Search Results for: Shopify

Skyrocket Your Ecommerce Sales: The Must-Have Shopify Apps of 2024!

When it comes to selling items online, Shopify can be your reliable e-commerce. Not only it can make your selling easy but it also provides hundreds of Shopify apps available to help you grow your business.

However, due to the amount of the Shopify apps available, finding the best ones can be hard. But don’t worry, we are here to help you find the best Shopify apps to increase sales.

Best Shopify Apps for Sales

One of the most common problems in e-commerce is having a low sales rate. The follow Shopify apps for sales can help you increase your sale.

Mobile App Builder ‑ Shopney

Send Push Notifications using Mobile App Creator by AppIt

Most of your visitors can be using mobile devices and sometimes you are not able to reach them.

But with Mobile App Creator – Shopney, you can now develop a mobile app that will target your visitors who use android devices and iOS devices without any hassle or purchasing.

Their subscription cost only around $99.99/month for silver plan and $199.99/month for gold plan.

Product Reviews by Shopify

Feedbacks are very important for increasing sales because your customer’s feedback is like free marketing. Whenever your customers give reviews to your products, they’re allowing other customers to know that your product is good.

Shopify Product reviews allows you to add a customer review feature to your products. This provides a way for your customers to engage with you, as well as each other to encourage sales.

  • FREE to install! 🤯
  • Theme-friendly design – Reviews automatically match your store’s look and feel
  • Easy customization – Edit layout options, text, and colours without needing to code
  • Bulk actions – Publish, hide, filter, and manage reviews quickly and easily
  • CSV import and Export – Import and export your reviews as a spreadsheet
  • SEO-friendly review scores – Add review scores to your Google search results.

Ultimate Sales Boost

Shopify App Ultimate Sales Boost by Hextom on cart page

As a buyer, you may already know how exciting it is to see that your favorite item is on sale or discount. That’s one of the features of Ultimate Sales Boost. Ultimate Sales Boost is a Swiss army knife to optimize your checkout flow (a.k.a conversion funnel). You may use it aggressively or moderately to build the path of your eCommerce success.

Another good thing about this app is you don’t need developer anymore. Just one click installation and launch your first campaign in one minute. That’s how easy to use this app is.

Conversion Plus

Most online merchants are losing about 67.45% of sales from cart abandonment and the key factors can be addressed simply by introducing a sense of urgency into the checkout flow.

By incorporating a sense of urgency to your checkout flow, you can make the consumers feel like they could lose out on an appealing offer if they don’t commit to an order immediately.

  • Free to use. 🤯
  • Cart reservation timer, with adjustable duration.
  • Change the displayed text as you see fit.
  • Options to define what happens after the timer expires.
  • Multi-language support.
  • Modify the look and feel to match your theme.
  • Optimized across all screen sizes including desktop, tablet, and mobile.
  • No App branding, to keep your site professional.
  • Easy step-by-step installation – No programming required.

Best Shopify Apps for Marketing

With Shopify apps for marketing, you can capture the attention and loyalty of your customers through social media, contests, programs, and more.

Use the following Shopify apps to effectively capture your customer’s attention.

Kit: Run better Facebook ads

Kit is not just a marketing app, it is an artificially-intelligent assistant that will talk to your customers 24/7. That means even if you’re not online, your Kit will always be reliable to assist your customers.

But of course, that’s not the only thing Kit can do. It can also manage your Instagram and Facebook ads, email marketing, and social posts to drive more sales and help you grow your business. All for Free!

Here’s what Kit can do for you:

  • Set up Facebook dynamic ads and retarget shoppers most likely to buy
  • Build lookalike audiences to ensure the best targeting for your ads
  • Create Facebook and Instagram ads that drive sales
  • Post Facebook updates to drive customer engagement
  • Send personalized ‘thank you’ emails to generate repeat purchases
  • Create and promote discount codes to acquire and retain customers
  • Generate quick reports to provide insights on sales and marketing performance

SEO Image Optimizer – SEO

According to a study of U.S. web-based searches, the world’s second most-used search engine is Google Images! That means your store can also get the benefit of getting traffic through proper SEO of images.

With SEO Image Optimizer, you can improve your Google search results and rankings in just a couple of clicks. No coding required!

