The right apps for your growing ecommerce store can turn your brand from good to great. Here are some top recommendations for small brands.
Starting a new ecommerce business can be a whirlwind of responsibilities and decisions — like choosing which ecommerce apps you’ll use to run your business. When your time and budget are limited, how do you determine which apps and plug-ins will:
Some ecommerce apps are a must-have right out of the gate, while others can wait until you get more budget and staff.
To help determine which apps are necessary for your new business, we share the most important criteria early-stage brands should look for in an app before covering nine ecommerce apps that every online business needs to download.
Now that we’ve covered the specific criteria that new ecommerce stores should look for in their apps, let’s take a look at a few of the most essential ecommerce apps to set your business up for success.
The first and most essential app for anyone starting a new ecommerce store is an ecommerce platform for building and hosting a shopping app or website. As the most popular ecommerce platform on the market today, Shopify makes it easy for new stores to offer online shopping essentials, like:
With Shopify, app development is easy-breezy: You can build a customized online store using simple drag-and-drop commands. Best of all, Shopify has an app store full of integrations with just about all popular ecommerce apps and tools, enabling you to expand on all of these features. For example, you can download a Shopify app to:
Shopify offers three pricing plans:
While Shopify is a favorite choice for many, it’s not the only ecommerce platform. Popular alternatives include WooCommerce, BigCommerce, and Magento. We recommend staying away from general website builders like WordPress and Wix, which offer limited support for ecommerce.
Huboo is an order fulfillment solution that enables effortless order tracking and much more. With Huboo, you can outsource all of your company’s order fulfillment responsibilities, shipping your products in bulk to Huboo warehouses, where they are stored, picked, packed, and delivered on behalf of your brand.
Customers demand the ability to track their orders. 90% of consumers who engage in online shopping actively track their packages, with 20% of consumers tracking their packages multiple times a day. If you want to keep your customers happy and avoid a flood of “where is my order?” tickets, you will need to provide order tracking.
Using your Huboo Dashboard, you can see sales and listings by channel, courier tracking, inventory, costs, and billing, making it easy to provide order updates to your customers.
To learn more about Huboo, check out our Huboo partner page.
Huboo charges per-item rates for every package shipped, varying based on the package size and how quickly it is delivered. For a detailed breakdown of these rates, check out Huboo’s pricing page.
Another excellent warehouse management and order fulfillment app, ShipHero offers two solutions to ecommerce stores:
With ShipHero’s fully outsourced fulfillment services, store owners can ship their products in bulk to ShipHero warehouses, where they are picked, packed, and delivered with 99%+ shipping accuracy.
ShipHero’s warehouse management system lets you automatically process orders and returns, manage your inventory, and access insightful analytics and reporting.
ShipHero offers three pricing plans for its warehouse management system:
However, pricing for their outsourced fulfillment services is only available upon request.
89% of customers are more likely to make another purchase with a company following a positive customer service interaction. While most brands want to offer great customer experience, doing so as a small team can be difficult.
Luckily, helpdesks like Gorgias make it easy to offer great customer support without all the hassle, thanks to automation and self-service features.
Thankfully, Gorgias makes it easy for brands of all sizes to offer personalized customer support via an industry-leading customer support platform. This includes features such as:
Gorgias offers five pricing plans:
Klaviyo is an SMS and email marketing platform with unparalleled personalization possitbilitieis. With Klaviyo, you can:
Email marketing remains one of the most effective of all digital marketing channels and is something that every ecommerce store should take advantage of. Plus, SMS marketing has been one of the most trending marketing channels for the past few years thanks to texting’s highly visible push notifications.
Take a look at how Klaviyo and Gorgias integrate for even more powerful experiences.
Klaviyo offers three pricing plans:
Whether it’s creating graphics for your emails, website, social media posts, or anything in between, creating and running an online store requires you to design a lot of content. Canva makes content design and creation easy regardless of your artistic experience.
With Canva, you can use attractive design templates and user-friendly drag-and-drop commands to create all manner of designs, including logos, flyers, banners, and much more.
Canva offers three pricing plans:
Customer feedback is an invaluable resource for ecommerce stores of all sizes, enabling you to take a data-based approach to optimizing your store’s customer experience.
With Typeform, you can start gathering more customer feedback by using templates to create customer feedback surveys.
Along with these customer feedback survey templates, Typeform also offers signup forms, report forms, order forms, and a ton of other professional templates.
Typeform offers three pricing plans:
Triple Whale is a complete ecommerce hub for Shopify stores that lets you track the metrics that matter most to your brand in one easy-to-use dashboard.
Triple Whale’s attribution features allow you to track how much you spend on each marketing channel and your return on these investments. If you are looking for a single solution that gives your brand access to all of the data and insights it needs to grow and improve, you’ll find a lot to like about Triple Whale.
