It’s not enough to spin up a store, install a theme, and take orders. Smart business owners know how to maximize the
If you’re on Shopify Plus and have enough traffic to get statistically significant results from optimization, you’re in the right place. In this post, we’ll talk about what optimization means to store owners (it’s not precisely what you think!), outline the best tools that you can use to optimize your store, and discuss what to do next.
There’s a widespread belief that CRO is synonymous with A/B testing. Running experiments is a big part of CRO, but we take a much broader view at Draft, our Ecommerce optimization consultancy.
A/B tests don’t happen in a vacuum, and we consider their role in a more holistic process. In addition to A/B tests, we also consider one-off fixes to be the purview of optimization. We also believe that the process of understanding customers, researching what tests are likely to move the needle, and prioritizing accordingly is part of optimization. Our job is part design researcher, part project manager, and part A/B tester.
Taken in such a broad fashion, optimization is fundamentally the process of de-risking new design decisions by investigating whether they’ll move the needle, prioritizing what to work on next, and experimenting with new changes. In doing so, you eliminate the negative
If you’re wondering how this all fits together, we wrote a book, Value-Based Design, that teaches you everything you need to know about how to start moving the needle by optimizing your store and designing more intentionally.
A good optimization tool should be:
With that in mind, let’s dive deep into the current tool landscape and discuss what might work for your store. There are many options out there, and you don’t need to install all of these, of course. Just go through this list, pick what might work for you, and see what happens.
There are many apps that replace your checkout with a custom solution, allowing you powerful tools like one-click post-purchase upsells, custom messaging, and countdown timers – even if you aren’t on Shopify Plus.
The challenge with many checkout apps is that they replace your whole checkout, meaning that updates and long-term maintenance fall on the app provider, not Shopify. And now that Shopify has stopped allowing new checkout replacements into the app store, you may be on your own.
With that in mind, the increased AOV may be worth the risk. Here are the biggest players in the space:
Custom Funnels & Post-purchase Upsells.
CartHook replaces your whole checkout with a custom funnel that allows you to provide post-purchase upsells to your customers. Once the customer has placed their order, they have a time-limited opportunity to add more products to their cart. This generally increases AOV by 10–15%.
CartHook’s monthly fees are a little higher than its competitors, but at a low transaction rate, you might operate in sufficient volume to make up the difference.
$500/month, plus 0.5% of all upsell revenue.
Smart Product Recommendations & Cross-selling
Bold Upsell is a robust, comprehensive upselling app. It offers rich funnels that adapt to the customer’s choices, offering a series of alternatives if a given upsell offer is declined.
Bold Upsell also gives you full control over the design of your upsell flow, so you can match it to your store’s theme.
Starts at $9.99/month
One-click Post-purchase Upsells For Your Store
*Full disclosure: Zipify is a former Draft client.*
Zipify’s OneClickUpsell, or OCU, replaces your checkout and creates comprehensive upsell, downsell, and cross-sell funnels for your store. It’s easy to get started, with robust integrations with your existing email automation and payment workflows.
$56/month for their essentials plan, plus 2.5% of all upsell revenue.
In-checkout Upsells – Without Checkout Replacement
Order Bump is an upsell app that only adds upsells to your checkout page – without the need to replace the checkout wholesale. Since OrderBump focuses exclusively on this part of the checkout process, it can deliver upsells without needing to replace the entire checkout.
$99/month, 10-day trial.
Monthly Installment Plans in a Pinch
Sezzle lets customers buy now and pay over six weeks – and, as of press time, it’s the most-used buy-now-pay-later app for Shopify.
In our research with Draft’s clients, many customers cited Sezzle’s functionality as a key reason why they were able to buy right now. Its call to action easily fits in any store’s buy box, and should increase conversion rate significantly.
Rates are customized to merchants, depending on their transaction volume and take rate.
Multi-channel Messaging to Recover Carts & Boost Conversion
CartStack focuses on getting more of your customers to convert with smarter messaging. With cart abandonment emails, SMS campaigns, and push notification alerts, CartStack provides a comprehensive set of channels to engage with customers in order to close more sales.
Starts at $29/mo for abandoned cart recovery, and $49/month for multi-channel messaging.
Thank-you Page Optimization for Upsells & Cross-sells
ReConvert provides custom messaging and robust features on a store’s order status, or thank-you, page. Upsells are part of the package, of course, but with additional functionality around birthdays, social shares, and videos & imagery, ReConvert gives store owners considerably more creative latitude over their thank-you pages – in far less time than rolling your own code.
Starts at $7.99/mo for up to 100 orders.
Optimization goes beyond the borders of your store, across every touchpoint that the customer experiences – from ads to shipment tracking.
Let’s talk about how you can think more holistically about every part of the customer’s experience – and create the best possible impression of your brand in the process.
