BigCommerce’s App Marketplace is one of the platform’s claims to fame. Their current selection of 650 apps across 15 categories and 65 subcategories is constantly expanding, and is second to none in the ecommerce universe.
Why invest in apps? “We’re now in a digital world where smaller and growing brands can take advantage of the same technologies that previously were only available as built-in integrations for companies with large development teams (and even larger wallets). Add-on apps are the key to scalable and lasting growth in online retail because they provide brands with the functionality and expertise that normally aren’t available in standalone teams.” — Corinne Watson, Partner Content Marketing Specialist, BigCommerce
With so many choices, where do you start? Here’s our list of must-have BigCommerce apps for 2019.
Note: This post contains affiliate links to products from one or more of our strategic partners. While we may receive compensation from purchases made through these links, these do not have any impact on our recommendations.
Avalara AvaTax
Category: Accounting & Tax/Tax
Description: Spend more time selling and less time calculating taxes when you activate AvaTax with your BigCommerce Account.
Price: Custom pricing
Top 5 Features:
- One-stop-shop service helps eliminates risk and saves time.
- Includes tax calculation on every order for all state and local tax jurisdictions.
- Allows access to thousands of product taxability codes.
- Includes Avalara tax compliance and audit reports.
- Offers full compatibility with Avalara Returns filing service.
What We Like About It:
By integrating completely with your BigCommerce store, this app helps your business get compliant fast and lowers your audit risk.
Justuno
Category: Marketing/Digital Marketing & Advertising
Description: Justuno is a conversion marketing and analytics platform that provides retailers with powerful tools to convert shoppers along with data insights to optimize marketing campaigns.
Price: 14-day free trial; $29/month
Top 5 Features:
- Customizable pop-ups to build your email list and generate sales.
- Cart and Checkout Abandonment offers helps convert shoppers into customers.
- Versatile targeting and segmentation to better understand shoppers’ behavior.
- A/B testing to optimize your conversion funnel.
- Drag-and-drop design canvas helps customize existing themes to your needs.
What We Like About It:
Not only is this app highly rated in the BigCommerce Apps Marketplace, Justuno is constantly adding new features to their app based on user feedback, BigCommerce updates, and industry trends.
Live Chat
Category: CRM & Customer Service/Customer Service & Helpdesks
Description: LiveChat is a BigCommerce-specific chat tool for customer support and online sales that can be used to manage communication and personal interactions with your customers.
Price: 30-Day Free Trial; $16/mo.
Top 5 Features:
- Live chat triggers allow you to initiate conversations with visitors on your site.
- Multi-channel communications enable you to reach out to your customers on Facebook, Messenger, Twitter, or email.
- Ticketing system enables communication with clients by storing their messages as tickets when you go offline.
- Customizable live chat widget allows you to customize its look and feel, position on the page, and welcome message for customers.
- Mobile live chat applications let you chat everywhere your customers are: in a car, at home, or while shopping.
What We Like About It:
Efficiency! Live Chat makes customer service more efficient by letting you hold multiple chat sessions at the same time and sending canned responses to frequently asked questions, as well as managing offline messages.
Printful
Category: Product Sourcing/Printing & Products-on-Demand
Description: Create custom products for your online store, from t-shirts to hats, while Printful handles the fulfillment, storage, and shipping.
Price: Free
Top 5 Features:
- Large catalog gives gives you lots of product choices.
- Warehousing and fulfillment services enables you to store your non-Printful products at their warehouse and they’ll fulfill all your orders.
- Customized branding: white labeling lets you add your personal touch.
- Dedicated customer support.
- Multiple fulfillment centers for faster service.
What We Like About It:
Printful offers on-demand printing, fulfillment, and warehousing services, making life easier for online store owners — nice!
Rewind
Category: Site Tools/Site Performance & Monitoring
Description: Automated, secure backups for stores of all sizes. Get peace of mind knowing your most important store data is always backed up.
Price: Custom pricing
Top 5 Features:
- Automatically backup and undo unwanted changes gives you peace of mind.
- Restore dozens, hundreds, or thousands of product in a few minutes.
- Secure and GDPR compliant, with encrypted storage.
- From products and product images to orders and blog posts, Rewind backs up everything you need.
- World-class support with live phone support.
What We Like About It:
Rewind performs vital functionality for any size store. Knowing your site’s contents are secure no matter what helps you sleep at night.
ShipStation
Category: Shipping & Fulfillment/Label Printing
Description: Save time and money with efficient shipping labels, wherever you sell, however you ship.
Price: Custom Pricing
Top 5 Features:
- Import orders from all your selling channels into a single platform.
- Ship orders with the best carrier, service, and rates to fit your needs.
- Create a self-service Branded Returns Portal with your colors, logo, and social channels for an exceptional customer experience.
- Branded tracking pages, custom confirmation emails, and branded labels and custom packing slips available on paid plans.
- Great customer support.
What We Like About It:
ShipStation has more integrations than any other shipping platform, and the app is free up to 50 shipments per month. Plus, you can automate nearly every step of your shipping process with presets and automation rules — we love efficiency!
Shogun
Category: Merchandising/Visual Merchandising
Description: Customize your landing pages, blog and product pages with Shogun’s easy drag-and-drop page builder, optimized for SEO and marketing campaigns.
Price: 7-Day Free trial; $49/mo.
Top 5 Features:
- Easy-to-use editor that works with your existing theme.
- Pre-designed templates for landing, home, product, and blog pages.
- World class technical support with same-day email response for all plans.
- Awesome element library includes just about everything you need, Product Elements enables you to insert product data into any page.
- Create custom drag and drop elements for endless reuse.
What We Like About It:
Shogun is easy to use and enables anyone to create a custom web page with no coding experience necessary, saving time and money.
Swerve Redirects
Category: Site Tools/Site Performance & Monitoring
Description: Swerve helps you easily track/fix 404 Errors and quickly search/edit 301 Redirects. Efficiently maintains store health and improves site ranking.
Price: 7-day free trial; $9.99/month
Top 5 Features:
- Finds new 404 Errors and allows you to fix them on the spot.
- Allows you to search and edit your 301 Redirects, saving you tons of time.
- Improves user experience, reducing customer frustration and keeping happy shoppers on your site.
- Reduces bounce rate, improving sales and SEO.
- Helps maintain your link power by helping search engines find your content and preserving the link juice you worked to hard to earn.
What We Like About It:
This new app adds much-needed 404 Error tracking and 301 Redirect search functionality to your BigCommerce store, a unique feature not available in any other BigCommerce application.
Yotpo
Category: Merchandising/Ratings & Reviews
Description: Generate tons of reviews and use them to drive qualified traffic and more sales for your store.
Price: Custom pricing; free plan available
Top 5 Features:
- Increases conversion rate on product pages.
- Optimized for mobile.
- Full social integration (premium plans)
- Rich snippets, Google Seller Ratings, and Product Listing Ads increase SEO success (premium plans)
- User-generated photos create unique visual marketing opportunities (premium plans).
What We Like About It:
Letting customers see what other customers love about your company and products creates trust and drives sales.
__________________________________________________________________________
Investing in apps to augment your store’s functionality is not only vital for your success in ecommerce, but helps you focus more on improving your business, not just your website.
Larger, big-box retailers have built out technology for years — often with a high price tag, and lasting issues with development and security. With more and more apps becoming available to store owners of any size, businesses can now compete against and stand above their competition.
Whether you’re a new or veteran store owner, we hope this list is a good starting point for helping grow your business efficiently.
