Shoreline 2

The single biggest flaw in the Shopify platform is their stupid insistence at showing all the optional pay buttons at the top of the checkout. THIS CONFUSES CUSTOMERS AND DRIVES AWAY SALES. Yesterday was the last straw—I had a customer write in to say that he wasn't going to purchase an item worth several thousand dollars, simply because he didn't have Paypal, Google Pay, or Apple Pay. Shopify needs to fix this stupid design immediately. But in the meantime, Billy Yeung's Hide Paypal In Cart is the best $1/month you'll ever spend. Just do it. You'll be glad you did.

This app is the next step in the world domination by Out of the Sandbox. Why do I say this? Well, to start, they have the very best themes. I've owned two. Second, they have the very best support. Patient, informative, and helpful. Now, the Theme Updater app solves the single biggest problem for those of us who dig into the CSS and Liquid to modify our themes: It automatically preseves your code changes. The fact that there's a theme updater app in the first place is pretty darned amazing. But I've tried it, and it really works. This app preserves your code changes when updating. (when "updating", it really just downloads an updated copy to your dashboard, so you can double check that all is OK before publishing) Knowing all this, there's really no reason not to get an OOTSB theme. Great work!

I've been using this app for over a year, and after trying the other similar apps on Shopify, this one is clearly the best. It takes one very important task off your plate: Keeping track of who wants to know when what is back in stock. There really is no reason to try to manage this yourself. All the editable customer emails and reporting are icing on the cake. I can point to thousands of dollars of sales that this app has generated, and many hours of time saved by not having to manage and notify all those backorder people myself. Worth every penny.

I installed and uninstalled every review app available on Shopify. Judge.me was the winner for price and performance. Loads fast, looks great, and it just works. Look at the update log posted on this app page—it's obvious that PJ is dedicated to making this the best app possible. Get this app. ***UPDATE*** I've been using this app since the beginning. I figured I'd update my review to reflect nearly a year with the app. Quite simply, I couldn't be happier. Customer service is the very best on Shopify, the app improves almost daily, and my customers love it. Judge.me is currently the only review app to allow grouped products. This alone is reason enough to dump whatever review app you're using. Undoubtedly Yotpo will steal this idea at some point.....and then charge you another $200/month for the privilege. Plus, the logic in this app is head and shoulders above anything else—review timing, who gets review emails, what products get reviewed, etc. Very refined and functional. Keep up the good work, PJ.

It’s simple: If you have a Shopify store, you want this app. Really. Shopify’s transactional emails are spartan. If you want to look pro, you need to spice them up a bit. There are several apps that do this, but none—and I’ve installed and tried them all—do it as simply and cleanly as OrderlyEmails. The proof is in the pudding: I spent many, many hours working up designs using those other popular Shopify apps, the ones that have gazillions of positive reviews. And yet the email design I got after 10 minutes of fiddling with OrderlyEmails was substantially better than all of them. I really cannot overstate the bang for the buck that this app gives you. The fact that you'll be up and running in minutes is only icing on the cake for any busy store owner. And the best part? You don’t have to buy anything until you’ve created the design. I wish all developers would take this approach.

When considering a cross sell / upsell app, you have to decide which is more valuable to you—automation or manual control. Nearly every recommendation app on Shopify takes an automated approach. This means you can install it and forget it, but you have to trust that the recommendations are going to be good ones. The automated apps (I’ve installed and tried nearly all of them) all claim to use BIG DATA, some sort of secret-sauce algorithm that magically determines what your customers will want to click on. And they make you pay for it: Expect to pay a minimum of $40/month for that magic formula. You know what? Big Data is overrated. We installed a bunch of apps in succession, only because most looked awful on our site and they kept giving the same lousy recommendations. We finally settled on a single app, just to see if it could learn our customer behavior. This app was by far the best of the automated apps that we installed. Nevertheless, in 6 months of reporting, we found that over 90% of clicks from recommendations were just products from the same collection. There’s no programming magic in that, no secret sauce, and no Big Data—our theme (Retina) already has this built in. There’s really no point in paying $50/month for that. So how do you get recommendations that are actually interesting and useful and generate additional sales? If you want it done right, you have to do it yourself. And this means manually selecting your recommendations. Enter Cross Sell. It does not (yet) have an automated algorithm to guess the best possible recommendations, but for only $7/month, who cares? We don’t have 20,000 SKUs, and it’s easy enough to pick our 100 best sellers and add manual recommendations that we know will keep customers clicking and buying. Yes, some of those will be from the same collection, but many will not, and we know after 20 years in business which recommendations are best. For all the rest, Cross Sell lets you choose a default set of recommendations, and there’s also a separate Shopping Cart set of recommendations. Their shopping cart is about to get a lot smarter, too, pulling from the manual recommendations you’ve already assigned to the products in your cart. A few last points: • Automated / Big Data recommendations change as they gather more data. But in every single case that we observed (we monitored about 30 products closely), the changes were for the WORSE. Cross-Sell's manual approach prevents this. • Cross Sell's manual approach lets you choose your own marketing priorities: Do you simply want to highlight accessories that will increase total cart value? Or do you want to highlight new products? Perhaps you want to point customers to lesser-known products? Automated apps don't let you choose. • Cross Sell integrates seamlessly into your Shopify theme—at least for now, their support team will do this for you for free. You’d be surprised how few of the high-dollar recommendation / upsell apps actually play nice with your CSS. • Don’t underestimate the value of speedy load times. All the automated apps I tried (including the one I stuck with for many months) had SLOOOOW load times. With so many users on mobile, the slow-loading upsell apps were a real drag. Because Cross Sell uses a fixed set of recommendations, and doesn’t have to calculate new ones with each page load, it loads as fast as your original content. The support at Cross Sell is the best I've ever received for an app less than $10/month. Steve and Stuart are dedicated pros. Get this app.

