Apps are essentially a must-have for an ecommerce store. But they can quickly become expensive and noisy, especially if you don’t know what to install. Ideally, you want to have apps that make it easy for you to run a store.
Amanda Asks
“What apps would make it easy for me to run Evooli?”
My answer: There’s plenty of them. But I think you should at least have a contact app, an email popup app, a GDPR compliance app, and maybe a heatmap app. Once you can justify the costs, I also recommend an email marketing app.
Below is a quick breakdown of the ones I usually recommend to new store owners.
GDPR compliance app
Because of the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) which was introduced by the European Union to secure customers’/visitors’ data, there are now a number of things a store owner has to be vigilant about such as their privacy policies and cookie popups.
In this regard, an app like Easy GDPR + Cookie Bar can help protect your store from penalties and even data breaches.
It presents visitors with a ‘private data modify’ page and a ‘delete’ page, letting them modify and delete their personal data at will. Plus, it comes with a GDPR compatible cookie bar. It can be placed in various places, and is multilingual.
Click here to install Easy GDPR + Cookie Bar on your store and become GDPR complaint with a single click. It’s 100% free.
[highlight]Don’t take this as legal advice. Make sure to do proper research on how to make a website GDPR-complaint. Google should help. [/highlight]
Contact app
Want to give customers an easy and quick way to give you questions, comments, and even complaints? You better.
Easy Contact Form is a convenient app that creates a quick popup form for visitors to fill out when they have a question.
The app delivers an embeddable and responsive contact form that you can put on the ‘Contact Us’ page of your store.
Also, you get to customize the text, fields, background image and tab.
Click here to install Easy Contact Form in Shopify. It comes with a ‘forever free’ plan that places no limit on submissions. Paid plans start at $9.99 a month.
Email popup app
You should 100% have an app that collects visitors’ email addresses. Such leads are crucial for building lasting relationships and generating sales – now and in the long-run. (Plus, privacy laws like Europe’s GDPR require that users opt-in to receiving marketing from you.)
There are plenty of apps you can use for this, both free and paid. A good option is the Sumo app for Shopify. It allows you to create a call-to-action popup which you can use to collect email addresses of people who visit your website.
Additionally, you can configure this app to automatically send follow-up emails when people view your items but leave without buying anything.
Click here to add Sumo to your store. It’s free for up to 200 subscribers. Paid plans begin at $29 a month.
Heatmap app
Heatmaps are visuals that show you which areas of your store a visitor’s mouse (or finger) hovers over, and which buttons they’re clicking the most.
Lucky Orange is a great heatmap tool, but note that it’s not free. It starts at $10/month. However, there’s a 7-day free trial – so there’s no commitment to try it out.
Once installed, it’ll give you an insight into the most interesting and intriguing parts of your store, so you can double-down on what works and abandon what doesn’t.
[highlight]Note: If you decide to use this app, make sure it’s noted in your privacy policy that this behavioral data is being collected and used for advertising/marketing purposes.[/highlight] It’s unlikely that you’d need more apps than these 4 as you march onward. You’re good to go.
Getting feedback on your store
Taking another look at your store overall can give you a good insight into what your audience may or may not like. But sometimes it’s easy to oversee mistakes when you’re too close to your work. That’s where a second pair of eyes comes in handy.
Whenever I build a store for myself, I ask other entrepreneurs and friends to give me some honest feedback on it.
The reason I do this is to get both perspectives: thoughts of someone experienced and also of people who could answer as my customers would.
That said, I’m always super picky and careful about the people I approach for feedback.
That’s because I don’t want someone to criticize my work just for the sake of it. Very often, in fact, I’ve seen people desperately searching for ‘mistakes’ on a website because they want to give at least some input. It’s, therefore, best to not ask everyone about how your store looks.
To get valuable feedback on her store, I advised Amanda to take these steps:
Join Facebook groups related to ecommerce & dropshipping
I asked her to do this knowing many entrepreneurs join such groups to exchange ideas, share success stories, and provide guidance to beginners.
And the best part is that they’re super responsive. You could just say “I recently built this store. What do you guys think?” and you’d receive loads of feedback from highly experienced individuals.
Here’s an example of a store owner asking for feedback on his dropshipping store:
See the second comment? That’s the kind of transparent feedback you can expect to receive with this approach. Just remember: don’t take anything too personally by them being blunt. Take it as constructive so you can improve.
Since your store is still protected by a password page, you can just include the password in your original post so they can sign in and see it.
Ask your friends who fit into the audience
This is easy. Just take out a few minutes to browse your Instagram or Facebook feed and you’d know which of your friends recently shopped online.
Once you’ve identified those friends, send them a message saying you just launched a new store and would love their honest feedback on it.
As an option, you could also ask them to compare it with the stores they buy from on a regular basis.
If all goes well, you should have some decent feedback to work with.
It could be that you forgot to add something important, like an email popup that gives an incentive to people who’re about to leave your site. Or your product page has jargon that’s difficult to comprehend.
Get rid of all the major and minor issues today, so you don’t look bad on launch day or after.
✓ Installed essential apps for your store to make sure everything runs smoothly ✓ Asked for and started to received honest feedback on things you can improve
