Top 10 Shopify Apps of 2017
Best Shopify apps are not always so easy to assemble in a top notch manner. This is basically because you have a plethora of Shopify apps to choose from at Shopify store. Of course, you may find the process easier if you’re a Shopify developer or a confirmed ecommerce veteran. But, on the flip side, the process often appears disgustingly overwhelming to new Shopify store owners.
In fact, even the most astute Shopify users may struggle to keep up with the emerging trends in the app store today. The reason is that Shopify App Store gives you well over a thousand options to choose from. And, as they say, it’s tougher to make the right choices when options are pretty high. So my aim is to help fix this.
Thus, in a section of my Shopify store setup mastery guide (The Shopify Boss), I explained the best practices to choosing the optimal Shopify apps for your store. I will also buttress these points further in my upcoming Udemy course (click here to get notified when it’s ready). In the meantime, below are my Top 10 Shopify Apps of 2017. Of course the list is by no means exhaustive. But each app is chosen from one of ten core segments of ecommerce that really matter. The ten core segments are then grouped further into the following two categories.
Top Shopify Apps for Store Keeping and Inventory Mgt.
As shown in the preceding table, this section shows my top apps from 5 subcategories. The covered subcategories include inventory, shipping, tools, accounting and reporting.
1. Ordoro - An Inventory, Shipping/Dropshipping App - $25 - $129/Month
Ordoro is like a virtual workstation from which you can easily automate your Shopify store inventory management tasks. But you can also do much more with it. For example, lots of Shopify merchants also sell their products simultaneously on other platforms (like Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Magento and Bigcommerce, etc). Now, with this app you can efficiently manage your orders and inventory on all of those other sales channels from one central dashboard. You will no longer need to keep logging in and out of multiple accounts all the time. In addition, the app also offers robust shipping and dropshipping management features.
*Note that you probably won’t need a separate shipping (or sales channel) app when you use Ordoro for inventory management. The app seems to have all these other needs covered, right off the bat.
2. Postmen - An App For Scalable Shipping Service - $0 - $400+/Month
Postmen app integrates with international couriers in over 40 countries worldwide. Its intuitive interface enables you to print shipping labels and calculate shipping rates easily. But the high point is that the app promises to get you the best USPS discounted rates, regardless the size of your business. This may be a huge leg-up especially for the small-sized merchants in the US.
Note: You may need to also install AfterShip - An Enterprise Shipment Tracking App - in order to provide efficient tracking service and delivery updates to your customers.
3. BEST Converter - An Auto Currency Conversion App - $0 - $10/Month
Best Currency Converter auto-detects the location of your store’s visitors and automatically converts your prices to their various local currencies. This helps to enhance user experience and build familiarity with your customers.
4. Sufio - Automatic Invoice Generation App - $9 - $49/Month
Sufio is hailed as the first automated invoicing tool for Shopify. The app enables you to automatically generate and send invoices that are compliant to a plethora of diverse legislations in virtually all countries. Whilst it requires a bit of technical efforts to fully implement some of its core functions, the app would help you capture some required business information from your customers. This is critically essential especially if you’re selling to folks in EU, Canada, etc.
- Compass - An ecommerce Metrics Reporting App - $0 - $49/Month
Compass enables you to track over 30 essential metrics on your store. The app also gives you access to important benchmarks so you can see clearly what’s working and what’s not. It also enables you to fully analyze the effectiveness of your traffic sources. Plus, the app also offers regular actionable recommendations which you can use to hack your store into the growth path.
Top Shopify Apps for Customer Engagement and Rev Gen
This section will highlight top apps for marketing, sales, social media, customer service and sales channels.
1. JustUno - A Pop Up & Conversion Marketing App - $0 - $699/Month
Justuno is an enterprise level marketing tool. The app equips your store with fancy pop-ups for lead capture, sales conversion and website messaging. It also offers powerful options for advanced targeting and campaign optimization. Plus you will get several design templates and a lot of options for customization, segmentation and A/B testing.
2. Recart - A Sales Recovery and Conversion App - $29 - $299/Month
Recart helps you to drive more sales with abandoned cart email, messenger and push notifications. It also comes with lead capture and add to cart pop-ups. Plus, you will gain access to its inbuilt abandonment analytics. This analytics tool throws up some hidden data and shows you how much your store is losing to cart abandonment, which the app is designed to mitigate.
3. Outfy - A Social Media Promotion App - $15 - $30/Month
Outfy enables you to share your products on multiple social media platforms on a fly. Basically the app is a social media marketing management and analytics dashboard. It allows you to import your products from Shopify and schedule them for posting on various social media platforms. You can even schedule the posts for weeks in advance.
4. Gorgias - A Dynamic Customer Helpdesk App - $60 - $400/Month
Ever had to repeat yourself severally while trying to sort things out with your supplier? Well, millions of online shoppers experience the same problem daily - and it is super frustrating. That’s what Gorgias seeks to fix. The app enables you to see and manage all your customers’ concern on one location, regardless the channel of communication they use. This ensures that you will always see the history of you customers’ complaints. Thus you can easily and promptly respond to them contextually, be it on email, facebook or chat. The app also enables you to integrate your customer support system with other services (like shipping, fulfillment and sales apps, etc.) for a more robust and cohesive customer support experience. You can even issue a refund or a reward to your customers directly without leaving the app.
5. Shopify Amazon - An Amazon Sales Channel App - $0 - Custom
Shopify Amazon sync was a hugely promising sales route which many merchants dreamt to travel through. It made a lot of business sense. So the developers at Shopify went to work to make the dream a reality. Now you can quickly integrate your Shopify store with Amazon marketplace. But there’s a huge caveat. For example, the tool is still a work in progress. It can only function on Amzon.com (USA) seller account. And you can only use it for a few product categories. See Shopify Amazon help for more information.
[BONUS] - Top Shopify App for Product Sourcing
Product sourcing is a very tedious and complicated part of ecommerce. Thus, we can’t conclude this piece without mentioning the following incredible piece of app which can help you speed up your product sourcing routine.
Oberlo - A Dropshipping & Product Sourcing App - $0 - $80/Month
Oberlo is the cheapest and fastest way to launch your first ecommerce business, full stop. The app enables you to source and import products from Aliexpress into your Shopify store in a few minutes flat. And it takes only a few clicks to have the product shipped directly to your customers. No need for inventory keeping, huge capital investment or logistics headaches. It cannot get any easier than that.
Conclusion
Did you notice that the features in some of the listed Shopify apps may be redundant when combined with the others? For example, with the Ordoro app you can manage inventory and shipping. And you’d also be able to sync orders across multiple sales channels. This will basically create a sort of redundancy if you were to combine Ordoro with, say, the Postmen shipping app or Shopify Amazon sales channel app. Of course, the Shopify Amazon sales channel app can do more than just sync orders. But I’m sure you got the idea. For this reason, I’d suggest you put on your thinking cap when next you visit the Shopify app store.
