I will give you the “give a man a fish, you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime” type of answer.
Why? Because the Shopify appstore is a dynamic ecosystem, where new apps get published and old apps leave every day.
This means that any one app I mention now will have an expiration date attached to it, depending on when you are reading this. Or at the very least many caveats (i.e. it depends on your niche, geography, language, theme, budget, technical know-how etc.)
The only thing that matters, is that you are able to find the right app for YOUR store, given YOUR personal situation. Luckily this is a skill that can be taught.
You will need at least one app for each of the following operational ‘pillars’ of your store:
Marketing
Product page optimization (incl. CRO “conversion rate optimization”)
Logistics (incl. Order, tracking and inventory management
CRM
And yes each one subdivides into many smaller categories. Just for your product page ‘pillar’ you might need:
Page builder app
Currency converter app
Language translation app
Promotion & pricing app
Countdown timer app
Reviews app
Pre-order app
Dynamic pricing app
Yes the list goes on. I on average use 30-50 apps per store, depending on the size of the store.
Here’s the takeaway however: “don’t be the man with a hammer, to whom every problem is a nail”.
What do I mean by that? Don’t just go and download a bunch of apps that you read on all those review sites. FIRST, experience a concrete problem your store is facing, THEN go out and find an app that specifically fixes that problem.
This will be much cheaper and a customised approach to solving your store’s problems.
SO, for example you realise you need a currency converter app, since you now want to sell in a new country / new audience. What do you do?
You go to the Shopify appstore and literally type in ‘currency converter’ into the search bar. (Yes it's that simple).
What you will see is a Pareto Distribution for each category I listed above. This means that only 2 - 3 apps dominate each category (for the biggest categories it might be 3 - 5 apps). They typically control 80%+ of that category's market.
You can see that by their ranking on the appstore but most notably by their reviews. There is a massive dropoff in reviews after the top 2-3 apps in almost every category.
You then simply follow the following steps:
You open the 2-3 top apps for each category (minimum 500 reviews with above 4.6 stars)
You go to their features bullet point list and read it
You rank them by: relevance of features, cost of app and review quality
Install the top app in your ranking
Repeat for all categories where your store is experiencing a problem
That’s it. This is how you will ALWAYS find the BEST app for YOUR store. Most importantly, this is expiration proof.
Notice how I didn’t mention a single app name. This is because every review that insists a given app is the best one (without knowing your store specifics) is most likely monetizing that somehow, leading to a bias in their answer. And that's coming from someone who developed and owns multiple Shopify apps right now.
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