I think some congratulations are in order—you started your own ecommerce business on Shopify! This, in and of itself, is a major accomplishment. Precious few people actually make it to the launch phase and instead stall out during planning. So kudos.

Now comes the hard part.

But wait, you say, everything up to this moment was hard and now it gets even more difficult?

Yes, and here’s the thing—90% of new Internet businesses fails as quickly as 120 days in. Obviously that’s not what you want to hear right now but you can mitigate disaster by souping up your business with these awesome Shopify apps! There are plenty on the market but these are the top 10 for new and growing businesses!

Sweet Tooth

With Sweet Tooth, in about 10 minutes, you can establish a loyalty and referral program. With this system, customers can receive rewards for purchases and referrals, and incentivize them to come back and spend more money in your shop!

Mailbot

You already know that for every dollar spent on email marketing, you can make $38 back, right? So I don’t need to tell you how important email marketing is. Plenty of stores are already using outside automated email marketing apps but Shopify has one that seamlessly combines with their system making email marketing easier than ever. Mailbot tracks customer behavior and interest in your store, logs the activity and then sends personalized, targeted emails to your customers suggesting ideas for their next online shopping trip.

Yotpo

Not everyone loves crowd-sourced reviews, especially when their products aren’t great. But you’re products are awesome, and your customer service is on point, so you’ve got nothing to worry about.

With Yotpo, your customers can quickly leave reviews after their purchases, from both on-site and signature in-mail review. A couple of weeks after their purchase, customers are sent an email asking them for feedback on your product. 90% of potential customers make decisions based on online reviews, so why haven’t you taken this into consideration yet?

Tidio Live Chat

Like user-generated reviews, live chat isn’t something every business owner necessarily wants to have but really needs to have. Point of fact, 63% of customers said that they were more likely to return to an ecommerce business that had live chat than one that didn’t.

Tidio adds a live chat window to your online store, which connects to your mobile device so you can answer customer questions from anywhere (sounds great, right?).

Take yourself offline with the swipe of a finger and the live chat window becomes an email questionnaire.

Boost Sales

Ask any salesman, online or off, what the best tactics for maximizing sales are and they’ll no doubt tell you the upsell followed by the cross-sell. Boost Sales suggests to your customers another item in your inventory that would go well with what they’ve got in their cart, or it will suggest the more expensive version. They’ve also just added a sales motivator and last step upsell to their app so it’s even better!

ALT Text

If you’re not a programmer or attuned to the finer aspects of SEO, you might not know what alt text does. Basically, all images have alt tags, which causes them to be indexed by Google. Not everyone always remembers to name their images so ALT Text crawls your online store images and renames them to something Google can recognize, saving you precious time and helping your store appear higher in search rankings.

Checkout Boost

$260 billion worldwide has been lost to customer cart abandonment. It’s the thorn in the side of all ecommerce businesses and shop owners are constantly looking for new ways to combat this growing problem. Checkout Boost is a fantastic app that urges your customers to complete the sale. With gift offers to promote social sharing to a countdown timer that will offer deals until it runs out, you will certainly see an uptick in conversion rates with an app like this.

Lucky Orange

If you’re still having trouble with conversion rates, Lucky Orange can help. This app generates in depth analytic reports—from form analytics to real-time customer heat maps—to give you better insight into your Shopify store’s customer behaviors.

GetSocial

71% of consumers stated that if they had a good social media experience with a brand, they were more likely to recommend said brand to a friend. GetSocial adds responsive social share buttons to your website, letting customers easily find and follow your social pages. Not only that, but GetSocial provides real-time analytics to let you know how much your social media sites are driving customers to your storefront.

RetargetApp

Retargeting might be one of the most underused ways to entice your customers to come back to your store if they left without making a purchase. In fact, some research has pinpointed a 50 to 60% conversion rate with customers who have been retargeted. RetargetApp takes store traffic that failed to convert and displays your products in their Facebook timeline using Facebook Dynamic Ads making retargeting simple and effective.

 

Starting an ecommerce business is hard. Making one successful is even harder. Don’t be another casualty of the startup game. Use these great apps that Shopify provides to maximize your sales and you’re sure to see incredible results!