How Blake Mill Grew Bundle Engagement By Focusing on High-Intent Customers
For a brand built on bold, statement-making designs, Blake Mill needed a way to help customers discover more of what they love—without relying on chance.
Tina Donati
Jul 05, 2023 · 17 min
We meticulously gathered insights from industry experts, including interviews with seven prominent Shopify Plus brands.
Tina Donati
Jul 05, 2023 · 17 min
The best Shopify apps aren’t easy to discover when there are over 7,000 available in the app store today.
Yes, 7,000 apps for you to choose from.
We meticulously gathered insights from industry experts, including interviews with seven prominent Shopify Plus brands. Through our in-depth research, we have curated a list of the top 18 best Shopify apps to increase sales.
But here's the twist—we aren't just highlighting the usual suspects. While we cover some well-known apps, we also focus on uncovering hidden gems that have proven indispensable to these brands' growth.
You’ll discover apps across the entire tech stack in our list, from reviews to bundles, analytics, and shipping.
If you're a Shopify or Shopify Plus merchant seeking to accelerate growth, streamline operations, or overcome the platform's limitations, our curated list of the best Shopify apps is your gateway to success.
Apps we'll cover:
Established in 2017, Three Ships is a skincare brand that prides itself on being natural and cruelty-free. With a strong commitment to crafting affordable yet highly effective beauty products, the brand aims to deliver effective skincare solutions that anyone can enjoy.
How Three Ships evaluates apps for its tech stack:
“First, through reviews in the Shopify app store. If the app is higher cost ($100+ per month), I'll vet it in a Slack community I'm a part of with other ecommerce operators to see if they have used it and what their experience is like. If the app has a free trial, I'll download it, do the setup quickly, and see if it fits what we need it for,”
- Laura Burget, Co-Founder of Three Ships.
Lifetimely is a customer behavior data and analytics platform that provides merchants with month-to-month LTV projections.
Octane AI is a platform that uses artificial intelligence to personalize customer experiences. With it, merchants can collect valuable data through quizzes and Insights Analysis, and then create customized experiences throughout the entire customer journey.
Gorgias is one of the top customer service apps for Shopify. This well-known helpdesk is on a mission to empower ecommerce businesses to deliver top-notch customer experiences. By centralizing 1:1 interactions with customers across various channels, brands can review customer data and efficiently respond in a single dashboard.
“All of these apps have been scalable, which is why they’re the ones I can’t live without.”
- Laura Burget, Co-Founder, Three Ships
Pease Doors sells exactly what you’d think: doors of all kinds for your home, including the entryway, interior, screen, and patio doors. The brand’s mission is to modernize the door industry with good prices, great customer service, and a commitment to quality.
Simple Bundles is an innovative bundling application crafted to enhance the efficiency of fulfillment, inventory tracking, and shipping for your product bundles. Using Simple Bundles' versatile range of bundle types, including single-SKU, multi-SKU, and infinite options, you gain the power to create dynamic mix-and-match bundles, multi-packs, subscription bundles, enticing bundle deals, volume discounts, wholesale packs, and countless other offerings—without the need for any coding expertise.
Pease Doors places a strong emphasis on bundles due to the unique nature of their product. Rather than just selling individual doors, their customers require complete door kits carefully selected to match their chosen door.
With significant variations in fit for each product, Pease Doors expertly curates these bundles, making it convenient for customers to select their desired options. Using Simple Bundles with a Slide Cart to sell bundles, Pease Doors allows customers to add bundles to their cart with one click.
This small change drove a take rate increase of 5-10% and an AOV increase of $50. Additionally, by reducing friction in the shopping experience, Pease Doors’ monthly revenue increased by $20-50K.
“Bundles are the biggest opportunity for us. It’s like building a burrito bowl at Chipotle. We want to sell doors bundled with glass, locks, hinges, etc. all together to our customers but we also need them to be unbundled as SKUs. Even really large companies like Home Depot and Lowe’s really struggle with bundling.”
- David Pease, owner of Pease Doors
Zonos simplifies cross-border selling by providing automated solutions for cross-border tax compliance. The platform’s suite of tools includes guaranteed landed cost calculations, duty and tax collection, VAT threshold monitoring, in-country tax registration and remittance (such as UK VAT and IOSS), and seamless reconciliation processes.
Based in Austin, Texas, Beardbrand is a distinguished men's grooming company. Specializing in a wide range of products, Beardbrand offers solutions for grooming, styling, and maintaining beards, hair, skin, and mustaches.
How Beardbrand evaluates apps for its tech stack:
“Generally, we identify a problem we're having and look towards solutions. We'll then see how much the cost is to develop ourselves or to solve the problem with other methods. If none of those are feasible, we'll consider the cost of the app and how much additional savings or revenue it can generate. Ideally, it'd need to be at least 10x return on what we spend,”
- Eric Bandholz, Founder of Beardbrand.
Judge.me is a product reviews app focused on helping ecommerce stores collect and display product and store reviews and other user-generated content.
Grapevine is a post-purchase survey app for Shopify brands to gather insights and monitor ad performance.
“There are always trade-offs with all apps, even ones you custom build. Sometimes you love the app and it does everything you need, and sometimes you're constantly swearing about how much an app bugs you. That is the life of apps. Nothing is perfect, but find the one that gets you 95% of the way there and focus your energies on other problems.”
