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The 40+ Best Shopify & Shopify Plus Apps to Grow Your Store in 2022

by Deb Mukherjee in , , November 12th, 2021

Shopify as a company constantly evolving with a core goal: Make it easy to launch and scale an ecommerce business. This motto has proved to be effective because today, Shopify boasts a market cap of $180B.

Although Shopify provides a multitude of products and services to ensure their customers are satisfied at all times, one of the most critical aspects of their business model is the Shopify App Store. 

Today, there are over 6,000 publicly available apps across the Shopify App Store, and on average, a merchant will use around six apps to run their business. These apps are instrumental to running & growing a Shopify store. 

So, let me help you with the best Shopify apps in each category that you need to increase sales, retain more customers, and create everlasting relationships. 

Best Shopify Apps for Email Marketing

Email marketing has always been the preferred choice for ecommerce merchants to acquire new customers & retain the existing ones. Even though the slogan “email is dead” has gained quite the traction, Shopify stores rely heavily on email to meet their revenue goals. 

But that’s not just for the sake of it – for every dollar spent on email marketing, the return is $36. Call me crazy, but that’s freaking high! But that’s not all. 4 out of 5 marketers said they’d instead give up social media than email marketing.

With that in mind, let’s look at the top Shopify email marketing apps that merchants prefer all the time. 

1. Klaviyo

Quick Info

Klaviyo is pretty much the #1 email marketing platform for Shopify stores or any ecommerce business for that matter. While Klaviyo is used majorly by ecommerce marketers to launch campaigns with deep segmentation & personalization, you can also use the platform for sending newsletters and transactional emails. 

2. Omnisend

Quick Info

Omnisend’s all-in-one multi-channel suite allows you to create detailed automated marketing workflows by integrating multiple channels that include email, SMS, web push notifications, Google retargeting & FB retargeting.

Combining this with intelligent segmentation for hyper-focused targeting, you can ensure that your message is always relevant irrespective of the customer you’re engaging with. 

3. SmartrMail

Quick Info

SmartrMail is probably the easiest email marketing platform that Shopify stores can use to launch their campaigns. The platform is equipped with easy-to-use automation, beautiful newsletters, advanced segmentation, and much more.

Best SMS Apps for Shopify

If you’re looking for “what’s hot right now,” it’s SMS. SMS marketing is quickly becoming one of the prominent marketing channels to leverage ecommerce stores. 

This is with good reason. Corey Epstein, the founder of Voyage SMS, claims that his customers see an average of 45X ROAS across campaigns and closer to 60X ROAS when using basic drip campaigns.

It’s one platform that you can’t miss in 2022 and beyond. So, let’s take a look at the top apps that help you skyrocket your sales through SMS. 

1. PostScript

Quick Info

As per anecdotal evidence, word-of-mouth, and top-notch customers, Postscript is the best SMS marketing platform for Shopify and ecommerce businesses. 

With Postscript, you can build your TCPA-compliant subscriber list, drive traffic & sales using personalized & automated SMS marketing campaigns, create hyper-targeted customer segments, or talk 1:1 with any customer – all from a single platform. 

2. Attentive

Quick Info

Trusted by over 4,000+ innovative brands for humanizing customer experiences - Attentive is at the forefront of revamping ecommerce by changing the way businesses and people connect at every step of the customer lifecycle. 

Targeting the right audience with personalized messaging fostering growth and building business intelligence is the key to driving ROI. Attentive also helps in amplifying click-through rates and the total digital revenue with the use of their solutions.

3. Voyage

Quick Info

Voyage empowers personalized micro-marketing at scale and enables brands to send the right message to the right customer at the right time - with the right call to action. 

This app has everything you need to grow your SMS subscriber list by building fully-flexible marketing automation or a predefined list of trigger events. The ecommerce stores that are using the platform observe 45X ROAS across campaigns, in addition to experiencing 251X ROAS across all drip campaigns in January 2021.

As one of the most intelligent SMS marketing platforms for ecommerce stores, Voyage is a comprehensive, advanced, and user-friendly app for Shopify businesses. 

