July 2015 Edition: Top 7 Free Shopify Apps June 30, 2015 19:00
Shopify gives you an easy to use platform to set up your eCommerce store. You get many features out-of-the-box that you can set up (without needing to know any code!) using Shopify’s user-friendly backend. Shopify includes features like customizing the design of your website storefront, categorizing products you want to sell on your online store, connecting to payment gateways like Stripe and PayPal, and more.
You also get access to Shopify’s App Store that lists hundreds of apps that can enhance your store by adding features and functionality both on the front and the back end. Although many apps have a monthly price to use, you don’t have to go broke in order to get some great add-ons to your store.
We’d like to start gathering some of the best free Shopify apps for your store every few months, so we’re starting with this June edition. Here’s our list of top 7 free Shopify apps you can use to enhance your Shopify store.
1. Receiptful
The Receiptful app allows you to customize the email receipts your customers get when they purchase products from your store, and it’s currently the most popular app in the entire app store.
Receiptful lets you customize the design of your receipts to enhance your branding and embed promotions to upsell your products. All this is done while providing you analytics on the backend so you can better monitor how people interact with the Receiptful receipts.
The app turns receipts into advertising and marketing mediums through which you can better engage your customers. This can leave a positive lasting impression that can potentially get your repeat customers. We’ve got a more detailed review of Receiptful as well.
2. Product Reviews
The Product Reviews app lets you include a customer review section to your products. The review section lets your customers post about their experiences with your store and your products.
Positive reviews can greatly influence the buying behavior of potential customers, but all reviews are important to increase conversions. The app lets you customize the design of the review section and moderate the reviews before they are published on your store.
The app is maintained and supported by Shopify, and you can find official documentation for the Product Reviews app on their website.
3. MailChimp
The MailChimp app connects your Shopify store with your MailChimp account. MailChimp is an email marketing platform that allows you to manage subscription lists and contacts, create and design visually rich emails, track whether emails were opened, get analytics on links within emails, and more. (We proudly use it ourselves!)
Through the app, your customers are automatically synced with your MailChimp account that you can use to create targeted email marketing campaigns. In addition, you can automate emails that are sent to customers during various points of interaction – first purchase, newsletter sign-up, repeat purchase, etc. This can also enhance customer loyalty as you can send them customized and targeted emails that provide what they want.
4. Order Printer
The Order Printer app enables you to print customized invoices, receipts, labels and packing slips to include in the shipment of your products. The ability to customize these materials gives you an opportunity to easily apply your branding to the different materials your customers receive outside of your products. In addition, the app makes it easy to recreate receipts and documents for multiple orders using pre-designed templates that you can customize. This makes life a lot easier when you are packing to ship out multiple orders at the same time.
Learn more about the app in our post on how to enhance your branding using the Order Printer App.
5. Bulk Discounts
The Bulk Discounts app by Shopify lets you easily create multiple discount codes for your store. You can use the app to import discount codes from Groupon and Living Social, create sets of discount codes that you can use for different campaigns, track usage of discount codes and calculate conversion rates.
View the official documentation to learn more about how to use the Bulk Discounts apps.
6. Digital Downloads
The Digital Downloads app lets your customers download digital files like PDFs, images, movies, songs, eBooks and more, from your store. You have the option to charge customers for the digital products they can get or you can allow customers to download materials for free. Free digital giveaways like product introductions, tutorial videos, eBook versions of physical copies, etc. can be a great way enhance the customer experience by giving them one extra thing they had not planned on getting.
Digital products have no inventory or shipping costs and are typically cheaper to develop. Check out our post about digital products to learn about how you can use the app and why you should start offering digital materials through your Shopify store.
7. Google Shopping
The Google Shopping app connects your Shopify store to your Google Merchant Center account that lets you sync and list your Shopify products on Google Shopping and Google Product Listing Ads.
Both Google Product Listing Ads and Shopping are paid services through which you can create ad campaigns for your products that Google targets to potential customers around the web. To learn more about the app and its features, read the Shopify documentation for Google Shopping.
What’s on your list?
That sums up some of the most popular free Shopify apps we recommend that can enhance your store – both for your customers and for your business.
Are there other free apps you use? Tell us about one free app you use on a daily basis in the comments below.
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