Richer Package Tracking & Shipping Insurance
After purchase, customers want to know where their stuff is. Route provides them with deep, rich insight into exactly where their package is, along with push notifications for every step of the way. And it also provides protection against lost, damaged, or stolen packages.
Free for merchants, 98¢ or 1% of order value for customers
Facilitate Charitable Donations From Your Customers’ Purchases
ShoppingGives allows customers to donate 1% of their purchases to causes that matter to them. Instead of saying that a small portion of proceeds go to charity, now you can allow customers to decide who to give to. This increases conversion rate, AOV, and CLTV for you, while allowing customers to live out their values in their purchasing behavior.
Starts at free, with an 0.5% processing fee on any order that has a donation
Set Up Your Store for Google AMP
Right now, Shopify doesn’t offer support for Google AMP out of the box. AMP by Ampify Me is a drop-in tool to make your store ready for AMP right away.
Starts at free, with a $9.99/month plan for AMP validation, suggested products, richer analytics, and review integrations
Turnkey Progressive Web Apps & Mobile Apps
Progressive web apps, or PWAs for short, are available for easy installation on a customer’s smartphone home screen – regardless of whether they’re on iOS or Android. The result is a fast, user-friendly experience that stays top of mind when the customer makes future purchases.
Starts at free, with a $29.99/month plan for analytics & a custom iOS splash screen
Headless Ecommerce for Merchants
Nacelle is a headless Ecommerce platform that helps customers load your store faster. In particular, they help you build unique PWA storefronts – with the backend fully managed by them, so you don’t have to worry about issues like scaling or updates.
The Best Shopify Discounts App
Special offers & discounts are essential to the purchasing process, but Shopify doesn’t make it easy to create them. With Ultimate Special Offers, you can create over 8 different types of discounts, from BOGO to bulk to free gifts.
Discounts can be scheduled in advance, too, so you can run time-delimited sales that start & end at the exact right time – without having to sweat about turning everything on or off all at once.
Starts at $19/month
Pre-purchase Delivery Estimates for Conversion Boosts
The absolute best thing you can do to boost conversion rates on your store right now is to provide specific delivery date estimates on your product detail page, cart, and checkout. Worst-case estimates are fine, too: underpromise and overdeliver, after all. But the date should be specific, and it should be an actual date: no “in 2–3 days” here.
FenixCommerce is the gold standard for estimated delivery dates, and multiple Draft clients use it. FenixCommerce combines geolocation and customer information to provide delivery date estimates that are as accurate as possible.
Starts as low as $199/month. Use code “Ecomtech” for 10% off!
Increase Sales with Drop-in Social Proof
A lot of my time as an optimizer is spent wondering how to display and promote social proof, especially on product detail pages. Fera makes it easy to add social proof anywhere, including in important above-the-fold places like your store’s buy box.
From star ratings to curated testimonials, you’ll be able to make new customers feel more comfortable buying from you at every step of the way. And with A/B testing functionality, you can even optimize your testimonials for maximal
Starts at $20/month
Shopify’s default search is getting better by the day, but it still can’t beat many of these out-of-the-box offerings, featuring machine learning, rich results, and fast autocomplete.
Smarter search, without the hassle
If you’re looking to upgrade your search provider from Shopify’s built-in store search, Algolia has a robust API and testing tools that allow you to adapt your searches over time to meet your customers’ needs.
Starts at free for 50,000 search queries, $29/month and up thereafter
Fast Autocomplete & Rich Results
For those who are okay with their search providers controlling the experience so they don’t have to, Searchanise provides a drop-in, turnkey search solution that levels up on a few of Shopify’s stock features and fits a wide range of layout contexts.
Starts at free for up to 25 products, $9/month and up thereafter
On-the-fly Image Compression
Starts at $4.99/month
Page Speed Monitoring That Reflects How People See Your Store
In conversion, nothing matters more than performance. Yet there are dozens of metrics that people use that don’t really reflect how people perceive your store. Time to first render matters, as does the time to interactive.
Lightify Me allows you to monitor how your store is performing, while also giving you concrete recommendations for improvement. That way, you don’t need to focus on vanity metrics or the wrong points of improvement.
Starts at free, $9.99/month plan for daily reporting
For when you’re ready to start experimenting on your store, you’ll need a framework to build new tests, send variations to the right customers, and analyze results.
The Best Optimization Framework for Any SMB
Draft’s exclusive optimization platform as of press time, Google Optimize has risen from newcomer to industry standard within just a couple of years. Its plan is free for the vast majority of applications, and its tight integration with Google Analytics makes experiment analysis a snap.
It’s in-browser editor works well enough for most content tests, although you’ll want to host your own images through Shopify for any image-based experiments.
