20 Shopify Apps Your Store Should Consider this Year

Whether it’s a Cart Recovery system, Messenger Bot, or a Review Platform, the right Shopify App can drive the conversation, streamline your workload, and boost revenue for your store in little more than a few clicks a week. From improving conversion rates to bolstering consumer trust, you’d be hard-pressed not to find something a simple app can improve in your store.

But all that convenience comes at a cost. With over 1,200 apps to choose from – many of which you’d need to pay for, right of the gate – and no reliable way to test them, enterprising Shopify store owners can quickly find themselves overwhelmed and underwater.

👋 This is exactly what we’re here for! With decades of combined experience across hundreds of Shopify stores of every possible size and type, we’ve narrowed down the list of our must-have apps to just 20.

We’ve divvied these apps up into the must-have categories your store should cover, and further broken them down by cost and sophistication – so feel free to choose your own adventure with them at that point.

With this list in hand, you can’t go wrong wading into the Shopify App waters.

The Table Stakes:

If you’re a digital seller, these are non-negotiable.

Facebook Catalog Hookup (Not to be confused with the Facebook Sales Channel)

If you want to advertise your products on Facebook (and you do), your best option is hands-down going to be Flexify.

✅ Flexify (Free plan available. Additional charges may apply): Sure, Shopify has the ability to add Facebook as a sales channel, which allows you to connect your product catalog to an ad account. But that will limit you (and any agency you might want to employ hint hint) in your product set creation and image-cropping options. Flexify’s free plan simplifies this whole process and does it very, very well.

Google Feed Hookup (Not to be confused with the Google Sales Channel)

Same deal – if you’re into advertising on Google Shopping (and… you probably are), the Google Shopping Feed is your buddy.

✅ Google Shopping Feed (Free plan available. 14-day free trial. Additional charges may apply): Shopify has made an an app to try to hook stores’ feeds into Google … but by all accounts (um, including ours), it’s awful. Do yourself a favor, skip the Shopify version and head straight to Google’s purpose-built feed app.

Bonus: The Audience-Builder

Kick up your audience-building a notch with an app developed by yours truly. 

✅ SyncTap (sign up for free) comes from the minds at EmberTribe and was built specifically with busy entrepreneurs in mind. Use this high-powered app to build profitable targeted audiences without all the busywork.

The Revenue Boosters

Repeat after us: Abandoned cart recovery = Revenue recovery

All stores need some sort of email marketing solution, which is how you’re going to at least start recovering these carts. Here are some of our favorite, low-risk options:

✅ Recart ($29/month. 28-day free trial. Additional charges may apply.) Also includes Facebook Messenger Recovery, where we’ve seen messages getting upwards of 70% open rates.

✅ MailChimp (Free) If you’ve already got MailChimp as your email provider, nab this app for recovery.

✅ Klaviyo (Free to install. Additional charges may apply.) Robust email platform, works beautifully with equally sophisticated stores, tons of automation options.

Got another email provider in place? See if they have a Shopify app and give it a go. The above are our favorites, but that doesn’t mean an email platform you love won’t perform adequately in its Shopify implementation. We’re just a little more skeptical (and how much do you really love that email provider anyway? 😉).

Bonus: Exit Intent Pop Up

Capturing customers intent on leaving with some sort of promotion or discount can bump up store conversion rates, with less than 10 minutes of work.

✅ Exit Offers ($9.99/month. 14-day free trial.)

✅ Wheelio (From $14.92/month. 7-day free trial.)

The Conversation Drivers

When you’re good, you’re good. And you want everyone to know it.

Reviews: We recommend most eCommerce stores have some sort of reviewing mechanism. They help build trust, build social reactions, and build your bottom line.

✅ Product Reviews (Free): Great for a simple review mechanism where you can manually upload reviews from other platforms, like Amazon.

✅ Yotpo Reviews (Free to install. External Charges may apply.): Perfect for a more complex reviewing mechanism –  it verifies reviews to give customers a sense of trust, outputs them to your marketing on a kind of modified Facebook Dynamic Product Ad system, and more.

Live Chat/Messenger: There are a ton of live chat apps out there and many of them work just fine. Below, however, are a few that we particularly like. Use them to answer questions, bot together some FAQ responses, direct consumers to the appropriate sections of your site or ( 😱) talk directly to your customers … live.

✅ Chatra Live Chat + Facebook (Free plan available)

✅ Tidio Live Chat (Free plan available. Additional charges may apply.)

✅ Zendesk (Free to install. Additional charges may apply.)

The Bonus Apps

Every store is unique, with unique challenges. If your special set of circumstances seems to warrant a little something extra, one of these just may hit the spot.

Please note: MORE APPS does not equal BETTER STORE. In fact, more apps can slow your site down, confuse the systems in place, mess with your site formatting and even drive away confused customers (especially on mobile …yikes!). Consider your needs before implementing and monitor your results after 👍

✅ Shogun (From $19/month. 10-day free trial.)
Custom landing page builder. Easy as pie, can fit your store theme almost out of the box.

✅ Free Shipping Bar by Hextom (Free plan available)
Top-of-site announcement bar for free shipping or some other sort of promotion (many themes have this as a built-in feature, just by the way. Check yours for it, first!).

✅ Back in Stock (From $19/month. 30-day free trial.)
Run out of inventory quickly and often? Capture that audience before they leave the site. A pre-order app can also work well here, but this one is simpler than most.

✅ Product Discount by Bold Apps ($19.99/month. 14-day free trial.)
Storewide sales, flash-sales, & scheduled sales with a click. Boom.

✅ Recurring Orders & Subscriptions by Bold Apps ($39.99/month. 60-day free trial.) For shops with a recurring business model.

✅ Product Upsell by Bold Apps (From $9.99/month. 14-day free trial.)
Awesome way to increase your average order value.

✅ Persistent Cart (Free)
Keep your users logged into their cart across devices.

Psst: If you choose to upgrade to the paid version of any of these apps, you’ll need to be logged into your Shopify store as an owner to do so.