Get These 5 Best Free Shopify Apps Before Launching Your Store

1. PushOwl Web Push Notifications

PushOwl allows you to send automated push notifications completely free.

You can bring back visitors to your store, even anonymous shoppers who abandoned their cart or forgot to checkout via automated notifications to drive more sales and boost brand recognition.

Moreover, PushOwl integrates with 18+ other Shopify apps for an improved experience and results-driven strategies. This app helps you move shoppers down the funnel, improve the overall customer journey, and ultimately boost sales.

The free versions features:

• Unlimited Subscribers
• Campaign Scheduling
• Back-In-Stock Automation
• Price Drop Automation
• Basic Reports
• Chat Support

2. WeSupply Order Tracking

What should you look for in an order tracking solution?

It should enable you to track all orders while allowing you to look up any specific order in your database as easily and smoothly as possible.

To make sure you are always in control, our technology should enable tracked orders to be found with pinpoint accuracy. This will help ensure a smooth customer experience and increase productivity for everyone involved!

Moreover, you need to give your customer the opportunity to track their purchase as it moves from point A to point B, and so on, through various stages and onto delivery at its final destination. This will increase engagement levels, giving your business more credibility.

By communicating with your customers and letting them know what’s going on, you can increase their satisfaction levels. Shipment exceptions, backorders, and delays are still most likely to happen, but the key is to let your customers know exactly what happened to their orders.

When relying only on Shopify’s own order tracking tool, both of you and your customers might encounter certain inconveniences, such as:

• Lack of responsiveness
• No real-time updates
• Poor inventory management

While Shopify is great for its core functionality, you can improve the order tracking experience using WeSupply‘s free features that enable you to:

• Create personalized experiences
• Ease your customers’ shipping anxiety     
• Ask the right post-purchase questions

Click here to find out what are the main differences between Shopify and WeSupply order tracking tools.

The free version for your eCommerce store includes:

• Unlimited shipments per month
• Proactive email notifications
• Branded Tracking Page
• Integration with customer service app Zendesk

Keep in mind that WeSupply also comes with additional paid plans and advanced features to help store owners increase average order value, drive post-purchase engagement, manage returns effectively, and increase the number of repeat buyers.

3. Language Translate & Currency

Language Translate & Currency is a free AI-powered Shopify app that translates store content, including the checkout page and other third-party apps in one click. To improve the shopping experience, this tool switches languages automatically by the visitors’ location.

You can translate and edit content in real-time, automatically, while making sure everything is SEO-friendly.

Besides, you’ll also be able to convert currency into 160+ local currencies on the checkout page.

The free version comes with:

• Unlimited words and page views
• Translating into one language
• AI neural machine translation
• One free currency to switch to
• Shopify Payment integration
• Basic switcher settings

4. Meteor Mega Menu

Meteor Mega Menu provides pre-designed menu templates to get that professional look within minutes and doesn’t require web development knowledge.

It enables you to feature products by name, category, image, or price and effortlessly customize the looks and contents of your menu. In just a few clicks, the app lets you organize menu items in a variety of ways, including the ability to display images or other product information.

The app lets you create designs that are both desktop and mobile-friendly for a seamless customer experience. The free version of this app comes with:

• 1 published mega menu
• 2 menu template designs
• Chat and email support

5. Powerful Form Builder

Powerful Form Builder helps you to save time and effort on building both simple and advanced forms. You can choose from their pre-designed form templates and display them anywhere in just a few clicks, including on product pages, collection pages, cart pages, and even on your online store’s homepage.

Powerful Form Builder is a great tool for building your Shopify contact form or custom form without any technical knowledge, only using their no-code design elements.

It comes with a free plan that enables you to:

• Display 1 form anywhere
• Have 12 fields
• Have unlimited submissions each month
• Get 40 auto-response emails per month
• Upload files
• Create a conditional logic

What To Know Before You Get Started

There’s a lot to know, of course, but you have to start somewhere.

To get the most out of your Shopify experience, it’s important that you do some pre-work before even starting. You need to know what you want from your online shop before you get down to business.

That’s why we’ll discuss below some of the fundamental things you need to get straight before you jump into the unknown and kickstart your Shopify store.