Free for up to 5 concurrent tests & 3 goals, with enterprise pricing for very, very big stores
Developer-focused Optimization for Bug-free Experiments
If you have any developers on staff, or you’re looking to get a little more involved in your store’s code, Omniconvert is a tremendously powerful experimentation framework.
With a CSS- and JavaScript-focused editor, you’ll make sure that you can put together experiments that fit your existing store’s DOM model – without needing to go back in and troubleshoot every time something breaks, or worrying about whether your customers are seeing the same thing that you see in your framework’s editor. If you know how to code testable prototypes, Omniconvert is a no-brainer.
Starts at $1,990/year
One of the first, still one of the best
Visual Website Optimizer, or VWO for short, is one of the earliest experimentation frameworks – and still among the best. VWO allows you to set as many goals as possible, allowing you to gain a greater understanding of knock-on effects & upper-funnel metrics. And its in-page editor is super fast for updating variants, bug fixing things on the fly, and ensuring clean data reporting.
Testing starts at $199/month, limited by page views
Robust, Modern Testing At Volume for Large Stores
The choice of large, enterprise-scale stores – Optimizely helps you run tests, flag features to specific customer segments, and roll features out in continuously deployed environments. If you run multiple dozens of concurrent tests on every single part of your conversion funnel, Optimizely is worth looking into.
You’re probably aware that personalization is essential for conversion. Once you operate at a sufficient volume, you need to focus on delivering the right message to the right customers at the right time. That’s accomplished through personalization, or the practice of modifying your store to meet specific segments’ needs. Let’s talk about some of the best personalization tools out there right now.
Customized Banner Images & Products
If you’re looking for an easy way to get started with personalization, DataCue helps you modify your banners, mastheads, and advertising in order to convert as highly as possible.
Starting at $9.99/month for Shopify & Shopify Plus, $99.99/month for PrestaShop & WooCommerce
Cross-platform Personalization – Even Over Email
For those who want to personalize their product recommendations, LimeSpot is a perfect tool. With plug-and-play installation, easier customer discovery, and recommendations that change based on product performance, LimeSpot is personalization that’s easy to set & forget. And with email recommendations being custom-tailored to customers, now LimeSpot works across your two most important channels as well.
Starting at free, with a $20/mo plan for email personalization
Omnichannel Personalization, From In-store to Emails to Pop-ups
Nosto is a major personalization force in DTC, allowing the biggest brands to match their personalization strategies between their in-store experiences, emails, mobile apps, and online stores. It’s great if you’re a large or rapidly growing DTC brand with many touchpoints, and you want to unify everything into one consistent experience.
Starts at $1,000/month
Segmentation & Personalization with Dynamic Q&As
The best way to know what your customers are thinking is to ask them. And RightMesssage provides a terrific experience for surveying customers, gathering data on their motivations, and adapting your store to meet their needs.
Starts at $29/month
When you’re putting together new design decisions to test, you want to find a way to rapidly convey your ideas to the team. That’s where good wireframing tools come in: they allow you to create mock-ups as you desire, showing layout, behavior, and edge cases. That helps prototypes get built out at lower cost, with fewer bugs.
Wireframing & Sketching for Cloud & Desktop
For those who want to create wireframes & sketches to outline new functionality, Balsamiq has been around for a while – and it’s always risen to meet the needs of each generation of UX designers. With fast prototyping and sketching support across all platforms you’d typically want to use, you can easily manifest your ideas, make something the team can look at, and then move into the build process with confidence.
Starts at $9/month or $90/year. Desktop client is available for $89.
Wireframes & Flowcharts for Mac & iOS
OmniGraffle is a Mac- and iOS-only wireframing, flowcharting, and layout application. It works equally well for interior designers to lay out rooms, engineers to lay out flowcharts & specification diagrams, and designers to create rich wireframe prototypes. I’ve personally used OmniGraffle for almost 20 years in my career, and recommend it highly to new designers & anyone with an interest in prototyping.
$249.99 upfront for Mac, $119.99 for iOS
High-fidelity Prototyping for Mac & the Cloud
For those who want to create higher-fidelity mockups, Sketch allows you to create responsive layouts quickly & simply. With a wide library of UI elements and fast export, you can create storyboards rapidly and share with your team using their Sketch Cloud service.
$99 for the first year, $79/year thereafter
If you run a store, you should be running heat & scroll maps on it. They’re one of the easiest research methods out there, and they yield rich insights that you can easily take action on.
The Best Heat Mapping Tool for Shopify Plus
There are many heat mapping tools out there, but Hotjar is the best in our experience. It’s set up within minutes, and you don’t need any technical know-how to do so: only a code snippet in your theme. With heat & scroll maps, behavior recordings, and in-page surveys, Hotjar is perfect for stores of any size.