Features:

  • Alt-Text Optimization
  • Unlimited Image Sync Quota
  • New Images Checked Once per Week
  • Always FREE! 🤯

Pro Features:

  • Complete SEO Optimization
  • Meta Tag Optimization
  • Auto Pilot SEO Fixes
  • Fix Broken Links
  • Google Snippets
  • Auto JSONLD

Smile: Rewards & Loyalty

Your customers become more valuable the more they shop and engage with your brand. A rewards program gives you an easy way to encourage the behaviour that builds emotional connections and customer loyalty.

Smile offers three programs that make program management simple and intuitive:

  • Loyalty points program
  • Referral program
  • VIP program

Why should you choose Smile.io for rewards and loyalty?

As the most used rewards program in the world, we’ve learned a lot from helping tens of thousands of businesses with their retention and loyalty strategies. We’ve used that experience to design a rewards solution that makes it easy for anyone using Shopify or Shopify Plus to create a beautiful rewards program that brings customers back.

  • Simple design customizations to reflect your brand
  • Get your rewards program started in just a few clicks
  • Integrate with the marketing tools you already use

We believe the future of commerce is rooted in emotional relationships, and want to help every business build a strong customer retention strategy that promotes sustainable growth.

Best Shopify Apps for Customer Support

The following apps can help you support and track your customers to increase their satisfaction and build more loyalty. I highly recommend you to install at least one of the following Shopify apps as it will no doubt help your business.

Tidio Live Chat

Automatically solve customer questions with Tidio's AI, Lyro

Research shows that live chat can boost sales by as much as 40%. Next time your customer faces an issue, they won’t go to the competitors or waste time — they’ll contact you.

With Tidio, you can help your customers immediately even if you are not available. Thanks to the artificially-intelligent bots. Bots automatically reply to 43% of the most popular inquiries. Right after registering, with a few clicks of the mouse, you’ll be able to add Bots that will check product availability, inform about delivery status, and give the estimated delivery time. When faced with an issue, the Bot will transfer the conversation to an operator.

Tidio uniquely merges live chat, Bots, and Marketing Automation to meet the expectations of the most demanding Shopify store owners.

With its Free plan, you will get the following features:

  • Up to 3 operators for a lifetime
  • Live Chat
  • Messenger Integration
  • Email Integration
  • iOS & Android App
  • 100 Chatbot Triggers a month

100 Chatbot Triggers feels too short? You may upgrade your plan to $18 per month and get UNLIMITED Chatbot Triggers.

AfterShip ‑ Track & Notify

Keep your customers updated of the whereabouts of their orders until delivery through an intuitive, customized tracking page and automated notifications.

Track & Notify is not just a tracking app, it is a Shopify app that will also help your SEO. Thanks to its improved SEO and ranking system that replaces the carrier’s tracking link with their auto-generated link to drive traffic to your site instead of the carrier’s site. Improve SEO and increase organic search.

With its starter plan, you can have the following features:

  • 50 shipments quota per month
  • Branded tracking page with banner

You may also upgrade your plan to essential, growth and up to PRO and get more shipments quota per month.

If you are having issues with your customers not being able to properly track their orders then I suggest you give Track & Notify a try. It’s worth a shot!

Best Shopify Apps for Products and Inventory

The following apps will help you automate track your inventory to prevent your customers from buying sold out items.

Wipeout: Hide out of stock

If you are having trouble manually setting up your inventory then you’re obviously not using Wipeout. Wipeout is a tool that will quickly hide your sold-out products and show them once they’re on-stock once again. Thanks to its automatic daily hide/publish feature, you won’t have to worry about your items being out of inventory.

Use wipeout for free and get the following features:

  • FREE manual option if the store has less than 3000 products
  • Manually press “Hide” or “Unhide” buttons whenever needed
  • Exclude products
  • Reverse within 24 hours

You may also upgrade your plan to automatic plan for $9 per month and get the following features:

  • Automatically hide & unhide once a day.
  • Daily Email reports
  • Exclusion List to exclude products you want the app to ignore
  • Reverse within 24 hours
  • Multi-location

Oberlo

Oberlo by Shopify is one of my favorite apps. Not only it will help you get started for ecommerce but it will also help you find the products that you wanted to sell and not worry much about inventory and shipping.

