Running an eCommerce store can be a little overwhelming.
Between managing products, finding customers, fulfilling orders, and, oh yeah, keeping your customers happy, it can be hard to keep track of everything you should be doing to make your store a success.
With the right set of tools, though, you can create systems that simplify your business and put your store on the path to success and longevity.
But now that’s a whole new can of worms. Because it seems like there are a million different eCommerce tools out there and…well, you already have too much on your plate with those things we mentioned before!
So to help save you time and cut through the fluff, we’ve collected eight of the best eCommerce tools and Shopify apps to power your online store to success.
They’ll help you connect with your customers, improve your store’s conversion rates and revenue per order, and just generally make your life easier.
1. Build Trust With Your Customers
If you’ve ever bought something online, you probably instinctively know how important reviews are to your eCommerce store.
We know that because, judging by the numbers, there’s probably a pretty good chance that you use online reviews to impact your own buying decisions. In fact, in a survey of 1,000 consumers by Go Fish Digital at Moz, 67.7% of respondents said that online reviews had an impact on their buying decisions.
So if you want to have a positive impact on encouraging people to purchase from your store, it pays to make an effort to collect honest reviews from your customers.
But how can you maximize the chances that your customers leave a review?
You need to be proactive. And the best way to be proactive is with the right tool.
There are two good options:
Loox (starts at $9.99/mo) – Loox is a Shopify app that helps you collect reviews by sending automatic emails to your customers and offering discounts if a shopper includes a real photo with the review (Loox claims that real photos increase the effectiveness of customer reviews, which is why it tries to incentivize them).
Trustpilot (free to start) – Trustpilot is a consumer-facing review site that offers dedicated business tools to help you encourage reviews from your customers.
- Price: Trustpilot lets you get started for free. Loox starts at $9.99 per month.
- Where To Get It: Trustpilot | Loox
2. Stop Cart Abandonment In Its Tracks
Imagine doing all the hard work of getting a customer to your store, convincing them to add a product to their cart, and then…
They never finish the purchase.
While it might seem like a rare situation, cart abandonment is actually surprisingly common. In fact, according to the aggregate data, the average cart abandonment rate is actually a whopping 69.23%.
Hold on a minute:
That means more than two out of every three people who add one of your products to their cart won’t end up purchasing it.
And it also means that if you can decrease your cart abandonment rate by even a few percentage points, that can make a big impact on your store’s bottom line.
Abandonment Protector is a tool that can help you do just that.
It’s a Shopify app that helps you recover more carts by giving you:
- Pre-designed email templates.
- Pre-built “follow-up” flows to help you send recovery emails at the right times.
- Email automation to automatically send emails to customers that meet the right criteria.
- Analytics so that you can see what your abandonment rate is, as well as how successful your recovery efforts are.
- Price: Starts at $8 per month
- Where To Get It: Abandonment Protector
3. Connect With Your Customers Better
If you want your store to be successful, you need to connect with your customers and be available to help them with issues.
The latter involves offering rock-solid support, while the former requires being proactive and gathering feedback from your shoppers.
To help you do that, GetSiteControl is a multi-purpose tool that makes connecting with your customers a two-way street.
On the support front, GetSiteControl sets you up with:
- Live Chat – according to data from Econsultancy, live chat has the highest level of customer satisfaction of any support channel.
- Contact Us – in addition, to live chat, GetSiteControl helps you create a “Contact Us” form for people who don’t want to use live chat.
But GetSiteControl can also help you reach out to shoppers and gather feedback in the form of quick, unobtrusive surveys. And you can even promote your sales and special offers with a separate promotion widget.
All of this can be done via the same interface, which makes it a more convenient approach than trying to manage a bunch of separate tools.
- Price: Has a free plan. Paid plans start at $19 per month
- Where To Get It: GetSiteControl
4. Earn From Every Order
You already know about the dangers of cart abandonment. But your shopping cart doesn’t have to just be a source of turmoil – you can also put your cart area to work and use it to upsell shoppers on additional relevant products.