Best Shopify Apps for Loyalty & Rewards program

What if I told you that 75% of customers unanimously like to be associated with a brand that offers rewards? Yes, that’s true!

In an era of numerous choices, holding on to your existing customers while attracting new ones is extremely grueling, making customer retention and loyalty more important than ever.

Let’s dive into our pick of the best apps for loyalty & rewards programs on Shopify.

1. Smile: Rewards & Loyalty

Quick Info

With a trusted loyalty provider like Smile.io, powering reward programs and boosting repeated transactions per customer is no longer a hassle!

With Smile.io - you get to build your business with a powerful program, level up your marketing applications with the existing customer base, slash out acquisition costs and boost customer retention in just minutes. 

Offer your customers exclusive perks, enticing discounts, and a fun way to engage with your brand.

2. Referral Candy

Quick Info

With ReferralCandy as one of the best referral apps out there, rewarding your customers for sharing your store with their friends couldn’t get any easier. Customize rewards and incentivize your best customers by getting them to spread the word and act as brand influencers for you! 

ReferralCandy also integrates with other widely used marketing tools like MailChimp and Klaviyo for leveraging your email flows; Adroll, Facebook, and Google for retargeting campaigns to customers that haven’t converted yet and with Google Analytics to track traffic. 

3. Stamped.io

Quick Info

With multiple choices available, loyalty programs can be a huge draw. Customers enjoy personalized services while engaging with brands, and they love the rewards that come along.

Stamped.io helps you embrace the most efficient and cost-effective marketing strategy - word-of-mouth marketing, helping you build brand loyalty from existing customers. 

Stamped.io is a trusted loyalty software with curated offerings to suit your business needs. The platform will help you maximize customer retention, customer lifetime value, and engagement using AI-powered points & rewards, VIP tiers, and referral solutions.

Best User-Generated Content/Review Apps for Shopify

Get this – a whopping 93% of customers believe that user-generated content (UGC) is extremely useful for making a purchase decision. They even spend close to an average of 5.4 hours per day with user-generated content alone.

UGC is a powerful form of content that your business must utilize, be it in any form - images, video, text, or audio. Instead of businesses promoting themselves, customers or employees talking about the product, services, or company culture is paramount and can significantly influence the reader in more ways than one.

We’re listing out our choice of the best UGC/Review apps on Shopify that your business can kickstart with.

1. Junip

Quick Info

Junip can integrate with your business theme to seamlessly export your reviews in a snap with a hassle-free installation and setup! Fostering growing UGC and reviews, this app deploys product & site review requests on new orders and sends out campaigns to old customers. 

1000+ brands rely on Junip for product, store, photo & video reviews. 

2. Okendo

Quick Info

Okendo is an official Google review partner offering tools such as post-purchase emails, content capture forms, and reward engines.

These offerings are key to driving and highlighting high-impact social proofs for brands, scale product ratings & reviews, customer photos/videos, and Q&A with their extensive & customizable widgets. 

Trusted by over 4000+ Shopify retailers, Okendo assists in building shoppers' trust and driving an effective buying action. 

3. Loox

Quick Info

Loox is a plug-and-play review platform that supports your business to get reviews from customers with automatic review request emails and delivery-based timing. What’s more interesting? Customers avail a discount for using a photo or a video.

With an engaging user interface and an attractive spread of customer review widgets, you can generate traffic and referrals, boost your virality quotient and take your social proof game to the next level!

Best Shopify Apps for Personalization

With the growth of ecommerce, ensuring users convert as efficiently as possible is paramount to your business. One of the trends for improving user experience and conversion rate is personalization, be it in any form - via emails or other channels.

91% of consumers are more likely to shop with brands that provide offers and recommendations.

We’ve hand-picked a few of the best apps for personalization on Shopify. Check them out:

1. Nosto 

Quick Info

Nosto enables your business to deliver personalized shopping experiences across every device, at every touchpoint with real-time product and shopper data using machine learning.

It is an easy-to-use AI-powered platform for all your ecommerce personalization and merchandising needs. Nosto helps you empower and optimize 1:1 omnichannel commerce experiences to stay a step ahead of your customers. 

