Must-Have Shopify Apps to Grow Your E-Commerce Store in 2023

Total Shopify platform sales from around the world are estimated at $100 billion

Shopify is your ideal e-commerce success story. Look at the great numbers: Shopify controls an estimated 20 percent of the $3.5 trillion ($4.97 trillion in 2021) e-commerce market share. With about 1 million e-commerce merchants listed on the platform, Shopify is only second to WooCommerce and outshines competitors such as BigCommerce, Wix, Magento, and Weebly.

To date, total Shopify platform sales from around the world are estimated at $100 billion. The total Shopify revenue in the second quarter of 2019 was $362.0 million, a 48% increase from the comparable quarter in 2018. This number could receive an additional 25% upside in 2021 based on available data.

Of all the Shopify merchants, 87% use apps, of which the Shopify app store offers more than 2,400. And 25.8 million Shopify apps have been installed, with more than 80% of merchants using third-party apps.

As developers continue to churn out more Shopify apps, we want to help you ramp up the 15 best free to low-cost Shopify apps and tools you need to grow your Shopify store in 2021.

1: SUMO — The #1 FREE email capture tool for your Shopify store

The Sumo team created the app to build emails for their parent company, AppSumo. As people began asking about their secrets, they opened it up as an email capture tool for bloggers and online businesses. With their Shopify app, Sumo becomes one of the top marketing and conversion tools for Shopify stores.

It has an easy-to-drag-and-drop email form editor that helps you create high-converting forms to collect your store visitors’ email addresses. It integrates with Shopify to generate unique discount codes for every visitor who subscribes.

Another critical feature of Sumo is the e-commerce shortcuts that help you reduce cart abandonment, grow your email list, and increase the average order value.

2: Chargeflow — The World’s first PayPal Disputes and Chargebacks Automation tool

We designed Chargeflow to help e-commerce merchants recover more money. We use Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to stop payment fraud, recognize when a dispute on a payment occurs and fight those disputes and chargebacks as you’d wish. This can mean sifting through 450,000 disputes per minute. Instead of relying on your power of logic and writing skills when fighting a payment dispute, which does not work, Chargeflow’s Dispute Automation software pulls from over 50 data points associated with the disputed order to strengthen your dispute. Onboarding Chargeflow is seamless with the 2-step integration process and any transaction not resolved in your favor is FREE.

Key features such as ChargeSync® automatically sync tracking and logistics information from your Shopify store to your PayPal account, free of charge.

Another exciting feature is ChargeScore®, which helps you gain deeper insights and forecast your business cash flow by having projections into how much money you are expected to recover from ongoing disputes.

3: HubSpot CRM — Marketing, sales, and service software that helps your Shopify store to grow

HubSpot CRM provides you with essential tools to organize, track, and grow your leads and customer base. You can quickly get started with free tools and upgrade as you grow.

With the HubSpot Shopify app, you can sync your Shopify store data into HubSpot and use it to personalize and automate your marketing campaigns. HubSpot allows you to step up your sales and marketing strategy by sending emails to visitors who’ve abandoned their cart items on your site so you can guide them toward a purchase.

Equally important, HubSpot CRM keeps a diligent track of your interactions with your Shopify store visitors and customers. It automatically stores the data from these interactions in a clear, concise timeline, making more informed marketing and customer engagement decisions.

4: Pagefly — Easily create Shopify pages for desktops, tablets, and smartphone

PageFly is one of the best Shopify page builder apps because of the fantastic all-around user experience. With a simple drag-and-drop system, you can design beautiful pages loaded within milliseconds while writing clean code.

Pagefly is loaded with cool features such as over 50 elements to choose from, analytics for tracking, smart form, in-page HTML, CSS, JavaScript, built-in animation, and custom hovering effects. These tools are the building blocks of each page and help you optimize your Shopify store’s performance by growing conversion rates and sales for your e-Commerce business.

Their pricing plans are equally cool. You can get a Free Plan, a Silver Plan ($19 / month), a Gold Plan ($39 / month), and a Platinum Plan ($99 / month). And they are always on standby to assist Shopify merchants with choosing the best package and setting things up to enhance SEO tools and customizable effects.

5: Sendinblue — Email, SMS, Facebook, Chat, CRM, and more, all-in-one platform

Sendinblue is another smart email marketing app for Shopify merchants. Sendinblue allows you to manage SMS and email campaigns, improve deliverability rates, and track metrics like open, click, and delivery. With Sendinblue, your Shopify email marketing will be seamless, and you can easily connect your Shopify list with several lists in your Sendinblue account.

Apart from the fantastic email marketing service, you also get marketing and transactional text message options on SendinBlue. That makes it easy for you to integrate a text messaging strategy into your Shopify store’s back office to maximize your customer engagement processes.