Triple Whale offers five pricing plans:
It might surprise you to learn that 54% of online shoppers are subscribed to at least one ecommerce subscription. Leveraging the subscription model is a good way to create a reliable, recurring revenue stream for your business. However, it’s also a model that entails its own unique requirements and complexities.
The best way to create and manage a subscription service for your online store is to utilize a subscription management app, and Recharge is a great one to consider. Recharge lets you quickly set up a subscription program, packaging your products or services into monthly or annual subscription plans.
The app processes recurring subscription payments and makes it easy to manage every aspect of your subscription programs, providing detailed analytics into the performance of your program. Recharge also allows you to create a customer-facing subscription management portal where customers can easily view, change, or cancel their subscriptions.
Learn how Recharge and Gorgias integrate for powerful subscription management.
Recharge offers three pricing plans:
Zonka Feedback is a leading eCommerce survey app designed to enhance customers’ shopping experience through feedback collection. Equipped with an intuitive survey builder, it enables the creation of surveys at crucial touchpoints in the customer journey, such as exit intent, post-purchase, post-delivery, cart abandonment, etc.
You can customize and white-label your surveys to resonate with your brand’s identity. As a full-suite eCommerce feedback management platform, Zonka Feedback facilitates collecting and measuring CX metrics, including CSAT, NPS, and CES, with automated data processing.
Pricing Options
Zonka Feedback offers five pricing plans.
Most new ecommerce businesses don’t have the budget or the sales volume to justify purchasing a broad range of ecommerce apps right away. So, you’ll need to narrow down your selection to the apps with great bang for your buck.
With that in mind, here are the most important features that small business owners should look for in ecommerce apps:
Some ecommerce solutions can cost thousands of dollars a month or more, putting them out of reach for most small businesses and early-stage brands.
These high-priced apps are almost always geared toward larger organizations anyway, meaning that you aren’t likely to need all of the features they offer until your business grows.
The good news is that there’s also a wide range of affordable ecommerce apps designed to support smaller stores and brands — those are the ones we’ll focus on below.
Starting a new business requires a lot of hard work. The more manual tasks and workflows you can automate, the more time you have to focus on important activities like developing new products and growing your audience.
Creating automated email marketing campaigns rather than sending out emails manually is one example of how apps that offer automation features can save you time. Using automation to provide canned responses to common customer questions is another example of the time-saving benefits that automation can provide.
Whatever function of your ecommerce business that an app is designed to facilitate (whether it’s customer support, marketing, sales, or order fulfillment), it also needs to be able to track your store’s performance in these key areas.
This is especially important for small stores, who don’t have full time data analysts to pull insights from tools. Choosing apps that provide detailed analytics and reporting will give your business the data and insights it needs for continual optimization.
Integrating all your ecommerce apps can enable powerful new features and capabilities. For instance, integrating your customer support app with your order tracking and fulfillment app might allow you to easily provide tracking numbers and order updates when customers request them.
Along with choosing apps that offer a broad range of possible integrations with other popular ecommerce tools, it’s especially important to ensure that the apps you select are capable of integrating with whatever ecommerce platform you use.
When you don’t have the budget to purchase every app you might want, it’s important to focus on the apps that align most closely with your important KPIs. Business of all sizes, but especially small businesses, do well to focus on one area at a time. Are you looking to:
Identifying the KPIs most important to your business and choosing your ecommerce apps based on these KPIs will ensure that you purchase apps that will have the biggest
When budgets are tight, you need to ensure that the app you purchase will meet your business’s needs before you break out your wallet. For this reason, small businesses should prioritize apps that offer a free trial, a free version, or, at the very least, a free demo.
Ecommerce apps are often challenging to set up and use. And as a small business owner, you can’t afford to spend all your time troubleshooting issues with your ecommerce apps. This makes it important to choose apps with high-quality customer support or customer success services.
While it’s great to find an app with free or affordable pricing, you also need solutions that can scale alongside your company. Choosing apps with multiple pricing plans allows you to upgrade your subscription as your company grows, without having to switch to a new app.
Choosing the right customer support platform is just one of the many vital decisions you will need to make as an ecommerce store owner. While you’ve got plenty of options, only one is exclusively built for ecommerce and offers features and plans that scale from small stores to large enterprises.
{{lead-magnet-2}}
If you want to get started enjoying the many benefits of the best ecommerce customer support platform on the market, sign up for Gorgias today!
Ryan Baum, Content Lead at Gorgias
Ryan is passionate about helping customer experience professionals grow their online stores — and their careers. With a focus on content that seeks to inform, improve, and support, he writes in-depth guides that leverage insights from ecommerce founders and customer service leads.