2. Octane AI

Quick Info

With Octane AI bagging the award for the Best Storefront App on Shopify, you can be certain you have the expert guidance for leveraging a personalized approach towards your customers.  

 

A zero-party data marketing platform powers your business to increase conversion rates by engaging with your customers using conversational pop-ups and shopping quizzes.

Octane AI helps you personalize the shopping experience at every stage of your customer’s journey, including channels like the website, SMS, ads, emails, and Facebook messenger!

3. Justuno

Quick Info

Justuno lets you convert with your existing traffic and enhance your marketing performance from all channels using pop-ups, banner offers, exit offers, upsell promotions, and recommendations. 

Enable easy on-site personalization with Justuno and improve your ROAS by offering your customers intelligent, smoother, and personalized AI-powered product recommendations. 

Best Apps for Payments on Shopify

With any ecommerce store, predicting revenue is often a challenge. Customers can churn quickly, leaving you spending more time and resources in acquiring new customers. Not to mention that acquiring a new customer can cost 5-10 times more than retaining an existing customer. 

With diverse payment options - Subscriptions or Buy Now, Pay Later offers, past customers are repeated, allowing businesses to generate and predict consistent revenue.

But what type of model is right for you? Let’s find out from our list of subscriptions and BNPL options.

Subscriptions

1. ReCharge Subscriptions

Quick Info

ReCharge is a program that allows you to transition one-time products into recurring subscription products while allowing a seamless experience for both the customer and yourself. 

Powering over 15,000 brands with a powerful merchant and customer portal - ReCharge lets you easily manage, analyze, and customize subscriptions and, in turn, gain actionable insights to increase lifetime value and customer engagements.

2. Bold Subscriptions

Quick Info

Bold Subscriptions provides more flexibility for subscription models that require single purchases, upsells, and discounts. Bold Subscriptions also offers prepaid and gift subscription options.

You can not only create a custom subscriber portal that gives you much access, but you can also seamlessly integrate with over a dozen payment gateways on Woocommerce, Bigcommerce, and Commercetools. 

3. Skio

Quick Info

Skio provides easy migration from other subscription programs without payment disruptions or card updates. You can further eliminate customer tickets by enabling faster options in editing subscriptions and offering a passwordless login. 

4. Smartrr

Quick Info

Smartrr provides a native checkout that enriches branded buyer experience empowering engagement with your brand in converting new subscribers. With a user-friendly interface, Smartrr allows users to review and adjust their orders easily. 

Smartrr lets you turn visitors into subscribers with integration while building and managing your customer order data (including attribution data and retention matrix) to maximize lifetime value. 

5. Repeat

Quick Info

With Repeat, reordering your everyday goods is as easy as it can get. Most commonly used by CPG brands, Repeat enables faster and personalized reordering experiences from email and SMS.

The app also helps brands acquire deep insights into how customers are using their products. Repeat cart links are personalized based on customers’ past purchases and prepopulated with items due for ordering to build superior customer experiences.

Buy Now, Pay Later

5. Afterpay

Quick Info

Afterpay lets customers know that they can buy now and pay later with official on-site messaging to product and cart pages. As per respondents from a recent survey, Afterpay is the second most popular app for buy now and pay later services, faring nearly 30% after PayPal. 

With no interest, no external credit check, and no hidden fees when you pay on time - your customers are sure to get hooked on this buy now, pay later offering. 

7. Sezzle

Quick Info

Serving over 40,000 online merchants and over a million online shoppers, Sezzle is leveling up the shopping experiences by allowing shoppers to buy their desired product now and pay later in a break of 4 payments within six weeks, interest-free!

Sezzle also offers their shoppers the liberty to reschedule payments, and none of this would affect the customer’s credit score. What’s in it for you? Increased conversions, shopper frequency, and Average Order Value. It’s a win, win!

8. Affirm

Quick Info

Affirm’s tailored solutions remove price as an obstacle and turn traffic into buyers by showing how budget-friendly the item can be. Affirm is known to help businesses expand their customer base and increase the average order value. 

The mobile-friendly and omnichannel solution is optimized for ecommerce, telesales, and in-store transactions to accelerate customer acquisition and conversion. No matter the industry your business belongs to, Affirm pay-over-time messaging can help your business grow by leaps and bounds. 

9. PayPal

Quick Info

With the buy now, pay later option as an apparent trend, introducing flexible payment options to businesses is imperative to generate income and ultimately impact your customer’s lifetime value by eliminating the barrier to purchase.

PayPal empowers your customers to shop without thinking twice by offering the buy now, pay later option without impacting your credit score. The best part? It’s interest-free!

Stats show that PayPal is the most popular choice by shoppers regarding flexible payment options, followed by Afterpay and Affirm. 

If you haven't considered these subscriptions and buy now, pay later payment options for your business yet, we suggest you start now!

Best Shopify Apps for Post Purchase

Post-purchase experience is the key factor in turning first-time buyers into loyal customers. This will help you bring in repeated business - and in turn, attract new customers as well. 

From upselling and cross-selling solutions to post-purchase experiences, here are a few of the best Shopify apps that are certain to help you increase customer retention, drive repeated transactions and build brand loyalty.

1. CartHook

Quick Info

Looking to drive post-purchase upsells from customers? Give Carthook a try!

Carthook lets you add one-click post-purchase offers immediately after the checkout and before the thank-you page (just when customer loyalty is high) for an instant Average Order Value boost. 

You can also drive highly effective upsell offers with Carthook by customizing and measuring offers based on what your customer just bought. 

2. Rebuy

Quick Info

Rebuy is a data-driven personalization engine and merchandising solution that helps with upsells, cross-sells, and drives repeat purchases. Turn the intelligence engine on and tap into revenue-generating actions with real-time recommendations and automated subscriber churn win-backs!

Their widget entices well-timed and well-targeted actions from the customers. These widgets can be installed on pages of your choice. Rebuy can easily be one of the top 3 money-making apps for your store. 

3. Checkout Promos

Quick Info

Trusted by over 1000+ Shopify brands, Checkout promotions is a highly flexible one-click post-purchase upsell system. Checkout powers your business by offering your customers a variety of promotional offers with one-click upsells post purchases.

Checkout Promos can be easily installed without any technical support and works perfectly fine with any theme, payment gateways, and custom checkouts.

4. Fairing (formerly known as Enquire Labs)

Quick Info

Trusted by over 800+ Shopify stores, Fairing has been rated as the number one post-purchase survey app in building valuable customer insights.

Focusing on sensitive and vital topics like marketing attribution, conversion rate optimization, customer research, and personalization -  building personas just got a whole lot easier, all thanks to Fairing. 

Best Customer Support & Experiences App on Shopify

We live in the age of the customer; it just simply means your customer wants to do things their way and expects brands to fulfill their expectations. 

Customers prioritize experience over everything else when picking between brands. Though a lot of time and resources are needed to design, implement and manage extraordinary customer experiences, based on statistics, the efforts are worth it in the end.

Going by the stats, 74% of consumers are likely to make purchase decisions based on experiences alone. Now, I’m sure that got your attention! 

Check out our list of the best customer support & experiences apps on Shopify. 

1. Gorgias

Quick Info

Gorgias is an all-in-one support helpdesk software assisting ecommerce merchants to grow through exceptional customer service. With businesses driving an omnichannel presence across Facebook, Instagram, Emails, Live chat, SMS, and even calls, you can now easily centralize support tickets in one place with Gorgias.

Gorgias’ personalized automated support lets you answer customer queries in minutes using pre-made templates, including customer, shipping, and order details. This way, you can bring down the average response time to a great extent!

2. Tidio

Quick Info 

Tidio is a platform that merges uniquely with live chat, bots, and marketing automation to meet the expectations of your brand. No matter how your customer gets in touch, you will always respond, thanks to this integration. 

Enable intelligent bots to engage with customers based on their shopping behavior and get them to reclaim abandoned carts. 