- Eric Bandholz, Founder of Beardbrand
Believing makeup should be an extension of your skincare, Youthforia is known as “makeup you can sleep in.” Ever since its launch, the brand has focused on cleanliness and sustainability. Their makeup is designed to act like skincare and is even tested by wearing it overnight.
How Youthforia evaluates apps for its tech stack: Simply put, Fion Co Chan, the Founder of Youthforia, expressed, "For us, it's all about enhancing the customer experience."
Okendo is a customer review and marketing platform that specializes in collecting and showcasing customer feedback and reviews. It provides businesses with tools to gather and manage customer reviews, ratings, and testimonials, which can be displayed on their websites, social media channels, and other marketing materials.
Klaviyo is a popular email marketing and automation platform designed specifically for ecommerce businesses. It enables businesses to create targeted email and SMS campaigns, automate customer communications, and track various metrics to optimize marketing efforts.
“These apps are so important because they help us communicate with as well as get feedback from our customers.”
- Fiona Co Chan, Founder and CEO of Youthforia
Industry West specializes in industrial modern and mid-century furniture and decor, featuring bold designs that are reasonably priced and easily accessible. On the website, consumers can easily shop for furniture for every room in their house.
How Industry West evaluates apps for its tech stack:
“I like working with software that’s responsive on the dev side. Even if it's a relatively new app, as long as the dev team and founders are really responsive to feedback, I'm excited to grow with their company,”
- Ian Leslie, CMO at Industry West.
Nibble is an AI-based chatbot for ecommerce that lets customers make an offer on the product page for instant results. With it, brands decrease browse abandonment and drive more conversions.
Reviews.io is an online platform that specializes in collecting text and video reviews for brands. Businesses can easily gather feedback from their customers and showcase positive reviews to build trust and credibility.
Triple Whale is an AI data platform for ecommerce brands. The platform lets you easily manage and automate analytics, attribution, merchandising, forecasting, and more.
Quality is the most important product value for Range Leather, a US-based leather store selling wallets, bags, hats, and other accessories. The brand is known for using traditional leather working techniques, including hand saddle stitching and burnishing, to produce leather goods built to stand the test of time.
How Range Leather evaluates apps for its tech stack:
“I typically look for 3 things when evaluating apps to use: user experience, reviews, and clear ROI. User experience is important because I don’t want to waste a bunch of time fumbling through disorganized screens or reports when I know exactly what I’m trying to do. When diving into reviews I’m specifically looking for what people say about the support team (speed, helpfulness, etc.) and some common bugs to be aware of. If user experience and reviews checkout, I’ll do some quick math to estimate an ROI either with revenue itself or opportunity cost of my or my team’s time,”
- Tim Aton, COO at Range Leather.
KnoCommerce is a specialized provider of survey integrations designed specifically for ecommerce businesses. Using their powerful tools, brands can effectively gather valuable customer feedback, posing questions like "How did you discover us?" and "How was your purchasing experience?" These surveys are conducted over 100,000 daily, allowing businesses to gain crucial insights into customer preferences and satisfaction levels.
“The Kno team has worked very hard to continue to add value over time. We’ve been able to get access to beta tools, new insight reports, and their plan pricing is totally affordable for scale. The impact is 5/5.”
- Tim Aton, COO at Range Leather.
Junip is a review and user-generated content app for 3,000+ brands, including Olipop, Homesick, and Not Pot. Junip’s review widgets are fast and automatically match your branding out of the box.
With Shopify Flow, Shopify Plus brands can automate and streamline business operations without coding. From inventory management to fraud prevention, Flow allows you to easily build custom workflows effortlessly and connect applications seamlessly.
Launchpad lives within your Shopify admin. It’s a scheduling tool that empowers you to set specific start and end times for product visibility, Shopify Scripts, themes, discounts, and other elements.
Since the beginning, Every Man Jack has believed in using as many naturally derived and plant-based ingredients as possible. Today, the brand offers a range of men's personal care and grooming products made with naturally derived ingredients and outdoor-inspired scents.
How Every Man Jack evaluates apps for its tech stack:
“We generally source our apps by word-of-mouth and the greater DTC/Ecommerce community. Then we evaluate by ROI, obvious performance metrics, and impact on our broader goals tied to things like retention numbers, and other metrics,”
- Troy Petrunoff, Senior Retention Marketing Manager at Every Man Jack.
Wonderment is an order tracking platform for brands to create completely custom order tracking experiences in minutes with a no-code, Shopify-native builder.
Rebuy empowers over 5,000 Shopify stores with personalized shopping experiences to boost conversions, increase order values, and retain customers through intelligent upsells, cross-sells, and follow-ups.
“When we migrated to Shopify back in 2022, we were looking at all of these different apps that would each address things like product recommendations, post-purchase offers, bundle cross-sells, etc. Then we found Rebuy, which does all of those things and much more (and they're adding new features faster than we can keep up).”
- Troy Petrunoff, Senior Retention Marketing Manager at Every Man Jack.
It's important to remember that every business is unique. What works wonders for one brand may not yield the same results for another.
Ultimately, the key to success lies in finding the best for your business needs, goals, and target audience.
Consider your industry, scale of operations, budget, and long-term vision when selecting Shopify apps for your tech stack. And don't be afraid to experiment, iterate, and customize your toolkit to optimize your business operations and drive growth.
If you’re looking to experiment further with reading about apps that can help you scale your business, here are a few nuggets to check out: