There is a bewildering array of apps you can add to your Shopify store – anything you want, there’s an app for that. Check out the app store: https://apps.shopify.com/ Many of them will cost you money, and potentially clog up your store and slow it down. I’m an advocate for simplicity, and for saving money. You can always upgrade to expensive apps later on, if you find that the free versions aren’t giving you what you need.
These are my top 12 apps that I have added to stores, in no particular order:
- A review app (free or paid)
- Search and Discovery (free)
- Bookvault (free)
- Bundles (free)
- Upsell app (from free)
- EAS EU Compliance / Quaderno – for sales taxes (paid)
- GDPR Compliance (free or paid)
- Klaviyo (from free) / email provider app
- King Linked Options (paid)
- Print-on-demand apps for merch (free)
- Anti-fraud / country blocker app (paid)
- Shopify Flow and Email (free)
Note: I don’t have any affiliate links with any app I recommend. It’s simply from my own experience of using them. Also, this is not an exclusive list of all the apps available, so please do your own research when considering which apps to get.
This is what each one does and why you might want to add it:
A review app
I used to always go for judge.me as they have a free tier, but they have recently downgraded what you can get on the free plan. It’s still ok for a very basic review app, and looks fine, but you now can’t choose to not send review requests for some products, which is an issue if you’ve got a pre-order on sale. (You don’t want review requests sent out for a pre-order which your customer hasn’t received yet.) There is a manual workaround, but it’s clunky. Another popular app is Loox.
Both judge.me and Loox give you star ratings on your product pages and the ability for the customer to write a review on the product. They will also email customers with review requests after a time that you determine.
Shopify Search and Discovery
This is another free, Shopify-own app which I love. It’s a useful little app that I use for adding filters to collections using metafields. If you’ve got a View All collection, you can add these nifty filters so readers can search by genre, trope, format, etc.
The app also gives you the ability to create product recommendations on the product page, like this:
BookVault
You’ll need the BookVault app if you’re going to use them to print and distribute your print books. It makes the process of adding your books to Shopify extremely easy.
Shopify Bundles
This is a Shopify-own app that is useful if you want to create bundles of products you are shipping yourself, for example, signed paperbacks.
This is not for creating bundles of ebooks/audiobooks, as you do that within BookFunnel. And it’s not for bundles of print-on-demand books shipped through BookVault, as you make the bundle within BookVault.
The Shopify Bundles app is used if you are tracking your own inventory. So if you have three books in a series that you ship from home – maybe they are signed copies and you include a bookmark with the bundle – then by using the bundle app, it will manage the stock for you. If someone buys 10 copies of book 1, and you only have 10 in stock, Shopify will know that the series bundle is also out of stock.
Upsell app
You can get apps to set up frequently-bought-together options, cart upsells, product page upsells, and thank you page upsells. You can choose whether to add discounts or not to these. You will have seen frequently-bought-togethers on retailers such as Amazon.
I’ve used Selleasy as it’s free to start with, but there are other apps that have more functionality if you want it.
There are also ways you can edit your product templates to encourage people to buy the next in the series without needing an additional app.
Sales tax apps
If you are selling books to the EU you might want to consider getting an app to sort out the sales tax for you. EAS will get you set up for EU and UK compliance, and they will make sure your VAT is correct. If you want a worldwide solution, have a look at Quaderno. Both have a cost, unsurprisingly, but will give you peace of mind.
For US sellers, there is Shopify Tax, which is already included and free (up to a point). It will help you work out what US taxes you need to pay and in which jurisdictions.
GDPR Compliance
You’ll want one of those cookie banners. I’ve used Pandectes, which is free for the basics, and there is also Consentmo GDPR which has a free plan too. Shopify now has its own cookie banner built in too.
Klaviyo
See my separate article on post-purchase emails which explains in detail why you would want to consider integrating some sort of marketing automation emails.
Other email providers like Mailerlite and Kit also have apps for integrating your email with Shopify.
King Linked Options
This one has been a revelation to me! It’s $9.99 a month, but if you sell the same book in multiple formats, have a look at this.
You mustn’t set up the different formats of your books as variants of the same product, as it’ll mess up your sales taxes horribly. Ebooks and print books have different tax categories so you have to set them up separately.
When you look at a t-shirt for sale online, you can flip through the different colour options, because the options are different variants of the same product. King Linked Options allows you to link the formats of your books together as if they are variants. It adds buttons (which you can customise) to the product page like this:
Shopify has now added this function for its Shopify Plus customers, but those of us on the normal plan can’t use this yet, so we have to use the paid app for now. For a tenner a month, I think it’s worth the cost if you have several formats of the same book.
Print-on-demand apps for merch
The main ones are Printify, Printful and Gelato. Authors use these to sell t-shirts, bags, mugs, and other items that can have their designs printed on. They print the products on demand and ship them to the customer directly, similarly to BookVault for print books. Have a search for different companies if you have particular products in mind.
They are pretty easy to set up.
A word of warning! If you use EAS to manage your UK/EU VAT, the people at EAS will not support you using these print-on-demand apps in the EU/UK as they allege their tax situation is not what it should be. (I’m being diplomatic here, the chap at EAS used much stronger wording than this.) EAS do have some other printers they say are fine, who are UK-based, but that’s not ideal for your US customers. You will have to proceed with caution if you use EAS and also want to use one of these merchandise print-on-demand apps in the EU/UK. Talk to EAS before doing anything.
Just to confirm, this problem does NOT apply to BookVault.
Anti-fraud / country blocker app
There are lots of these apps. I have installed BM Country Blocker on several stores now. What you want is an app that will help you deal with orders with a high risk of fraud, and will enable you to block countries / states / IP addresses that you know are fraudulent. See my article on Bots for the details. If you sell any digital products cheaper than $5 definitely get a fraud blocker app without delay, as this seems to be the price point below which credit card testing fraud is most likely.
Shopify Flow and Email
These two apps are made by Shopify and you’ll need them if you want Shopify to send out abandoned cart emails for you. (You won’t if you’re using Klaviyo.)
You can also use Flow to set up all manner of automations in your store. For example, I use Flow to identify high or medium fraud risk orders, email the store owner, and make sure payment is only authorized for low fraud risk orders.
P.S. Thank you to Guy at swordschool.shop for the majority of the screenshots I’ve used in this article. If you want to have a look at anything in more detail, visit https://swordschool.shop/