3. eDesk

Quick Info

eDesk is the leading eCommerce helpdesk for Amazon & multichannel sellers. We integrate with the world’s leading marketplaces, social channels, and ecommerce platforms.

Through an easy-to-use platform, eDesk connects all your support data in one place and intelligently matches it with relevant transaction information required for sellers to provide extraordinary customer service.

Our centralized inbox and artificial intelligence tools help eCommerce businesses respond to customers faster, thereby increasing business effectiveness whilst reducing support costs.

4. Shopify Inbox

Quick Info

With Shopify inbox, you can do much more than just manage and support customer conversations - you can share products, discount codes, and insights to turn browsers into buyers. Keep your brand consistent by centralizing all your chats on one platform and helping more shoppers in real-time. 

Best Shopify Apps for Order Tracking, Shipping & Fulfillment

Shipping tools will not fulfill the orders for your brand; that’s the job of the 3PL provider. On the contrary, shipping tools would help you secure good shipping rates, labels and organize orders for shipping out. 

We have listed out apps for you to help your brand with order tracking, order management, pre-orders, and fraud protection on Shopify. Let’s get right to it.

Fulfillment

1. ShipBob

Quick Info

ShipBob is a logistics platform that caters exclusively to ecommerce orders for direct-to-consumer brands.

With hands-off order fulfillment and warehousing, ShipBob is easy to integrate into your store. You can sync your product catalog, set a schedule for order import, and manage everything on the go while ShipBob runs the logistics for you!

2. Shippo 

Quick Info

Shippo offers your brand the best rates with 85+ carriers globally, including regional carriers. Automate workflows across the fulfillment journey with professional support and sync orders automatically using Shippo.

With an impressive track record, Shippo currently supports 100K+ brands, delivering 100 Million+ shipments annually. 

3. Easyship

Quick Info

Easyship empowers your businesses to generate labels, handle paperwork, manage orders, create a shipment easily, and offer a great tracking experience that your customers love with their all-in-one platform. 

You can access over 250+ shipping solutions at the lowest possible rates - with absolutely no hidden fees! 

Order Tracking

4. Wonderment

Quick Info

On average, customers check on the status of their order four times until it’s delivered. It's critical to provide a stellar order tracking experience for the customer.

Wonderment solves that with our end-to-end order tracking & reporting platform that lets multimillion-dollar brands like Kettle & Fire, Ridge Wallet, Three Ships & Uqora deliver the best post-purchase experience for their customers through its host products like

  • Order status updates via Klaviyo & PostScript/Attentive
  • Reporting with in-depth analysis on order status and carrier efficacy
  • Ridiculously beautiful and on-brand order tracking pages that also increases the brand's revenue through upsells

Sounds like a great deal? You bet it is! 

5. Aftership

Quick Info

Aftership offers everything your business needs to ensure the best tracking experience - shipment visibility & notifications, branded tracking page, and analytics. Further, you can drive engagement & sales using emails and SMS from seven different notification triggers. 

You can always track order statuses under one platform, including delivery status, carrier, customer email, and other parameters. Aftership has a fleet of 898 shipping carriers to its list of partners. 

6. Convey

Quick Info

Convey is a data-driven platform gathering carrier data from across the globe, connecting it intelligently in real-time to all stages of the buyer journey. You can collaborate to solve shipment issues while communicating with customers at scale

Returns

7. Loop Returns

Quick Info

Loop is popular for helping brands retain their customers by delivering a positive returns experience.

With Loop, you can simply return shipping by automating your return policy from in-line exchanges to your own customized returns app and redefining returns like never before!

8. Returnly

Quick Info

Returnly completely emphasizes improving the post-purchase experience by reconverting post-purchasers and mitigating refunds. 

Offering a self-serve return platform for customers to return or exchange a product easily (with little or no human intervention), Returnly automates the process of returns. By using Returnly, you can analyze and categorize returns to identify loopholes and reduce returns over time. 

Best Automation Apps on Shopify

Creating automated workflows helps you save time and manage your store much better. We’ve gone ahead and taken the liberty of doing the groundwork for you - we did full-blown research of the best workflow automation apps to optimize your store.

