Now that we have entered 2021, you may have already started thinking about your business goals for the year. You’ve developed your brand and are ready to launch into the world of e-commerce. Whether you’re a newbie or well established, if you are using Shopify but aren’t using plugins that are available, you’re missing a great opportunity to increase your sales and take your business to the next level. The key is to find and select plugins that best suit your needs, as they can affect the loading speed of your site and some even charge to unlock better features. To help you narrow your search, here is a list of our top 5 must have Shopify plugins to enhance your online store:
- PageSpeed Monitor
- Swell Loyalty & Rewards
- Free Shipping Bar
- Upsell and Cross-Sell Products
- One-click social login
Let’s look at why we think these 5 plugins are a great add!
PageSpeed Monitor
By William Belk
One of the biggest turn-offs in the online world are web pages that take, what feels like a million years to load.
It is said that load times any longer than 3 seconds, will see shoppers leaving your website. That is why the PageSpeed monitor is a fantastic plugin to add to your Shopify store. It allows you to keep an eye on the speed of your website, analyse how any changes have affected load times and give suggestions on how you can make your web pages faster.
Swell Loyalty & Rewards
By Swell Rewards
There is nothing better than building long lasting bonds with your customers. What’s one of the best ways to do this, you may ask? Rewards! Who doesn’t like the extra perks of being a loyal customer? Over 50% of customers valued loyalty schemes in their shopping experience, so adding this as one of the benefits of being your customers is practically a no-brainer.
With ‘Swell loyalty & Rewards’ customers can earn points through referring friends, spending over a certain balance, leaving reviews and much more. It allows customers to easily check their points and allows you to analyse the impact different initiatives are having on your sales.
Free Shipping bar
By Hextom – $9.99 per month
We all know that feeling when you’ve filled your shopping bag, you click checkout, and you realise you have to pay for delivery. Sometimes it puts you off the entire online shopping experience and it is in fact the most popular reason for abandonments during checkout. Free shipping is a top incentive to shop at any online store
Free Shipping bar is one of the best free shipping plugins on Shopify, allowing you to promote free shipping on your site, create spending thresholds and customise offers based on pages visited, time and users’ locations.
Upsell and Cross-Sell Products
By Voyager – $27 per month
It is a lot easier to increase your existing customers average spend than attain new ones. This means as well as looking for ways to attract new customers, finding ways to upsell to current can boost your revenue.
The ‘Upsell and Cross-sell’ plugin does this for you by tracking what customers add to their shopping baskets and at checkout presenting the buyer with relevant products. As well as that, you can also add ‘recently viewed’ bar and present similar options when items are out of stock.
One-click Social login
By Dev Cloud LLC
A seamless shopping experience is exactly what you want for your customers and one of the main things that can disrupt that, is the need to create an account before checking out. Creating an account comes in at a strong second place for creating checkout abandonments, just after shipping fees.
Adding the ‘One Click Social login’ plugin is a great solution to this issue as it allows buyers to use existing social accounts to proceed to checkout with just one click, instead of the tedious task of creating an account from scratch. This can increase your conversion rates and save your shoppers a lot of hassle.
Hopefully this was a helpful breakdown into how you can optimise your online store, with a few simple add-ons. If you have any problems with your Shopify account or have some trouble accessing any of the plug-ins, drop G7 cloud an email.