That’s what In Cart Upsell does…
It lets you display targeted upsell offers based on the other products in a shopper’s cart.
But here’s the important part:
Because you definitely don’t want to do anything to increase your cart abandonment rate, In Cart Upsell does this in an unobtrusive way that won’t get in the way of your shopper’s checkout process.
No conversion-killing in-cart popups, just a gentle upsell like the screenshot below:
Other features include:
- Built-in A/B testing to see which offers perform the best
- Multiple upsell offer types and targeting options
- 8 customizable color schemes
- Price: Very limited free plan. Paid plans start at $14 per month
- Where To Get It: In Cart Upsell
5. Put Order Fulfillment On Autopilot
This is the first tool that won’t necessarily work for 100% of eCommerce stores.
But if drop shipping fits with your business model, Dropified is a Shopify app that makes drop shipping surprisingly easy.
With it, you can put your store on autopilot while other people handle the fulfillment.
Basically, Dropified works like this:
- You use Dropified’s product research tool to find quality vendors with products you want to sell.
- The Dropified Chrome Extension helps you import products to your Shopify store with a single click.
- Dropified helps you handle order fulfillment via three different modes.
If drop shipping works for your store, check out Dropified and see how it can help you save a ton of time.
- Price: Starts at $47 per month
- Where To Get It: Dropified
6. Reach Your Shoppers At All Times With Facebook Retargeting
If you’re not already familiar, retargeting is a powerful type of marketing where you’re able to display offers to shoppers even after they’ve left your site.
There are a few different types of retargeting. But one of the most popular is to show Facebook ads to people who’ve previously visited your site.
That’s what Trackify helps you with.
It not only helps you add the Facebook Pixel tracking code to your Shopify store to start gathering retargeting data, but it also helps you set up detailed tracking to see Shopify traffic, conversion, and sales data right in your Facebook Ads Reports.
Basically, the app doesn’t just help you start creating retargeting ads, it also helps you see how effective those ads are.
- Price: Starts at $19.95 per month
- Where To Get It: Trackify
7. Bring Shoppers Back With Email Marketing
According to data from Omnisend, eCommerce emails bring in an average return of $0.71 per email in the US.
While that might not seem like a lot if you’re just sending one email, when you get out your calculator and do the math for your entire email list, you’ll see that eCommerce email marketing can have a big effect on your store’s bottom line!
There are a ton of great email marketing providers out there. But two that are especially suited for eCommerce stores are:
Both tools allow you to set up email automation, which is an important feature for eCommerce stores because automated emails perform significantly better than emails that you send manually.
Additionally, both tools feature dedicated integrations for Shopify and other eCommerce platforms, which makes it easy to integrate them into your store.
For more information on each tool, you can read our Drip review and ActiveCampaign review.
- Price: Drip starts at$49 per month. ActiveCampaign starts at $17 per month.
- Where To Get It: Drip | ActiveCampaign
8. Keep Your Financials Organized
Finally, there’s the part of running an eCommerce store that isn’t a lot of fun:
Accounting.
But as tedious as accounting can be, it’s vitally important to the success of your store.
If you don’t know everything about where money is coming in and going out, you’ll not only be in trouble come tax season, you’ll also struggle to assess how well your store is doing.
To make your accounting a little more streamlined and less labor intensive, you can use a dedicated accounting tool like Quickbooks.
Not only is Quickbooks a beginner-friendly, detailed accounting tool, but you can also find apps like Intuit QuickBooks® Online which can help you automatically export orders from Shopify into Quickbooks for seamless reporting.
While you still have to manually check the books sometimes, Quickbooks and its associated eCommerce integrations can make eCommerce accounting a lot less painful.
- Price: Starts at $15 per month
- Where To Get It: Quickbooks
Final Thoughts
Running an eCommerce store is always going to take some effort. But with the right tools in place, you’ll put yourself in a position to maximize your chances for success while minimizing the work it takes to get there.
And that’s a win-win!
Have you found any other great eCommerce stores that helped your store out? Leave a comment below and let us know about them.