You may install Oberlo and get all the free features to get started building your business. But if you want to level up your game, you may upgrade from starter plan to basic plan ($29.90/month) and pro plan ($79.90/month).

What to look for Shopify Apps?

If you are new to Shopify apps, chances are you install apps that you think will help your business. Some entrepreneurs think that Shopify is like a WordPress, you find plugins, install, and see results. Shopify is a different case, you have to do research when you look for Shopify apps.

I would recommend you do the following before hitting the install button.

  • Read the reviews of the Shopify apps
  • Check if the app is getting high ratings
  • Check if the contact is working and see if they will respond
  • Look for screenshots

Conclusion

Shopify apps are great, especially if you are working on your business by yourself. You may also check out these 20 Shopify apps that will increase your sales by up to 64.56%. If you have experience with apps both good and bad, you may share them in the comments below. We’d love to have a chat with you below.

How To Learn Shopify Development in 2024 (as a beginner)

You are probably wanting to learn Shopify development because you either have a Shopify store that you want to improve or you just want to be a Shopify developer. Either way, you will do the same steps to learn Shopify development. Then you can choose whether you want to create a Shopify app or a Shopify theme.

But, the question still remains… How do you actually learn Shopify development as an absolute beginner?

Well, in this article, we will be talking about how to learn Shopify development in 2024 as a beginner.

Watch video

If you prefer watching video tutorials, you can watch the video version of this article below:

Otherwise, you can continue by reading my guide below.

Getting started

In order for you to be able to learn Shopify development, you’ll have to understand or at least know the fundamentals of web development (like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript).

Why? Because Shopify development is, indeed, still part of web development.

You will still use HTML, CSS, JavaScript, or frontend languages to render your Shopify development projects. You will also need to learn backend development. In other words, you will need to pick a programming language for your backend. This could be Node, PHP, Ruby, or Python.

It’s important to note though that there are more programming languages that you can use for Shopify development. The only thing that matters is the programming language should be able to communicate with the Shopify API.

Now, let’s assume you have learned the frontend and the backend. What is the next thing that you need to learn?

Well, the next thing that you should learn is database especially if your end goal is to create Shopify apps. Most of the time, when you do Shopify app development, you will be saving some data of the merchant to your database.

Once you have learned all of that, you’re pretty much ready to go and learn Shopify development.

Learning Shopify development

Good job! You have finally learned web development. The next thing that you will be learning is Shopify development. However, before you learn Shopify development, let’s understand first what is Shopify development.

What is Shopify development?

Shopify development is a way for Shopify developers to create applications or features to improve a Shopify online store.

Now, there are two things that you can create with Shopify development:

Shopify Apps

A Shopify app is a software application or plugin that extends the capabilities of a Shopify store. These apps are developed by third-party developers and are available in the Shopify App Store. Shopify apps allow store owners to add specific features, functionality, and integrations to their online stores without needing to code everything from scratch.

For example, there are apps for displaying product reviews, setting up email marketing campaigns, handling customer support, integrating with social media platforms, and much more. These apps help store owners optimize and customize their Shopify stores to suit their business needs.

Shopify Themes

A Shopify theme, on the other hand, is a collection of templates, sections, snippets and styles that determine the overall appearance and layout of a Shopify store. Themes control the design elements, such as the color scheme, typography, page layout, header, footer, and other visual aspects of the store.

If you’re familiar with WordPress, then WordPress theme is similar to the Shopify theme. The only difference is Shopify theme development uses its own programming language which is called Liquid.

If you want to learn more about Shopify app & theme development, you can enroll to our courses by clicking the buttons below.

So now that you at least have an idea of what is Shopify development, the next thing that you should learn is Shopify especially if you haven’t truly touched a Shopify store.

Don’t worry, you don’t have to purchase a Shopify store to learn Shopify. You can go to the Shopify Developers page and there you can create a partners account so you can create a development store.

So, you might be confused a little, what is a development store?

A development store is a Shopify store meant to be used for testing your Shopify apps and Shopify themes. That’s why it’s called a “development” store.