Free plan available; paid plans start at $29/month
Fast & Easy Heat Maps
Mouseflow is another excellent heat mapping tool, with an additional feature: the ability to track mouse movements as customers browse your store. This is great for understanding what people are reading – and what they aren’t.
Free plan available; paid plans start at $24/month
The easiest way to get started with usability testing for small businesses
Usability testing is a tremendously powerful tool for stores, but it’s often the purview of enterprise-level businesses. Conversion Crimes changes this. With affordable, à la carte pricing and a fast turnaround, you’ll be able to recruit the right participants, run example tasks, and rapidly understand what works and what doesn’t.
Starts at $5/participant
Enterprise-grade Usability Testing
For larger businesses with enterprise-grade needs, UserTesting is the original usability testing platform. With robust recruitment from a large pool of participants, you’ll be able to get started testing within an hour or two.
$49 per participant, limited to 15 per account
Subscription-based Usability Testing for Routine Research
TryMyUI is another usability test provider that has been around for about as long as UserTesting, but targets mid-sized businesses that are interested in running new rounds of tests every single month. Instead of charging per participant, TryMyUI provides subscription plans that make it easier to forecast in the long run.
Starts at $99/month
The Best Remote Interview Recruitment Tool
If you aren’t interviewing customers on a routine basis, you really should be. And if you are, you know that recruitment is the toughest part of the process. How do you get people on the phone at all – and how do you ensure that they’re the right people to generate valuable insights?
Ethnio helps you put together screeners, which are surveys that are focused exclusively on making sure that you have the right participants with the right qualifications.
Starts at $79/month
Post-purchase Surveys For Actionable Conversion Insight
The best way to understand what customers are thinking is to ask them. And the best way to understand how customers felt about their purchase is to ask them right after they made it. Enquire Labs helps you do exactly this, by putting post-purchase surveys on your store’s order status page.
Starts at $30/month
The biggest, still one of the best
If you want to make lots of money on evidence-based optimization, ask your customers what they think about your store, product, and competition. And the best way to do that is through a survey tool like SurveyMonkey. They’ve been around for years – and with affordable individual pricing, rich segmentation, and branching logic, you’ll be able to get started asking the right questions of the right people for the right reasons.
Free plan available; paid plans start at $32/month
Great User Experience for High Completion Rates
If you want to create surveys with a little more polish, Typeform is great for the purpose. Typeform’s surveys have higher completion rates because they’re enjoyable to use and they don’t feel daunting to customers. They also allow you to create custom layouts & designs to match your own brand – and they have many of the features that you’ve come to expect out of a more powerful surveying platform.
Free plan available; paid plans start at $35/month
Obviously, social proof matters when promoting your products. You want to come across as a safe bet; it’s wiser for conversion and customer goodwill. Let’s talk about how to automatically gather reviews, display them on product pages, and promote social proof storewide.
Photography-driven Reviews App
If you run a visual brand, consider adding Loox, which promotes the photos that your customers take. Sometimes a picture matters more than the words that your customers write – especially for fashion, skincare, and cosmetics. With unique discounts & incentives for your customers, you’ll also be able to incentivize review completion.
Starts at $9.99/month
SEO-focused Product Reviews With Easy Installation
Judge.me is a newer entrant into review apps, but it’s easy to install, affordable for stores of any size, and provides just enough functionality to work well for your needs. With web, email, push, and SMS notifications, you’ll be sure to reach customers where they are, every time. And with quick syncing with Facebook, your reviews will be viewable across all of the channels that matter to your store.
Free plan, with photo & video reviews starting at $15/month
Full Suite of Review & Loyalty Solutions
For larger stores on Shopify Plus, nothing beats Yotpo. It’s been around forever, it contains all of the tools that you need to gather reviews & promote social proof, and it works great. All of the best direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands use it, and it’s familiar to customers. It also provides a rich customer loyalty program, allowing your store to win back customers and increase CLTV in the process.
Free plan, with premium plans targeted at large businesses
Product Reviews & Net Promoter Scores (NPS)
Stamped is the best review platform if calculating your brand’s NPS matters to you. NPS is useful for tracking your brand’s loyalty & equity over time – and it also helps you understand what really matters to them. Stamped also contains all of the usual review tools that you’d come to expect from a platform of their kind, with robust moderation at scale, cross-channel follow-ups, and curation across your store.
Free plan, with photo & checkout reviews starting at $15/month
When optimizing, it’s not enough to just run A/B tests. You need the right ideas. Tests are only as good as their ideas. And you want optimization to have real
With this roundup, you should be able to get all of the tools that you need to research what your customers say, what your customers do, and how your customers will respond when you make changes in your store.
If you want to know how to use any of these tools to level up your store’s AOV & conversion rate, take a look at our most recent book, Value-Based Design. Thanks for reading!
