The 7 Best Shopify Apps to Increase Profits and Save Time

According to every one star app review ever written, some apps just aren’t worth the headache. But using the right technology can improve your marketing, and make running your store a lot easier.

So how do you know which apps are time savers instead of time wasters? The hard way is trial and error. The easy way is to look at this guide.

Below are 7 well made shopify apps that’ll save you time, increase your profits, or both.

Let’s take a look.

Smart SEO

With ad costs constantly rising, investing time in SEO keeps getting more cost effective. The problem is optimizing your store for search engines can be tedious and very technical. But you can make it easier by using the Smart SEO app.

Smart SEO automates some necessary SEO tasks. It can automatically generate: meta titles, meta descriptions, and alt tags for every product in your store.

That’s a big deal, especially for stores with hundreds of different product pages. Creating meta titles and meta descriptions for each of those pages is a daunting task. But any store that’s serious about ranking in search engines needs to do it.

Smart SEO also makes it easy to work on other important parts of SEO, like fixing broken links and managing your site map. These tasks might seem insignificant, but every little bit helps when you’re trying to rank for competitive keywords.

Automating these tasks can save a ton of time. If you’re trying to get more traffic from search engines, consider using it for your own store.

Wheelio

Email marketing is one of the best ways to increase a customer’s lifetime value, and growing your email list is crucial to successful email marketing campaigns. So how do you grow your email list?

That’s where Wheelio comes in.

Wheelio is an app that lets you collect customer emails with “gamified” pop ups on your store. Instead of just a regular email signup form and some text, Wheelio’s pop ups have interactive games. There are a few different games to choose from, but the most popular is their spinning wheel game.

Customers can exchange their email to spin the wheel. This gives them a chance to win a special discount. You can customize these discounts in the app, and even set the percentage chance that someone will win one.

Many customers love the unique gamified experience, and the chance to win something of real value. By offering a discount, or some other incentive like free shipping, you can entice your customers to share their email for a chance to win big!

If you’re not having much success with a standard email sign up form, try Wheelio. It might be just what you need to improve your opt in rate.

Loox Reviews

It goes without saying that reviews are a must for every product page. But how you display and collect your reviews is also important.

Savvy online shoppers are always on the lookout for fake reviews, which is why it’s so important that your reviews look legitimate.

Loox makes it easy to display your reviews professionally. The app goes for a clean minimal style. It prominently displays the customers photo, if it’s available, and then just a grey box for the text. This minimal style ensures that the reviews will match the branding of almost any store.

Displaying your reviews in a loud busy app, that clashes with the style of your store, will make you look unprofessional. This decreases your customers’ trust, and may even cause them to question if your reviews are legitimate.

If you don’t have reviews to display yet, loox helps with this too. It comes with a feature that makes it easy to collect reviews. You can set the app to automatically email customers and ask for a review. It also lets you offer special discounts if customers respond, just in case they need an incentive to send you their review.

Having your review collection on autopilot is a huge advantage. It’s also important to display your reviews in a trustworthy way. Loox helps with both of these important tasks. Try Loox on your store to see if it’s right for you.

Reconvert Upsell and Cross Sell

The people who buy one product from your store, might be willing to buy more if they’re given the opportunity. The Reconvert app lets you present additional opportunities for your customers to buy more products after their purchase.

A lot of other upsell apps introduce an upsell or a cross sell right after someone adds a product to their cart, or initiates a checkout. Reconvert lets you use a post purchase upsell. This ensures that you’re not interrupting someone from completing their purchase.

You can use Reconvert to test what upsells or cross sells result in the highest increases in average order value. The app makes it easy to offer a product on your thank you page, and easily switch the product anytime you want.

Reconvert also comes with it’s own dashboards that track revenue made through the app. This makes it easy to see what upsell and cross sell offers are the most effective.

If you’re looking for a way to quickly improve your store’s average order value then try using Reconvert.

SMS Bump

If you’ve ever ran an abandoned cart email sequence, you know it can make a big difference in sales. So what do you do if potential customers don’t give you their email address?

With SMS bump you also have the option to collect their phone number. Then you can send an abandoned checkout sequence through text messages, right to their phone!

The potential customer does have to opt in and you will get charged a small amount for each text message sent, but the ROI on this app more than makes up for it.

According to SMS’s website, text marketing boasts an incredible average open rate of 99+%, click-through rates of 35+%, and a 25x+ ROI. Those numbers are unbelievable. Even if you only get half those results, it would still be a great investment.

Ready for the best part? You’re not limited to abandon email sequences either. You can send all kinds of campaigns straight to someone’s phone.

SMS marketing is a channel similar to email but with some key differences. The potential returns are so great, it’s worth trying on your own store.

Aftership

Customers today expect the delivery process of their orders to be extremely convenient. You need to make your customers’ experience of receiving their order as seamless as possible. Tracking shipments is a big part of that experience.

Aftership allows your customers to track their orders right on your website. You can also use it to automatically send email alerts to your customers when there’s an update on their order’s shipment status.

The app integrates with a lot of different 3PL solutions to make tracking orders and sending updates to your customers easier. When your customer’s order is shipped they’ll receive email alerts updating them on its status. They can even receive updates throughout the shipment process.

This will help keep your customers happy, which will make them more likely to buy from you in the future. It should also help cut down on customers emailing you for updates on their order’s status, which will save a lot of time for your customer service staff.

Optimizing your customers’ experience after the sale is just as important as getting the sale. Look into Aftership to see if it can help improve your customer’s experience.

Vitals

Vitals is self described as 40+ apps in one, and that’s a fact. It even includes some of the apps listed above. Vitals takes a lot of small useful apps and bundles them together into one sleek easy to use interface.

Some of the features Vitals provides are volume discounts, sticky add to cart buttons, currency convertors, customer reviews, and much more.

When you use Vitals you no longer need 10 different apps to have all the useful features you need in your store. This helps save you a lot of money. Most apps charge anywhere from $5-10 dollars a month, and only do a fraction of what Vitals does.

On top of that having 10 different apps on your store can seriously slow down your website’s load time. You may not use all the features in Vitals, but it’s easy to shut off certain features of the app, and have them not affect your website.

Check out all the features Vitals has. There’s a good chance it can help you replace some of the apps already on your store.

Conclusion

Apps are essential for optimizing your store and streamlining your operations. But knowing which apps work well, and which ones to avoid, can save you a lot of time and money.

This list of seven apps is a great place to start when exploring options for your store. Think about your specific needs to find what apps will be the most useful for you. Try them on your own store and see what they can do for you.