by Joe Callon
When starting a new business or moving your existing business over to Shopify, it can be a daunting task to choose which apps are right for your store. It's just as easy to install too many apps, and find yourself overwhelmed with customisations which can slow down your store and result in unhappy customers.
To make life easier, we’ve compiled a list of essential Shopify apps that will add must-have features to your new store.
Product Reviews
Reviews are essential to encouraging conversions, as well as helping with SEO (especially helpful if you're a new business!). Product Reviews is an app built by Shopify themselves, meaning its backed by their great support and it is also incredibly easy to implement and customise. Reviews can also be imported from a CSV file, which is very handy if you're transferring them from another eCommerce platform.
Consistent Cart
Sales aren't always instant. Customers often spend time mulling over their purchase, especially if you're selling high value items that might take more deliberation and your typical customer isn’t prone to impulse buys.
It can be confusing for a customer to think they have saved a product in their basket, only to find that it’s deleted itself when they do come back to take the plunge, which is where Consistent Cart comes in.
The app saves your logged-in customer’s cart for later, even if they login from a different device.
Plug in SEO
Search engines are likely to direct the most significant volume of traffic to your website - so will most likely be responsible for many of your sales moving forwards.
Getting your new store to rank well in search is difficult, especially if there are some settings in the back end of your website that could be better optimised - really simple errors can affect your site's ranking from the word go.
Plug in SEO helps you identify these problems, giving you simple directions on the next steps that need to be taken to fix them. The app will also periodically check for any optimisation issues that could arise during the lifespan of your site.
Order Printer
One feature Shopify doesn't offer as part of their standard system is the ability to print out invoices and packing slips.
Thankfully, they freely offer the Order Printer app which as well as, funnily enough, order printing, also presents you with easily customisable templates and the option to print in bulk, saving you huge amounts of time during the shipping process.
Infinite Options
When creating your products within Shopify, you may have noticed that you're limited to only 3 options per product, as well as being limited to a maximum of 100 variants per product.
Whilst this might sound like a lot, if you're selling t-shirts with 15 different colour options in 7 different sizes, you're already hitting your limit. But don't worry, the Infinite Options app is here to save the day!
With this app, you can easily add as many variants as required, for free. The app also has a whole host of great additional features, including required and optional fields, control over placeholder and default values and even multiple option selections.
We hope you find some (if not all) of these app suggestions useful! If you’re not yet set up on Shopify and have no idea what we're talking about (or even if you are set up but would find it helpful to know more about these apps), please don’t hesitate to get in touch!
