If you're a first time Shopify store owner, you probably view these apps and plugins as a cost-head, instead of a profit center. I've covered in detail in another post, why you need to embrace Shopify plugins and make them your best friends.
The post basically tells you WHY the opportunity cost of not investing in the right Shopify tools is much greater than the cost of using them. I'd recommend you read that if you're skeptic; just note that i have no incentive for recommending one tool over the other.
For this guide, I've divided my favourite Shopify plugins into 3 major categories.
Each of these categories is further divided into the following sub categories
I will be updating this blog every 1-2 months and I'd recommend that you save this blog so that you can come check out the latest apps and tools which would be relevant for your stage of the business.
Typically between 0-10L in monthly revenue.
Your goal at this stage is to validate your product market fit and identify the best channels which will help you achieve this.
P.S. Paid marketing is the most commonly used channel, especially Meta for brands at this stage but it's not a rule. Several brands are able to leverage social media and content to reach to their first 10L in MRR.
a) A popup tool to collect email IDs of customers visiting your site. You may not be doing aggressive email marketing just yet, but it's important to build your list for when you DO start.
My favourite tool for this is Alia. It's ideal for high AOV brands that want to differentiate themselves through content or for massy brands which want to reel in initial customers through aggressive discounting. When I switched from my Klaviyo popup to Alia, my AOV increased from Rs.3200 to 5100 for first time buyers; and my popup fill rate increased from 4% to 11%, in addition to several other uplifted key metrics.
b) A payment gateway that has RTO detection and fraud detection built in.
The recommended tool of our choice is Gokwik inspite of its high transaction fees.
Reason: They have the fastest innovation among all payment gateways and they always a few months ahead when it comes to solving for key D2C problems. Gokiwik also has their own whatsapp automation software and both work very well together because you get access to phone numbers of customers from gokwik's database even
You should not be needing to use any tools at this stage. Let's try to figure out what your conversion numbers look like before making any major, conscious changes, or using any advanced tools. This will be a great indicator of initial demand for your product.
Monk is our preferred upsell-cross-sell tool. All you need is a simple tool that recommends another product to be added on the side-cart tray. Anything more would be an overkill.
This is an area where you cannot afford to go wrong. not doing retention is the biggest mistake you can make in 2024 and the tool you pick could be the difference between a few million $$ in revenue over the next few years. The opportunity cost of picking the wrong retention tool is too high, with the increasing difficulty and rising costs on Meta. Our pick is Klaviyo for email, and Business on Bot & Quickreply by Gokwik for whatsapp.
a) A session recording and heatmap tracking tool like Hotjar.
It may feel like an overkill this early on but this is EXACTLY when you need it the most. Reason being, your earlier customers are the biggest indicator of what you should be building, and understanding their behaviour patterns better will help you build better for your future customers.
b) Just setup google analytics end to end and you should be golden. Don't hesitate to pay a freelancer/agency Rs.10-20k to set this up for you one-time. It'll be well worth the investment.
Note: this is in ADDITION to what you're already doing in phase 1. I'd highly recommend you to make sure all the basic hygiene apps are installed before you read ahead.
There will be no change/addition to our recommended Hygiene & Retention tools as you move ahead.
Before we get into this further, what exactly does "conversion optimisation" imply? In a nutshell, increasing the % of people that end up making a desired action on your website is called your website conversion rate. For ecommerce, it's essentially purchases. Typical ecommerce CVRS are 2% but it varies quite a bit depending on various factors. I am preparing a guide called "everything you need to know about conversion rates" soon.
a) For brands with decent IG following/ IG traffic
I recommend a tool called "openinapp". What this does is redirect traffic from the native IG browser to the default phone browser and while it may seem like a very silly thing to care about, it matters a lot because the native default browser does not store passwords and emails and addresses which means that if you want "autofill" to work for your customers, then the session needs to take place on the default phone browser.
b) A landing page optimisation tool
These are the holy grail of paid advertising because it allows the media buyer to change key elements on your Shopify store, without impacting the journey for all your website visitors. Imagine if I can run ads to 3 versions of the same product page simultaneously without neeidng a developer to run this experiment. You can test things like images, product names, reviews, description etc to find the winning formula for that page/product.
Recommended app - customfit.ai
c) Product personalisation tools
Personalisation is the fastest way to combat rising CPM costs on Meta, and there are a bunch of apps which will show a user the product they are most likely to buy using their prediction models. The fact is, a user will bounce of your website if they don;t find what they are looking for within 60-90 seconds of coming onto your website. This is especially useful for brands that sell more than 12-15 SKUs.
d) Shoppable video commerce apps
If you're not leveraging video to communicate your key product benefits and features ON your product listing pages, then you're missing out on some sweet conversion love. In 2024, with attention spans like mice, we should give our users video content whenever it is possible to do so.
Recommended apps: Quinn & Tolstoy
a) By now, you should already be using an upsell-crosssell tool.
There are 3 other ways in which AOV can be increased.
b) Bundling
If you sell phone covers or tshirts, why would you sell just one when you can package them together and sell more than one?
Best example of implementation is done on True Classics and The Whole Truth. I went to the whole truth to buy 1 protein bar and ended up with 5 I think, because THERE IS NO OPTION TO BUY ONE. It is infuriating, and you MAY think you'll lose out on sales, but the increase in AOV is usually offset by the customers dropping off. Also, no reason to not sell the pack of 1. Just give more options.
c) Thank you page optimisation
Imagine this -> A customer has just purchased something from you and they get to know that they can get an additional 25% off on another product they were eyeing but it's a limited time offer that will go away within 5 minutes. A 15-25% discount will usually be much lesser than your CAC if you had to go and acquire that customer all over again. So it's a total win-win.
Recommended apps: monk & Aftersell
d) Playing around with Shipping thresholds
We usually set free shipping on AOV + Rs.200.
This means that if your current AOV is Rs.1200, then free shipping should be on all orders above Rs.1400 or 1500. It's a industry approved, tried and trusted way to increase your AOV by just a little something.
a) For accurate tracking
If your cashflow permits, please get triplewhale - the industry leader for Shopify analytics when it comes to accuracy of attribution.
b) For optimal reporting of all channels in one place, including spends
I would recommend you to configure a custom dashboard on Looker studio.
The challenge with Google analytics is that it can fetch your facebook (or any other platform's) traffic and conversions but won't be able to fetch your facebook spends. This means that you can only track absolute metrics like purchases, traffic, conversion rates. But what you also need is metrics like overall Shopify CAC, overall Shopify ROAS, product level CAC and product level ROAS.
I will be writing a separate article for that soon - stay tuned. And do follow our newsletter (check the website footer) to stay on top of all new D2C trends in growth & marketing.
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