Having your own business has never been so easy. Gone are the days that you need a physical store, a warehouse and staff in order to sell your own products. When selling online, you are bringing your products in front of millions of people since 80% of people who use the Internet buy products online and the rise of online retail is not likely to subside anytime soon.
There is no shortage of platforms to sell your products but Shopify is the top choice for a lot of sellers due to the simplicity of its features.
For those who are unfamiliar with Shopify, it is a cloud-based e-commerce store platform used by businesses to set up online shops that can sell almost anything. The company was founded by Tobias Lütke, Daniel Weinand, and Scott Lake in 2004 after attempting to open a store they called Snowdevil. Unsatisfied with the existing e-commerce products on the market, Lütke, a computer programmer, built his own instead.
It wasn’t an overnight hit. In fact, the co-founders went without salaries for nearly two years. “It took a while and the beginning was slow, but then people started realizing we had a good product,” says Lütke. Now, there are over 500,000 active stores running on Shopify and they have collectively driven more than 40 billion worth of sales.
Shopify has everything to get your business up and running but you can get even more out of it if you take advantage of their app integrations. There are over 1,200 apps in the Shopify app store, so whether you want to add customer reviews, create a loyalty program, or get store analytics, there is surely an app for that. But 1,200 apps is a lot to choose from. So, we rounded up the best free Shopify apps to sell more in 2019!
Shopify Live Chat
Customer service plays a crucial role in business and having a live chat feature on your Shopify store would be the best way to provide stellar customer service to your shop’s visitors. The Shopify Live Chat app allows you to real-time answers rather than have your potential customers wait around for hours before they get a response from you. This app is trusted is trusted by over 50,000 happy business owners!
Features include:
- Chat Customization – You can customize colors, logos, text, default responses, and tab styles to fit your brand.
- Targeting Rules – You can set up page level, on page rules, and timers to trigger proactive invites at the right time for the right customer.
- Unlimited Agents – No per agent pricing. You can grow your live chat team as your business grows.
- Canned Responses – You can create shortcuts for typical responses.
- Mobile Ready – Shopify Live Chat is optimized for mobile.
- Time of Day Rules – You can set your chat to be online and offline during office hours.
- Proactive Invites – You can reach out to potential customers with automatic chat invites.
- Chat Reports – Keep track of your live chats through transcripts and reports. You can even export that data to your external systems.
- Zapier Integration – You can send leads and transcripts just about anywhere with the Zapier integration.
Better Coupon Box
Better Coupon Box is a free coupon pop up app that converts visitors into email subscribers, social media followers for eCommerce stores. It’s one of the most popular free apps in the Shopify platform where over 30,000 stores in the platform uses this app. With Better Coupon Box, you can boost your web store conversion rate and increase your email list, social followers, and visitor engagement.
Features include:
- Exit-intent technology – When buyers begin to take action in leaving your store, a pop-up will appear offering a last-minute discount coupon to encourage them to stay and buy. This is a good last-ditch attempt to make a sale.
- Theme customization – You can create professional looking pop-ups within minutes with their 20+ pre-built themes. You can also use CSS code and add your own backgrounds so you pop-ups will suit your overall brand feel. If you’re not familiar with customization, the app developers will be happy to help.
- Show coupon popups to new or existing customers – You can target the right customers by triggering your pop-ups to show on specific pages or to selected customer segments.
Smile.io
The best way to show your customers that you appreciate them is through loyalty programs. Without happy customers that continue to buy from you, it’s impossible for your business to survive. Unfortunately, lot of businesses don’t focus on customer loyalty enough.
Customer loyalty programs are proven methods for growing and sustaining sales since you are focusing on customers who are already enthusiastic about your brand. Of course, there’s a Shopify app integration for that and that is Smile.io.
Smile.io powers reward programs for 25,000 merchants across the globe and boasts an 80% increase of repeat purchases. With almost 3000 5 star ratings, it is without a doubt Shopify’s most popular reward app.
The free version of the app includes the following features:
- 10+ Ways to Reward
- Points & Referral Programs
- Visual Customizations
- Email Notifications
Users can also opt for a paid plan which is $50 per month and has the following features:
- All Free Features
- Full Design Customization
- VIP Programs
- Smile Analytics
- Remove Smile.io Branding
Countdown Cart
Creating a sense of urgency is a powerful method to persuade your shop visitors into making a faster decision on a purchase they are considering. The Countdown Cart is the perfect app to create urgency and convince your customers to buy before time runs out. Once installed, you will immediately get three powerful widgets on your product pages showing the scarcity as well as the popularity of your products.
- Countdown timer – This widget gives your customers an ultimatum: To buy as soon as possible and not lose the deal if the countdown hits zero.
- Social proof – This widget highlights the popularity of your products. It shows the number of visitors who have viewed your products and how many of them were sold in real time.
- Stock countdown – This widget shows how many items left in stock of every single product in your store. This feature will effectively increase the perceived value of your products and make your customers want it more when they see that these products are running out.
It’s 100% free and will be the most lightweight app you’ll ever install.
Auto Currency Switcher
As your business grows, you can expect customers that are from another countries. Is your shop ready to accommodate them?
It should be!
With the Auto Currency Switcher, you can do that easily. Installing this integration will detect the country your customer is in based on their IP and converts your product’s prices to their local currency automatically.
The app is free to use and has the following features:
- Currency Selector Dropdown
- 200+ ISO currencies
- Remembers User’s Currency Selection
- Live rates from Shopify’s XE API
- Free UX Customization
Users can also avail of their paid plan which is $9.95/month:
- All The Features of Free Plan
- 15 Days Risk-Free Trial Period
- IP Based Country Detection
- Country Flags
- Round Converted Prices for cleaner display
Personalized Recommendation
Using personalized data to recommend specific products to a shopper can drastically increase your store’s overall conversion rate.
Recommending products in the shopping cart based on a user’s purchasing or browsing behavior resulted in a 915% increase in conversion rate, according to a MyBuys study of more than 100 top Internet retailers. But this increase is not limited to the shopping cart alone. In fact, recommendations on product pages also increased conversions by 411%. On the homepage, they increased by 248%. And within search results, they increased by 192%.
Personalized Recommendation is an app integration that displays recommendations based on user behavior for more upsell and cross-sell opportunities. It is a free service and you get the following features:
- Bought this also bought – It suggest items most frequently bought together by collecting and analyzing sales data from all customers.
- Bestsellers of the store – It presents the best sellers of your store right on your homepage.
- Recently viewed & featured recommendations – It reminds customers of items they viewed and are interested in, together with featured recommendations based on their browsing and purchase history.
- Cart recommendations – It suggests items based on the products in their shopping cart.
- Handpicked products by you – It lets store owners freely choose which products to show.
Bulk Image Edit
Let’s face it, without beautiful product photos your products would be impossible to sell. Images are considered to be the most important assets of your online business. However, editing your photos can be very time-consuming.
With the Bulk Image Edit, you edit, resize, add alt-text and rename your image files in bulk. It also automatically updates all newly added images with the defined Alt text and file name templates and allows you to add text-based watermark to protect your product images from copy or theft.
About the author
Jeroen van Gils is a content writer at Social Intents, a platform with a full suite of tools to grow sales and improve customer service. Social Intents’ most popular apps are its live chat apps, such as Live Chat for Slack and Shopify Live Chat.
