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:

1. One-stop-shop service helps eliminates risk and saves time.
2. Includes tax calculation on every order for all state and local tax jurisdictions.
3. Allows access to thousands of product taxability codes.
4. Includes Avalara tax compliance and audit reports.
5. 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:

1. Customizable pop-ups to build your email list and generate sales.
2. Cart and Checkout Abandonment offers helps convert shoppers into customers.
3. Versatile targeting and segmentation to better understand shoppers’ behavior.
4. A/B testing to optimize your conversion funnel.
5. 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:

1. Live chat triggers allow you to initiate conversations with visitors on your site.
2. Multi-channel communications enable you to reach out to your customers on Facebook, Messenger, Twitter, or email.
3. Ticketing system enables communication with clients by storing their messages as tickets when you go offline.
4. Customizable live chat widget allows you to customize its look and feel, position on the page, and welcome message for customers.
5. 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:

1. Large catalog gives gives you lots of product choices.
2. Warehousing and fulfillment services enables you to store your non-Printful products at their warehouse and they’ll fulfill all your orders.
3. Customized branding: white labeling lets you add your personal touch.
4. Dedicated customer support.
5. 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:

1. Automatically backup and undo unwanted changes gives you peace of mind.
2. Restore dozens, hundreds, or thousands of product in a few minutes.
3. Secure and GDPR compliant, with encrypted storage.
4. From products and product images to orders and blog posts, Rewind backs up everything you need.
5. 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:

1. Import orders from all your selling channels into a single platform.
2. Ship orders with the best carrier, service, and rates to fit your needs.
3. Create a self-service Branded Returns Portal with your colors, logo, and social channels for an exceptional customer experience.
4. Branded tracking pages, custom confirmation emails, and branded labels and custom packing slips available on paid plans.
5. 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:

1. Easy-to-use editor that works with your existing theme.
2. Pre-designed templates for landing, home, product, and blog pages.
3. World class technical support with same-day email response for all plans.
4. Awesome element library includes just about everything you need, Product Elements enables you to insert product data into any page.
5. 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:

1. Finds new 404 Errors and allows you to fix them on the spot.
2. Allows you to search and edit your 301 Redirects, saving you tons of time.
3. Improves user experience, reducing customer frustration and keeping happy shoppers on your site.
4. Reduces bounce rate, improving sales and SEO.
5. 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:

1. Increases conversion rate on product pages.
2. Optimized for mobile.
3. Full social integration (premium plans)
4. Rich snippets, Google Seller Ratings, and Product Listing Ads increase SEO success (premium plans)
5. 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.

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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.

If you have an automotive store on BigCommerce, you know that the process of continuous improvement is a must to thrive in a fiercely competitive market. In addition to the challenges that most online stores experience (marketing, inventory, shipping, etc.), stores selling automotive parts have some unique issues. Not only do their customers have technical questions, they often don’t know what parts or tools they need to be the Weekend Warrior of their dreams. If they manage to find your website, they might be confused by the multitude of parts and fitments required to do the job they need to do.

Ready for some good news? According to an article in Forbes, Passing The Test Of Time: Cars Owners Keep For A Decade Or Longer, people are keeping their cars longer than ever. While the average marriage in the U.S. lasts just 8.8 years (wow), 12.9% of all new car buyers hold onto their purchases for a decade or longer. As vehicles on the road continue to age, there will be an ever-growing demand for parts and services — which is where your online automotive parts store comes in.

So how do you make the most of your online store and increase the chances of ecommerce success? Have you every heard the phrase “simple but not easy”? The answers aren’t always complicated. Here are three key areas to focus on to improve the effectiveness of your store …

Form and Function

Make your site pretty functional … I mean pretty and functional. If you have a great looking site that’s hard to navigate or get to checkout or a fully functioning site that looks terrible and scares customers away (or worse yet, a bad site that also looks terrible!) you’re shooting yourself in the foot. It’s vital to have both beauty and brains to make your site viable in the competitive ecommerce world.

1. Form: The Eye Buys

Opt 7 is killing it with their site images.

In order to make your site look legit and trustworthy, it’s vital to invest in eye-catching, quality images whenever possible. If your product photos are grainy, stretched, shot in bad light, or not uniformly sized, you have a big problem. Stores like Opt 7 set a high bar in site photo quality. We especially like the image on their Home page that turns lights on and off as you hover over different areas. How cool is that?

To slide or not to slide: that is the question. Many clients and BigCommerce Forum participants wonder if they should have carousel sliders on their site. The answer? It depends on whom you ask. Most conversion optimization experts are on the side of “no sliders!” but should you choose to use them, make sure you time them to ensure that the concise messaging you include on each slide gives the viewer enough time to read your very important content. In other words, if you’re going to do it, do it right.

