You’ve found a product you’re passionate about and want to get it out into the world. If you get things right it really pays off. That’s why it’s so important to get on the right track from the beginning and to make sure your store is set up optimally to maximize onsite conversions.
Setting up your eCommerce business should be a fun and exciting experience! Let's have a look at how you can get kicked off on the right foot.
It's important to first understand things like setup costs for an eCommerce store, secure payment gateways, and SEO for eCommerce, but this article will be specifically about what app plugins you can add to get the most out of your new store.
As a store owner, it can be difficult to know where to start, and sometimes it’s human nature to get excited about new things, and this takes attention away from what’s important.
That’s why we’ve put together our top 5 apps you can start using on your eCommerce store today to turn more of your visitors into customers.
Best 5 Apps for Your eCommerce Store
- Popup
- Form Builder
- Affiliate Marketing & Referral
- Image Slider
- Countdown Timer
There are countless apps available and just as many providers, so knowing what you need or don't need can be confusing and time-consuming. These are the top 5 that we recommend:
1. Popup
Popups are one of the most effective ways to curb cart abandonment in your store while helping you collect more leads. They are intrusive by nature and force a site visitor to take action.
For example, you can create a discount popup that gives a percentage or fixed amount off their first purchase in exchange for providing you with their email address.
You now have a fresh new lead that you can follow up with using an email marketing strategy if they didn’t buy right away.
Make sure the popup displays at the right time, too. You can show it immediately once they enter your site, after a short delay once they've begun browsing, or just before a visitor leaves your site so you can get something out of their visit instead of nothing.
2. Form Builder
As a store owner, it’s vital that you ensure your prospective customers can get all the information they need on your site to make an informed purchase.
You’ll want to ensure you display shipping and returns information clearly. Perhaps most importantly, you need to have an accessible contact page so that customers can easily contact you.
Whether they have a pre-sales question, need support post-sale, want to register a product, or if they’re ready to buy and you need to collect their information and make a payment, set up a form. Forms are incredibly useful lead collection tools for your business and can have multiple uses.
At a minimum, have a simple contact form with an autoresponder. You can also set it up one-click checkout via Stripe or PayPal so that collecting order information and payments is straightforward for you and your customer.
3. UpPromote: Affiliate & Referral
UpPromote Affiliate & Referral is the top-recommended affiliate/referral marketing app for Shopify stores. With UpPromote, you can easily build, create and manage successful affiliate marketing campaigns. UpPromote is suitable for all business sizes, with the price from FREE to $199.99/ month. Furthermore, UpPromote implements customization upon request for Enterprise customers.
To build your team, UpPromote allows you to freely customize the affiliate registration form and create unlimited affiliate programs with different commission offers. Your affiliates will automatically receive a unique link and coupon code after registering, which they can use to promote the merchant’s shop.
To manage your team, the reliable real-time tracking process gives you an up-to-second tracking system that is constantly improved to ensure accurate and instant updates.
And most importantly, UpPromote also supports recruiting more affiliates by free listing your offers on UpPromote Marketplace. Furthermore, the Customer Referral feature allows customers to refer your products to their friends and family and earn a small commission.
4. Image Slider
It’s no secret that your website should be visually appealing. You simply can't do without images and videos anymore. That's where this multimedia slider comes in.
Make sure your product pages include several product images taken from different angles or showing different uses. Consider using images and videos across your website, especially to separate blocks of text on your homepage.
A great tool for doing this is a slider app, where you can create a banner for the top of your homepage, a carousel of product images, or even customer testimonial slider.
They're an excellent and dynamic way to show valuable social proof for your eCommerce site that helps establish your authority as a trusted brand.
5. Countdown Timer
Even if you've presented every bit of information a site visitor needs to make a purchase, the truth is many of them still need an extra nudge to make their purchase.
While the coupon popup mentioned above is one helpful method, you can also use customer psychology to your advantage by creating urgency or a fear of missing out (FOMO) with a countdown timer.
If a customer sees that a deal is only available for a limited time, it triggers an emotional response that drives them to take action - fast!
Use a countdown timer in a banner on your homepage, or add it to customer carts so they know there's a deadline before the offer expires.
6. Social Feed
If there’s a final piece of advice to share with eCommerce business owners, it’s to ensure you don’t limit yourself to one social platform.
While Instagram and influencer marketing might work well for one store, Facebook and Facebook Ads might work well for another, or Pinterest could be a fantastic growth engine for another. If you use a combination while being more work, it will give you a competitive advantage.
What’s more, you can maximize your growth on social media by displaying a live stream of your social posts in a Social Feed on your site. This not only makes your site more visually appealing, and it also allows you to use user-generated content as valuable social proof that helps you sell more products.
Tags of your product on social activities like a user review, giving your site visitors more information that helps them make the informed purchase we talked about earlier.
Make sure all your posts are shareable, and if you’re on Shopify you can even make your feed Shoppable by tagging products in your images.
Bonus App - Visme
Digital marketing and visual content creation are very important nowadays. To boost your online presence and reach out to your audience efficiently, you will need the help of an online tool.
Visme is a visual content creation tool that lets you create infographics, presentations, animations, and other forms of visual content. Visme is easy to use yet can be used to create professional-looking assets with little to no design skills.
It also includes a whiteboard tool for real-time collaboration. This tool will definitely help you boost your eCommerce store marketing efforts.
Wrap Up
There can be a lot of uncertainty when launching or growing your eCommerce business. You’ll make some mistakes, of course, and the key is to learn from them quickly. The business success stories you read about could be you.
Get ahead of your competitors and try these apps on your eCommerce store today. You don’t need any expert knowledge or coding skills to use them, and you’ll be turning more of your site visitors into customers sooner than you think.
Not sure what other apps you might need? Check out the full POWR App Library.
