Best Free Shopify Apps To Power-Up Your E-Commerce Store

So, you’ve built your e-commerce store on Shopify and even started getting orders. But, a couple of weeks in, you notice something. Your store is very bare-bones, while all of your competitors have attractive features like pop-up quizzes, live chat support, and a carousel of testimonials — all to make their customers’ experience better.

And you want to get in on this wagon, too. But, how? The answer lies in using Shopify apps! These apps integrate with your store, helping you enhance customer experience, improve trust, and make more sales. 

Here’s a curated list of 9 of the best free Shopify apps for sellers on a budget. 

1. GemPages: Landing page builder

This Shopify page builder helps you build landing pages that are designed to close more sales. You can customize pretty much everything; all you need to do is drag and drop. Choose from one of the 400+ pre-made templates to get started or use AI to turn images and URLs into layouts. 

You can add several ready-to-use elements to make the sales process smoother. These include countdowns during sales, upsell offers, estimated delivery dates, and coupon codes. It also auto-resizes images and makes your store load faster. 

GemPages is also super mobile-friendly and works well with Shopify themes. It’s the perfect no-code Shopify page builder for those who want to DIY their page but don’t have the technical skills for it. 

2. TinyIMG: SEO speed image optimizer

E-Commerce SEO is more than just keywords and quality content; it also involves technical things like site speed, meta data, alt text for images, and so on. Some of these require coding knowledge, and all of them take up a lot of time. This is where TinyIMG comes in. 

This free Shopify app automatically reduces your image size to fit the Shopify image size requirements without any loss, creates schemas to help your e-commerce store gain more visibility, automatically generates alt text for images, and gives you personalized tips to improve your meta titles and descriptions. TinyIMG also gives you regular site audits that identify errors such as broken links. 

3. Tipo: Appointment booking

Tipo is a free appointment scheduling software for small businesses that offer coaching, consultations, tutoring, or virtual styling sessions. Your customers can also book in-person appointments and add the meeting location. It integrates directly with Shopify, letting interested customers book slots with you directly through your e-commerce store. 

You can customize the booking form to gather all the details needed about your customers, sync Tipo to your Google Calendar, block off certain dates and times, and track all your bookings. There’s also the option of sending automated emails for confirmations, reminders, and rescheduling. 

4. Track123: Shipping tracker

Whether you ship locally through USPS, or deliver internationally, Track123 integrates with all of the major shipping carriers (1500+, in fact), letting your customers track their orders in real time on your online store. It also automatically sends emails to your buyers and even displays an estimated delivery data on your store. 

When a buyer opens the tracking page, they get personalized product recommendations from your store, helping you boost sales. Are you a dropshipper who wants to hide the original location of the products? There’s a separate mode for that, too! 

With the help of Track123’s analytics, you can view data points such as transit times and so on. This can help you know if you need to change to a faster or cheaper shipping carrier. 

5.  Klaviyo: Email and SMS marketing

Email marketing isn’t really something that you can skip — especially if you’re selling on Shopify which doesn’t come with a ready-made customer base like, say, eBay or Etsy. By helping you automate the whole email marketing process, Klaviyo allows you to deliver a unique, personalized experience to all of your shoppers. 

Klaviyo does most of the heavy-lifting for you so that you won’t be starting from scratch: it collects customer data, gives you pre-built templates, and lets you segment customers based on any of the data points. You can create triggers for a variety of email campaigns, such as welcome emails, abandoned cart emails, discount emails, recommendation emails, and so on. 

The best part? You can A/B test your emails and get real-time data and metrics on all of your campaigns, so that you know which ones got you the most revenue and which ones aren’t performing so well and need some TLC. 

6. Geolocation by Orbe: Localization

If you sell internationally, one of the best things you can do for your e-commerce store is to make it available in regional languages and currencies — especially for buyers from countries where English isn’t the first language. This is a small step, but goes a long way in making your global customers feel welcome. 

It also helps you increase your international sales, because nobody is going to spend time converting product prices from USD to their local currency, or using Google Translate to read product descriptions. 

The Geolocation app makes this job easier for you by connecting all your multiple regional domains together, allowing your buyers to select their country and preferred language, and redirecting them to the correct regional pages. It even stores user preferences and automatically performs the geolocation redirects for them in the future. Very handy app to make the lives of your international buyers easier. 

7. Tidio: Live chat and AI chatbot

Customers will have queries and will need help resolving issues. That’s a given. But, the problem is that you can’t be online all the time providing live customer support. What you need, then, is a live chatbot that can take care of simple queries for you. Enter: Tidio, powered by an AI chatbot called Lyra AI. 

This free Shopify app lets you pre-answer and store certain low-level support questions. The chatbot, then, takes care of answering and resolving 90% of them, such as “do you have X item in your store?” or “can you help me track my most recent order?” It essentially does the job of a customer service representative. 

You can oversee all the tickets from a single dashboard and step in whenever needed. The app also syncs your inbox with the most urgent queries highlighted on top. And it’s available in 12 languages, which is great news for international sellers!

8. Junip: Product review app

The #1 thing that’s going to increase the trust of potential customers and help them get off the fence? It’s not your product quality, or your images, or descriptions (although these are pretty important, too). It’s social proof!

Yep, past customer reviews are worth more than gold when it comes to online selling. When shopping digitally, people can’t hold your product and assess its quality. So, how will they know whether it’s worth the investment? By reading customer reviews, so you shouldn’t skip out on collecting and displaying them. 

Junip is a free Shopify app that lets you collect photo and video reviews easily from customers during important points in their purchasing journey. It even helps you create thoughtful questions that are more likely to get a response than just asking users to leave a review. For instance, specific questions like “what was your favorite product feature?” is more likely to get you a good review than an open-ended “leave us a review.”

With Junip, you can also customize the way you want your reviews to be displayed. And, hey, you can also reply to reviews easily and share those testimonials on social media, increasing your reach.

9. Essential: Upsell and cross sell app

When shopping online, you must have noticed those tiny product recommendations inside your cart. The ones that suggest other products you might like. This is known as upselling, and is actually a great marketing tactic. 

Why? Because, it gives personalized product suggestions to customers that they may have otherwise missed. And it increases your sales. Is someone purchasing a tote bag from you? You can recommend a cute little pin to go along with it!

Essential is a free upselling and cross selling Shopify app that lets you add tailored recommendation widgets with an easy “add” button. You can create custom upsell strategies, display “frequently bought together” items, and display “buy x get y” discounts. 

The best part is that you can customize the widgets, including how they look, what they say, and where they are placed. You can also automatically add discounts to the products that you’re upselling to entice buyers from grabbing them! Overall, it’s a straightforward, no-frills Shopify app. 

Here’s something for you to keep in mind before we go: while all of these Shopify apps offer a free plan, some features might not be available. So, start using the app, and simply upgrade to the paid version if you need any of the more advanced features. 

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