Have a Website Monitoring System In Place

With so many tools available, it’s important to choose the right one for your needs. Some will provide more information than others and enable you to track conversions in different ways—a tool with solid reporting features is better most of the time because results can vary slightly depending on the metrics you decide to look at and improve.

A good starting point for businesses of all sizes is Google Analytics, a powerful tool you can use to take your website’s performance to the next level and generate more sales. You can use it to identify opportunities and improve conversions, leading you down the path of success!

Triple-check Your Payment Settings

A lot of unexpected things can happen during the buying process, which is why it’s important to test your payment settings before driving traffic to your store. To avoid situations in which the buying process may not go according to plan, make sure you go through the entire setup and triple-check all details.

One of the most common reasons for cart abandonment is a broken buying process. Shoppers get frustrated when they can’t complete a purchase, and this often leads to them leaving your site without buying anything.

Check the payment gateway tool to place a test order on your site. This will help you identify any potential problems with your payment settings before you start having visitors to your online store.

Settle On Tax And Shipping Settings

Before you launch your Shopify store, it’s important to make sure that your tax and shipping settings are appropriate for the products you’re selling.

Although setting up the correct tax and shipping rates for your Shopify store can be confusing, it’s a challenge all store owners have to overcome. Shopify enables you to set up free, flat, or calculated shipping rates that will then appear on the checkout page for your customers to see. You can set up location-based tax rates, include taxes in the product prices, charge taxes on shipping rates, and so on.

Moreover, you need to make sure that taxes aren’t duplicated when configuring the correct settings for your products and location. Depending on your business’s location and the destination country of your products, tax and shipping charges will vary, so you may want to consult the sales tax articles from Shopify and check with a local tax authority or a tax accountant.

Establish Your Shipping Options

Ecommerce businesses know that shipping can make or break them, but finding the best value shipping is not a walk in the park— and it’s often doubled down by supply chain issues worldwide.

Not to mention that not being able to offer free shipping can be a blow for an eCommerce business since consumer behavior keeps changing, and most customers want free shipping and free returns now more than ever. In fact, a report shows that half of the consumers avoid retailers that do not offer free shipping, and 77% have abandoned purchases due to unsatisfactory shipping options.

Establishing the right shipping options for your business often means sacrificing one thing in favor of another. You need to decide what you’re willing to give up on to make the customer experience better and protect your online store in the long run.

Start by providing all the relevant information your customers need upfront so they know what to expect. Compare the prices of various shipping carriers so you can get the best deal for your business.

Clarify Your Return, Refund, and Exchange Policy

Merchants can spend hours each week handling returns, refunds, and exchanges. Returns, refunds, and exchanges are a necessary part of doing business, but they can take up a lot of time that could be better spent on other tasks.

Before automating a significant part of the process, it’s key to review your policies for all types of purchases and consider all potential exceptions and how you’re going to be dealing with them.

Unfortunately, many customers are hesitant to shop online because they’re worried about how they’ll return or exchange an item if it doesn’t fit or isn’t what they expected. And with so many people shopping online, it’s important to make sure that your customers feel confident in how they handle returns and exchanges right from the start.

For instance in 2021, what was traditionally known as ‘National Returns Day’ became National Returns Week, with an average of 1.75 million packages returned for five days in a row during the week of January 4, 2021.

You have to be prepared for these types of situations since the way you handle returns can make a significant difference in terms of customer experience and brand loyalty. Consider working on an extended holiday return policy and make sure you also discuss terms of fair use in your return, refund, and exchange policies.

Why?

Truth is that you might have to deal with abusive or fraudulent returns, so you need to monitor your return activity. If you notice an abnormal pattern of return activity or behavior then you may have to connect with your customers about their returns. You can even reserve the right to limit returns or exchanges in instances of return, refund, and exchange abuse, and you can choose to have all returns subject to validation and approval before proceeding.

For this, enabling a return policy enforcer can help you avoid a significant part of these unpleasant situations altogether by asking a simple yes/no question before automatically approving or rejecting returns.

Check out this article to learn more about Shopify returns and how you can handle them!