Here we are with our pick of the best automation apps on Shopify: 

1. Shopify Flow

Quick Info

While Shopify Flow is only available to Shopify Plus subscribers, I will go ahead and list out what you need to know! Shopify Flow is an automation solution built to help solve unique challenges that Shopify merchants experience. 


Shopify Flow allows you to build workflows for automating manual and repetitive tasks, campaigns, and processes within your stores. This level of automation gives you the power to create custom solutions that your business needs for growth and for doubling the revenue.

2. Alloy Automation

Quick Info

Alloy is a no-code platform that lets ecommerce brands build automated workflows to save time and increase efficiency.

Alloy automation allows your brand to automate offload marketing, customer service, fulfillment, shipping, tagging, and other time-consuming tasks so you can focus on growing your store. 

With pre-built workflows, you can streamline analytics to centralize data and send it to your tech stack in just a snap!

Good-to-have Shopify Apps to Grow Your Store

1. co-op

Quick Info

When you bag an order from your customer, it is the best time to upsell or resell by showcasing products they might love. Co-op offers a delightful mobile-first, post-purchase experience that will help you acquire new customers.

By partnering with like-minded brands, you can upsell your products easily. That’s not all; you can even use fun surveys to learn more about your customers and build rich customer insights. 

2. Popshop

Quick Info

Popshop is a platform supporting businesses to expand and grow by promoting their products on Popshop’s marketplace across mediums.

A few features on Popshop includes real-time inventory management, gifting sales function, live audience raffle calling, discounted priority shipping at a flat rate, and many more. Popshop supports the sellers with dedicated customer support and commerce coaching.  

3. Batch

Quick Info

Batch is a fast one-tap checkout app that allows your customer to purchase by QR scan or NFC tap on their desired items - powering physical commerce. It keeps your brand top-of-mind and helps you drive repeated revenue by allowing direct response from ads. 

4. PushOwl

Quick Info

Trusted by over 20K+ stores on Shopify, PushOwl offers web push notifications to convert anonymous shoppers into customers and generate more revenue.

With PushOwl, besides marketing products and setting up flash sales, you can also experiment with automated notifications like back-in-stock & browse abandonment alerts. 

5. Privy

Quick Info

Privy is the number one rated sales app in the Shopify App Store. Supporting over 600,000+ stores, Privy is considered the best app to grow ecommerce sales with email & SMS. You can choose from a proven popup & display template to convert store visitors into buyers and subsequently grow your email list. 

6. Glew

Quick Info

Glew assists multichannel merchants to connect to data and grow their business using in-depth analysis and insights. Glew has over 150+ ecommerce integrations, all consolidated for reporting - including Shopify, Facebook, Google Analytics, Google Ads, Mailchimp, and more.

Glew is a brilliant ecommerce business intelligence platform for businesses both big and small.

7. GRIN

Quick Info

GRIN is a powerful all-in-one creator management platform for ecommerce to build more valuable brands through the power of creator partnerships.

Leverage GRIN for influencer discovery & outreach and manage all your influencer campaigns and relationships on one platform. Some of the best D2C brands trust GRIN as their influencer marketing platform for growth & scale.

8. Storeya

Quick Info

Storeya's powerful AI will optimize your campaigns 24/7 delivering the best ads to the right customers. StoreYa is a Google & Facebook Partner that supports 400,000+ merchants!

You don't need to be a marketer to use the tool – it's a hassle-free, single-click setup. With this app, you can get shoppers interested in your products straight from Google, Facebook, Bing, and more. All for the most affordable prices on the market.

Which apps do you already have installed?

So there you have it – businesses that concentrate on marketing, payments, post-purchase, automation, and the likes will have a competitive advantage in the industry.

Doing so will position your ecommerce business to reap the rewards of higher repeat customer rates, increase in new customers, enhanced customer experiences, improved purchase frequency, and higher average order value (AOV).

You’re spoilt for choice when it comes to building a customer acquisition & retention stack for your ecommerce store. Consider this list a good starting point to take your brand sky high!

But do let me know which apps you already have installed. I'm curious! :)