Pro Tip: Make sure your images are the same size/aspect ratio to maintain continuity and alignment throughout your site. This is especially important in your carousel to prevent image “jumps” as the sliders scroll.

2. Function: Choose the Right Theme

Parts Warehouse Theme

If you have thousands (or tens of thousands) of products, you need to start with a template that is optimized for large product catalogs. One theme that several of our BigCommerce clients in the automotive space have found successful is Parts Warehouse. Its left navigation with dropdowns makes it easy to organize products in multiple categories, and its simple home page design directs customers to where they want to go.

Pro Tip: Not using Parts Warehouse? Keep in mind that template designers aren’t always experts in conversion optimization. You may need to add, tweak, or remove elements to help show your products in their best light. Using available page real estate (especially above the fold) to convey the right messaging is also key to creating the right image and identity for your products and your brand. If you need help customizing your store’s features or functionality, contact us for help.

3. Fine-Tune Your Navigation

Make sure your nav is product-focused and that your categories and products are well organized. Never have a multi-line nav bar! This is an issue I see a lot, especially in big stores. Keep it simple and streamlined. Products have got to remain front and center to get the customer where they need to go, quickly and easily. Try consolidating your products into broad categories and offer a dropdown or mega menu experience to drive customers to subcategories.

Pro Tip: Items like Shipping, Returns, and Privacy Policies are better located in the footer than the main navigation bar.

Use Tools

Many new store owners get frustrated at the lack of functionality in their storefront. As I always say, shopping platforms cannot be all things to all people. Apps are an easy way to expand your site’s functionality both front end and back end. There are hundreds of tools in BigCommerce’s app marketplace in many price points. Here are a few to check out:

4. Frontend Tools

• • Shogun (Page Builder)
    Build beautiful custom landing pages and blog pages with a powerful drag and drop page builder that uses your theme’s styling. Landing pages are a great way to promote specific parts or product lines in your store, independent of your website. Having used Shogun on client projects, we can attest to its ease of use and overall awesomeness.

• PartFinder (YMM/Fitment Search)
  “I already have a search bar — what’s fitment search?” Many auto parts stores have products that have an exact match or fitment to another product or part (like a headlight for a particular Year/Make/Model of car). If you’re spending too much time fielding phone calls or chatting with customers online about what part they need, offering customers the ability to find precisely what they need on their own just got easier. PartFinder’s handy widget tool enables a customer to enter specific search criteria that points them to the part(s) they need.

Real-world example: Want to see a store using the PartFinder widget and the Parts Warehouse theme? Check out Tuner Experts.

5. Backend Tools

• • Skubana (Inventory Management)
    Do you have overselling or underselling issues? Skubana offers real-time inventory updates, along with integrating and managing inventory from multiple warehouses and shipping from BigCommerce and a variety of other shipping channels. It supports single products, bundles and kits for managing your listings. Different storage options for your inventory include third party logistics warehouses and dropshippers.

• Signifyd (Fraud protection)
  Signifyd solves the challenges that growing e-commerce businesses persistently face: billions of dollars lost in chargebacks, customer dissatisfaction from mistaken declines, and operational costs due to tedious, manual transaction investigation. Signifyd’s guaranteed fraud protection is supported by a full-service cloud platform that automates fraud prevention allowing businesses to increase sales and open new markets while reducing risk. When a customer places an order with your BigCommerce store, Signifyd automatically reviews the order and tells you whether to ship it or not.

Expand Your Reach with Social Proof

6. Build Trust & Connection, and Establish Authority

Have you ever stopped to think about the real value of social media marketing? Beyond likes, follows, and retweets, social engagement extends your reach past your static website. This enables you to establish your business as an authority in your industry, and presents your site as providing great products and advice to customers and potential customers in your niche.

Besides the channels you normally think of when you hear “social” (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, etc.), customer reviews and testimonials are great ways of communicating trust and value from others who have done business with you.

• • Yotpo (Product Reviews)Yotpo helps BigCommerce businesses generate tons of reviews, photos, and other user-generated content and use them to drive qualified traffic, increase conversion rate & boost sales. It collects, manages, analyzes, and distributes your customer content in a single platform, with AI-powered solutions designed to scale with you.

• Elfsight Testimonials Slider (Testimonials)
  

  A new app in the BigCommerce app marketplace, the Testimonials Slider plugin is a simple tool to display customers’ testimonials on your website in a vivid and attractive way. You can use any type of feedback to make a trustworthy testimonial with author’s name, photo, company logo, and even a URL to the client’s website. Increase credibility of your product showing user experience of your clients and strengthen your reputation with real and sincere testimonials.

Bonus: Tips Grab Bag

Want more? Check out “7 Critical SEO Errors of E-Commerce Websites” from Neil Patel’s blog for some extra cool tips on making your online auto parts store awesome. While not strictly automotive related, the timeless best practices noticed in this article are great references for any online store. Good luck, and happy selling!