Equally crucial, Sendinblue only charges you based on the emails you send, not your list count. You will enjoy advanced contact segmentation, on-site live chat, marketing automation, and up to 300 emails sent per day for free.

6: RECART — The Facebook Messenger Marketing & Abandoned Cart App

Recart helps Shopify merchants to sell more with Messenger marketing. Forget low email open rates and spam folders. Increase your Shopify store revenue by engaging customers on the platform they actively use: Facebook Messenger.

Instead of sending your emails to the Promotion folder, get better results by automating chat conversations with your customers on Facebook Messenger. Almost everyone opens your messages, and about a third engages with them. It’s also easy to subscribe to Recart, which offers various one-click Messenger subscription tools. After implementing Recart Messenger Marketing: customers respond to you. Unlike TV, FB ads, radio… Messenger is a 2-way conversation.

Recart makes it easy to grow your Messenger audience by providing tools to convert your visitors into subscribers with a 5–14% conversion rate. Generate more sales for your Shopify store with Recart Messenger Campaigns. Recover abandoned carts, send receipts, or ask for reviews with Loox Photo Review app.

7: Oberlo — Dropshipping App for Shopify merchants

Whatever your drive is, Oberlo is the toolkit to help you start and grow your Shopify store. For free.

With more than 100 million products sold using Oberlo’s dropshipping app, the app has become a virtual warehouse packed with products from thousands of suppliers. Electronics, fashion, beauty, toys. You name it, you can find it. In just a few clicks, Oberlo’s dropshipping app lets you grab your goods, customize the details, then pull them into your Shopify store, ready to sell.

Find anything and everything you can imagine on Oberlo. Then customize and add products directly to your store in just a few clicks — test new products without splashing cash upfront. You sell first, but later, so there are no paying suppliers until your customers pay you. You do the selling. Your suppliers sort the inventory and ship orders directly to your shoppers — no box stacking in your living room.

8: Freshbooks — Ridiculously easy-to-use small business accounting software

You can easily connect your Shopify store and FreshBooks account to pull your existing order history into FreshBooks. Upon syncing, you have three options to customize how your order history will be migrated into FreshBooks. The integration will manage Shopify orders based on three objects, Items, Invoices, and Payments in FreshBooks.

When a Shopify order is sent to FreshBooks, the integration will associate an order with a FreshBooks client. An invoice will be created along with the items sold from the Shopify order. The invoice will then have the payment applied to the invoice.

The Shopify inventory will be considered the source of truth for all inventory management since inventory levels are managed and changed. FreshBooks then receives that information and updates it as required.

You can manually sync this data based on the preferences you define as you set up your accounts.

9: Return Magic — Takes the pain out of returns for both Shopify merchants and shoppers.

With an e-commerce business, stuff happens occasionally, and you will need to refund your customers. Return Magic integrates with your Shopify or Shopify Plus store to create a seamless return experience for your customers. Using Return Magic, you will be able to quickly refund your clients on their original payment method (including Amazon Payments, Shopify Payments, etc.), process exchanges, or issue new gift card refunds. But don’t worry: Return Magic doesn’t automatically refund your customers; you always need to approve any transaction!

Return Magic creates a return portal on your store that sits on your domain. The return portal is automatically branded to your store and integrates seamlessly. The app does not affect the performance of your store in any way.

10: AfterShip — Tracking Solution for eCommerce Businesses.

If you sell physical goods on Shopify, always ensure that you ship your orders with tracking to avoid stories that hurt. AfterShip is trusted by 30,000 Shopify and Shopify Plus sellers to engage customers and boost sales with a branded tracking experience. Track and trace all shipments and parcels across 670+ carriers worldwide in one place.

Keep your Shopify customers updated on the whereabouts of their orders until delivery through an intuitive, customized tracking page and automated notifications. The app also lets you build your tracking page to include product marketing banners and Instagram image feeds. You can also upload your logo, customize the color scheme to conform to your brand identity, and replace the carrier’s tracking link with their auto-generated link to drive traffic to your site instead of the carrier’s site. Free users enjoy tracking 50 shipments per month.

11: Smile — Boost your Shopify sales & customer retention with points, referrals, and pop-ups

30,000+ Shopify brands have found success with Smile’s easy-to-build loyalty platform, making us the most trusted rewards app in the world.

Join these Shopify stores in saving money on expensive and unpredictable ads. With Smile, you can quickly boost sales from your existing customer base through referrals, interactive pop-ups, points, campaigns, and more!

Build an engaging and modern loyalty experience that seamlessly aligns with your existing brand. A Smile loyalty program gives your Shopify customers access to exclusive perks, attractive discounts, and a fun way to engage with your brand every time they log in to your store.

Getting started with Smile rewards is easy, fast, and exciting. Most Smile customers can get their rewards program configured, designed, and launched on their Shopify store in less than a day.