But rewarding your loyal customers shouldn't just be about stopping them from going to your competitors, you should do so because you genuinely want to show the people who have brought from you that you care about them and value their business.
The good news is that rewarding your loyal customers doesn't need to cost any money at all. By the time you've generated tonnes of orders, you should have a clear idea who your most loyal customers are. Without using any software you can reach out to those people directly to offer them a freebie or a discount or simply just reach out to say that you appreciate their custom and business.
But if you do want a more structured way to organize your loyalty program without paying any money, you could try using a free Shopify loyalty app, like Swell.
Swell makes it easy for e-commerce vendors to reward up to 100 customers per month. If you're just starting out and want to get your customer base loyal from the get-go, this is a great option. This way as your store grows, so can your loyal customers - you'll never end up paying for more of a service than you actually use.
You can customize the platform so that it matches your own branding - giving your loyalty program a consistent feel with your actual e-commerce store.
If you've ever used a rewards program as a consumer, you'll know that the most effective ones are those that reward more than just money spent. Your customers want to feel like you value more than just their money and so instead, using Swell. You can reward things like referrals, writing product reviews, interactions on social media, reading specific content on your site as well as the usual, buying goods from your store.
Free Shopify apps for boosting sales
One thing you'll start to think about more as you grow your e-commerce store is what strategies you can use to boost your sales. Even after the launch date, you'll come across a range of instances where your sales stagnate. This means that you don't have the same steep curve in your revenue graph, but instead, it starts to fall flat.
You'll be pleased to know that there is a wide range of ways you can boost your sales on Shopify but one of the most effective (free) ways to do this is by using an upsell or cross-sell app.
This app is free to use and uses intelligent machine learning software that tracks the products your target customers have previously ordered in a bid to recommend other products they might find useful or interesting.
Upsells are an outstanding way to boost sales because often you present you customers with hidden or unseen sales opportunities. If, for example, your customers come to your e-commerce store to buy a coffee machine. After doing some research, they have a good idea of what type of coffee machine they'll buy.
But, if they simply come to your store and then leave, you don't get the chance to offer them any additional products. Further to that, if they do buy additional products, you have to rely on them finding the right ones for them.
Instead, simply show them products they might find interesting based on their current profile. If you simply show them a random selection of products, you'll come across as spammy and do the opposite of boost sales.
Free Shopify apps for streamlining order receipts
Often, when you start to see traction with your e-commerce store, you come to find that simple processes like receipts, billings and orders can quickly become out of hand. When you have just one order, it's super simple to put together an order document and send it out.
But once you start generating 100's or even 1000's of orders per day, you'll run into a struggle. And that's where Shopify's Order Printer app comes in. Not only is it free to use, but it's also super simple to set up.
It allows you to seamlessly and quickly print packing slips, invoices, receipts or labels for all your customers. The app understands that each customer is different and so each label or packing slip is custom for the person buying at the time.
However, although the app is free, if you want to make the best use of your templates, you will have to have some understanding of HTML and Liquid. However, if you have experience or access to the resources needed to do this, you can employ the help of the Shopify design gurus to get your template looking as best as it can. This, however, isn't free so do keep that in mind, if you're after a completely free solution.
Free Shopify app to increase SEO positions
When it comes to your e-commerce store, you want your product and category pages to rank for your target keywords. This way, if you sell organic matcha tea, then when someone searches for "organic matcha tea buy online", you should ideally show up on the first page, if not the first position.
But getting your website to rank involves combining a good level of high-quality content as well as technical SEO optimizing that will propel your store into a success. We won't go on too much about e-commerce SEO, you can read about that in our articles:
But one often overlooked the aspect of SEO is the fact you need to optimize your images. A good e-commerce store will have a lot of images. You use your images to help show your customers what your products look like considering they're not able to touch or feel them online. But unlike written content where you can write exactly what you want to about your products, images are a different ball game.
You see, Google ranks images as well as web pages, but only if you correctly label your images as what they are.
For many, this is a task that gets put on the wayside and before you know it, you have 1000s of images and manually going through them to find out which need optimization is difficult.
Instead, use this free Shopify app that helps your SEO optimize all your images.
Free Shopify app for customer support
We've already mentioned that it's a good idea to keep your loyal customers happy. But what if your customers aren't happy for any reason? They need a way to get in touch with you and you need a way to document all these instances to ensure that your customers stay happy for the longest time.
Customer support is important in e-commerce because it shows customers that even if you do make a mistake (and let's face it, who hasn't made mistakes?) you're committed to not only rectifying the mistake but making the situation better all round for the customer in question.
Often, though customer support software, with all its bells and whistles, can become quite expensive. Instead, you could opt for a free version that allows your customers to talk to you via facebook messenger.
The only cost to you is the time it takes to respond to your eager customers and fix their issues.
Let's wrap it all up
Running an e-commerce store naturally involves a lot of costs. But keeping your costs lower means you're able to increase the profits you can make. The lower your outgoing costs are the higher your profit margins can be.