So, what should you learn in your Shopify store? Well, you should obviously learn how to navigate through a Shopify store. You should know how to create a product, how to go to the customizer page, how to access the locales, etc. In fact, you should really master all of the sections of a Shopify store. Otherwise, you’ll end up confused about where to find these sections.

Doing Shopify development

Okay, so let’s assume that you have done everything I mentioned above. Now what?

Well, obviously, you can start making Shopify development projects but like I mentioned earlier, there are two things that you can create with Shopify development, Shopify app and Shopify theme.

Now, the question is…

Which one should you make? Apps or Themes?

I highly recommend you to start with Shopify theme development because that’s where you will be learning everything about Liquid programming and Liquid programming is very important especially if you’re going to create a Shopify app that customizes a Shopify store.

Conclusion

I know it looked pretty simple but learning Shopify development can take a lot of time. I remember it took me 1 month to learn how to create a Shopify app but obviously, everyone is not the same. So my advice for you is to just take it easy and don’t pressure yourself a lot. Learn Shopify development when you feel like it and sooner or later, you’ll realize that you are now able to develop Shopify themes or apps.

If you’re interested, you can check out my courses here, I have put out a few courses that teach you how to create Shopify apps and Shopify themes.

Building Shopify Apps with Laravel & PHP (ohmybrew/laravel-shopify)

If you don’t know already, there are plenty of ways to create Shopify apps. Thanks to Shopify REST API and its GraphQL API access, you can now develop new apps with your favorite programming language.

If you are comfortable with plain PHP, we have written a full Shopify App Development Tutorial with PHP. You can use it as your guide to developing Shopify apps because, in this article, we’ll be focusing more on building Shopify apps using Laravel.

What is Laravel?

Laravel is a web application framework with an elegant syntax to make the development more enjoyable, unlike developing on a plain PHP syntax. Laravel attempts to take the pain out of development by easing common tasks used in the majority of the web projects, such as web authentication, routing, sessions, and caching.

What is a Shopify App?

How To Build Shopify Apps with PHP

Shopify app is an additional feature for Shopify stores for controlling and management. With the help of Shopify API and GraphQL, you can create applications like Oberlo to find products to sell.

For more applications, you may look at our list of best Shopify apps for increasing sales.

Shopify App Development Packages

There are many packages online that can help you build Shopify apps. See the list below:

Featured Video

Watch how I create Shopify apps using Laravel in 10 minutes here:

How to Create Shopify Apps with Laravel?

To create a Shopify app with Laravel, you firstly need to create first the app for API and secret keys.

Shopify Partner Dashboard: Create new apps

If you don’t know how to create an app, you may refer to this guide: How to build Shopify apps with Shopify Partner Dashboard

After creating the app in your Shopify Partner Dashboard, the next thing we need to do is to setup the skeleton of Laravel. To do that, we need to install composer and create a new project.

To do that, create a new folder where you want your projects to stay in and then open a command prompt and select that folder.

After that, type the following command:

composer create-project laravel/laravel /path/to/your/project

Then change your current directory to the path of your project. For example, I have created a Laravel project using the command above and name my project shopify_app.

cd shopify_app

Then type the following command:

composer require ohmybrew/laravel-shopifyCode language: JavaScript (javascript)

You should see something like this:

How to create shopify apps with Laravel & PHP

Then it will update the package and dependencies.

Installing Laravel PHP for Shopify App Development

Once done, use the following command.

php artisan vendor:publish --tag=shopify-config

After that, you will now be able to access the config file in config/shopify-app.php.

Typically you will need to fill in the app_nameapi_keyapi_secret, and api_scopes to generate a working app. Items like webhooks and scripttags are completely optional depending on your app requirements. As well, anything to do with billing is also optional and is disabled by default.

It is also recommended to use an env file for the configuration.

Shopify App Settings

In your app’s settings on your Shopify Partner dashboard, you need to set the callback URL to be:

http://127.0.0.1:8000/Code language: JavaScript (javascript)

And the whitelisted redirect_uri to be:

http://127.0.0.1:8000/authenticateCode language: JavaScript (javascript)

The callback URL will point to the home route, while the redirect_uri will point to the authentication route.