I am sometimes hesitant to leave reviews for apps that I really like. There’s something to be said for knowing a well-kept secret. But S Loyalty is good enough that I can’t keep it secret. We happily used another loyalty app for about 9 months. But I ultimately needed something with a) more visual and textual customization, b) more and better reward options, and c) a better customer interface. While I’m not a huge fan of popup / overlay windows, S Loyalty gave me all three of those, at a great price. Notifications — An amazing array of options here. Popup windows and reminders abound, and all can be toggled on or off as you see fit. Email notifications are also available on the Silver plan or above, which means you can have email notices go to your customers for only $39/month. That’s far cheaper than any loyalty app I’ve seen. Rewards — This was what originally drew me to S Loyalty. You can do percent off, percent off collection, dollars off with minimum purchase, dollars off specific items, and more. There’s really every possible kind of reward to be had with S Loyalty. Setup — Because S Loyalty is so customizable, there are a lot of decisions to make during setup. It’s only a few extra minutes, but be aware that you’ll have lots of control at your fingertips. I think the sweetest part is that they have a bookmarklet that allows the app to generate the necessary discount codes in Shopify in a single click. I have yet to run across anything that easy. Interface — The basic customer interface on this is awesome. It’s slick, modern, clean, and pretty customizable for look and feel. It is a perfect fit for our site, and looks really pro. While the basic layout is locked down, there’s enough customization here that it looks like it would work on any site, any theme. The organization is really intuitive, and it makes it really easy—and really tempting—for customers to manage and cash in their rewards. Support — I used to be a developer, so when I install an app, I tend to bombard support teams with lots of detailed questions. Anthony and Nancy at S Loyalty handled all this with grace and aplomb. I couldn’t have asked for better help. Our previous loyalty program was wildly successful, so I was a little unsure about how the new setup would affect customers. So far it has been great—within hours, we already have people cashing in their points through the S Loyalty interface. Loyalty programs are not for everyone—after all, you’ll end up giving away a lot of free stuff—but if you’ve been considering whether to install one on your store, you really need to look no further than S Loyalty.

This is, quite simply, the very best wish list app on Shopify: • Easy installation • Easily customizable Wishlist hosting / landing page • Very customizable add-to-list widget, so it can easily match your theme. • No account required to create a list • The very best add-to-list functionality—it all happens right on the product page. Very slick. No one else has anything like this. What's missing: • Reporting. Did the app generate sales? There is no way to know. • Notification. It would be great to get an email when a list is created. • Deletion. It would be helpful to be able to delete some wish lists. But don't let these minor things sway you—this really is the best Wishlist app on this platform. Get it now.

The best order tracking page / app currently on Shopify. Looks pro, inherits your site's CSS for an easy blend, and loads fast. Most other page-integrated apps on Shopify use slow-loading widgets, but this loads as quickly as any static page on the site. Plus, the app sits on your site, so you don't have to send customers to a third-party URL. The developers are very responsive and eager to keep improving. Get this app. UPDATE: Shopify will soon be building shipment tracking into their checkout page. The catch? They ONLY support USPS. We use 4 or 5 different shippers. Plus, who knows how it will actually work out? This app gives customers the ability to track with either tracking number or email+order ID. We're sticking with Trackr.

Do you remember the first time you watched real-time Google Analytics? How that parade of lines across your screen almost became addictive? Well, imagine those same analytics with far more robust information, and then actual recordings of website visitors—mouse movements, clicks, pauses, everything. That's what you get with Lucky Orange. LO gives you the most detailed information possible—whereas Google Analytics only shows you referring domains, LO shows actual pages, so you can see in an instant where each visitor is coming from. You can follow each visitor through your site in real time, or just click to see a sequential list of pages they've visited. The $10/month would be the best $10 you'd ever spend in the app store, even if it was just the amazing user recordings and realtime analytics. But there's also a chat engine and a bunch of other goodies thrown in to boot. I really can't recommend this highly enough. My only caveat is that you have to set aside time to watch the recordings—they are so useful, so informative.....and so addictive.