Routing the App

This package expects a route named home to exist. By default, the package has this route defined which shows a simple welcome page. To enable it, you will need to open routes/web.php and comment out the default Laravel route for /.

Optionally, to make your own, edit routes/web.php and modify the default route to use the auth.shop middleware with the home named, example:

Route::get('/', function () {
    return view('welcome');
})->middleware(['auth.shop'])->name('home');
Code language: JavaScript (javascript)

Next, modify resources/views/welcome.blade.php to extend this packages’ layout for Shopify AppBridge abilities, for example:

@extends('shopify-app::layouts.default')

@section('content')
    <p>You are: {{ ShopifyApp::shop()->shopify_domain }}</p>
@endsection

@section('scripts')
    @parent

    <script type="text/javascript">
        var AppBridge = window['app-bridge'];
        var actions = AppBridge.actions;
        var TitleBar = actions.TitleBar;
        var Button = actions.Button;
        var Redirect = actions.Redirect;
        var titleBarOptions = {
            title: 'Welcome',
        };
        var myTitleBar = TitleBar.create(app, titleBarOptions);
    </script>
@endsection

Code language: HTML, XML (xml)

Jobs

Recommendations

By default Laravel uses the sync driver to process jobs. These jobs run immediately and synchronously (blocking).

This package uses jobs to install webhooks, scripttags, and an option after-install hook if any are defined in the configuration. If you do not have any after-install hooks, scripttags, or webhooks to install on the shop, you may skip this section.

If you do however, you can leave the sync driver as default. But, it may impact load times for the customer accessing the app. Its recommended to setup Redis or database as your default driver in config/queue.php so jobs can run in the background and not affect the frontend performance. See Laravel’s docs on setting up queue drivers.

For more information on creating webhooks, see Creating Webhooks of this wiki or After Authentication Job.

Uninstalled Job

There is a default job provided which soft deletes the shop, and its charges (if any) for you. You’re able to install this job directly or extend it.

To install, first run:

php artisan vendor:publish --tag=shopify-jobs a job will be placed in App/Jobs/AppUninstalledJob.

Next, edit config/shopify-app.php to enable the job:

'webhooks' => [
        [
            'topic' => env('SHOPIFY_WEBHOOK_1_TOPIC', 'app/uninstalled'),
            'address' => env('SHOPIFY_WEBHOOK_1_ADDRESS', 'https://(your-domain).com/webhook/app-uninstalled')
        ],
    ],
Code language: JavaScript (javascript)

Use your environment file to replace the values, such as the domain, but set the topic to app/uninstalled and the path as /webhook/app-uninstalled will allow the webhook manager to do the heavy lifting for you.

Migrations

php artisan vendor:publish --tag=shopify-migrations && php artisan migrate

If you have encountered an error after using the commands above. Chances are, you haven’t configured your php.ini file and Laravel and trying to access the database module.

In your Laravel project, open the .env file and get rid of the lines starting with DB_ but keep the DB_CONNECTION and change the value to sqlite.

Laravel Shopify App Development Tutorial

That’s the database that we’re going to use.

Next, find your php.ini file and look for the lines starting with ;extension and remove the semi-colon for these two modules.

extension=pdo_mysql
extension=pdo_sqlite

Once you’re done with everything, try to run the command again

php artisan vendor:publish --tag=shopify-migrations && php artisan migrate

At this point, it should create the database for the Shopify app.

Serve Locally

After migration, run the following command to create the local server.

php artisan serve

There you can browse your application using 127.0.0.1:8000

Login with your store and install the app. However, you might encounter the following error.

Laravel: Invalid Request (Unsupported SSL Request)

Laravel and Shopify Invalid Request (Unsupported SSL Request)

By default, Laravel is only being served through HTTP and as you might already know, Shopify requires your application to be served with SSL and Laravel can’t help you with this at all.

There has been a lot of solutions out there, that you should modify this or add this code to your code. None of them will work.

I suggest you run your own server or use ngrok to expose local servers behind NATs and firewalls to the public internet over secure tunnels.

After you get the URL from ngrok, replace the URLs in your Shopify Partner App Dashboard and there you can access your app.

Laravel and Shopify Set Up ngrok to access web server with SSL and HTTPS

After that, you’ll be able to access your Shopify app using the URL provided by ngrok.

Access Shopify app with ngrok and laravel PHP

And here it is, you may now be redirected to the Shopify app created with Laravel. Lovely!

Shopify App made with Laravel PHP First Run

The ‘Loop’ Problem

If you are using Webhooks to listen for changes, such as a new customer, and then using the API to update this customer, you can create an inadvertent loop. As an example:

  • Laravel App listens for a customer update Shopify webhook.
  • Laravel App receives this webhook from Shopify and processes it.
  • Laravel App then makes a Shopify API call to update this same customer.
  • Shopify then triggers another webhook to your Laravel App as the customer was updated.

And thus an infinite loop is created.

To combat this, it is recommended to implement some mechanism to avoid a loop. For example, don’t perform a customer update on the same customer within 60 seconds. The Shopify Dev forums have a number of solutions to this problem but you must implement logic to avoid a loop or you risk hitting API limits, in addition to annoying your App users.

App Bridge & Legacy

By default, Appbridge is enabled, the embeddable mode for Shopify Apps. If you wish to disable this, set SHOPIFY_APPBRIDGE_ENABLED=0 for your environment variable. This will enabled legacy mode and skip any AppBridge modes.

Please note, X-Frame-Options header must be removed for AppBridge to function. This package attempts to remove this header through the responses in Laravel, but this does not work for all cases. For Nginx, and Laravel Forge, you must specifically comment-out or remove the line below from the Nginx configuration:

add_header X-Frame-Options "SAMEORIGIN";Code language: JavaScript (javascript)

The Nginx configuration is found in Laravel Forge at the very bottom of the page for the site in question: Files->Edit Nginx Configuration

Conclusion

Special thanks to the developers who developed the packages for building Shopify apps easier.

Creating Shopify apps with Laravel and Composer can be a little bit complex to some but it wouldn’t be that much hard if you know a little bit of Laravel and Shopify API. If in case you don’t know any of these, you may refer to their documentation.

Shopify Theme Development: Shopify CLI 3.0 + Online Store 2.0 + TailwindCSS

Shopify just recently updated their Shopify online experience which they call “Online Store 2.0”.

With this update, Shopify merchants can now customize their entire online store using sections & blocks. This opened a lot of doors not just for Shopify app developers but also for Shopify theme developers because now, you can add cool sections and blocks to the most commonly used pages like products page, collections page, blog page, etc.

If you’re a Shopify theme developer and you don’t know yet how to create a Shopify theme for Online Store 2.0, then this is the best time to learn because Shopify is now accepting Shopify themes to be listed on their Shopify Theme Store!

This means you can make money by selling your Shopify themes! So are you interested to learn more?

In this course, we’re going to learn how to create a Shopify theme for Online Store 2.0 using Shopify CLI with the help of TailwindCSS to design a cool online store.

In this course you will learn:

  1. How to set up your development store using Shopify CLI 3.x 🆕
  2. Using TailwindCSS to design a Shopify theme
    • Create navigational bar
    • Create collection page
    • Create product page
    • Create 3D model viewer
    • Create customer page
    • Create cart page
    • and more!
  3. Online Store 2.0 (JSON Templates)
  4. Shopify CLI
  5. Shopify GitHub Integration
  6. Project management
  7. Schema Settings
  8. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for pages like articles, products, etc.
  9. Liquid language (Referencing asset files, loops, conditional statements, Shopify objects, filters, and many more)
  10. Customer Templates

If you think you’re ready to start, signup now, and let’s create the best Shopify theme together!

Changelog

November 24, 2024

  • Updated/added new lesson(s)
  • Updated course title and description

November 17, 2024

  • Updated/added new lesson(s)
  • Updated course description

February 24, 2022

  • Updated/added new lesson(s)
  • Updated course description

February 19, 2022

  • Updated/added new lesson(s)
  • Removed deprecated lesson(s)
  • Edited course description
  • Added new resource(s)
  • Updated metadatas

January 25, 2022

  • Updated/created new lesson(s)
  • Removed deprecated lesson(s)
  • Added new resource(s)

December 03, 2022

  • Updated/created new lesson(s) for Shopify CLI 3.0
  • Updated course description