As the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic continues to impact businesses nationwide, many eCommerce retailers know that providing customers with exceptional shopping experiences is vitally important. These useful apps can help you to ramp up your customer service and run your business more smoothly.
Sales and Marketing
With fewer customers making purchases from online retailers, it’s especially important to attract Internet shoppers who are in the market for your merchandise. Innovative sales and marketing apps will help you to convert web browsers into paying customers.
Marsello
Marsello’s customer loyalty program rewards customers for engaging in behaviors that help to grow your store. You can also use Marsello to launch promotional offers, super-effective one-off SMS and email marketing campaigns, and automated, customizable emails that trigger at the perfect time, to the right customers.
Benefits for Your Business
By implementing a well-crafted customer loyalty program and complimenting that with seamless automated marketing, you’ll build “win-win” customer relationships that will help your business grow. Worldwide, omnichannel stores (those that sell across multiple sales channels) are adapting to a new way of retail and communications with built-in customer rewards are absolutely essential for keeping your customers coming back!
Answerbase
Answering your customers’ product questions encourages them to make a purchase. Answerbase helps ease the load of this by adding a product Q&A feature to your product pages. Your team’s product experts can address questions and drive people closer to a purchase decision.
Benefits for Your Business
Answerbase helps to increase your conversions by giving them the info they need while they’re shopping. You’ll also improve SEO and organic search rankings because you’re adding quality content to your product pages.
Fomo
Shoppers often want social proof before they’ll purchase a product from an online store. The Fomo app provides that validation by showcasing product reviews and real-time orders on your storefront. After customers view a Fomo notification, they can easily add items to their shopping cart without exiting the page.
Benefits for Your Business
When shoppers see customers buying your products, they’ll likely be enticed to make a purchase. As a result, you’ll see an increase in your store’s on-page sales conversions and completed sales.
Affiliatly
Maintain full control over your affiliate program with the multifunctional Affiliatly app. Track each affiliate’s user visits and customer orders. Manage your affiliates’ earning methods and income percentages. Customize the app so it blends with your store’s appearance.
Benefits for Your Business
By definition, affiliates build links and help to promote your store. You’ll have full control over how the affiliates perform those activities and can structure your affiliate interactions to benefit your business.
Financials
Maintaining an accurate picture of your business’ financials is important, especially in today’s economic climate. These beneficial apps make it easy to view your store’s sales, expenses, inventory, and other relevant functions.
QBO
The efficient QBO app collects data about your products, orders, customers, shipping charges, taxes, and more. Next, QBO transfers this vital data directly from your eCommerce store to your Quickbooks Online account.
Benefits for Your Business
Using the QBO app eliminates the need for manual data entry. Potential data entry errors are also a thing of the past. Using this time-saving app enables you to devote your efforts to higher-level business growth tasks.
Xero
The Xero online accounting app makes it easy for your small business to copy operations data to your accounting program. Xero syncs your products, orders, customers, shipping, taxes, and other charges to your accounting software. Automate frequently completed tasks such as creating invoices, recording expenses, and generating reports.
Benefits for Your Business
Xero frees you up from endless data entry tasks, giving you valuable time to work on higher-level operations goals. You’ll also eliminate the possibility of manual data entry errors that can completely skew your accounting results.
Taxman
If your eCommerce store sells regulated products such as alcohol or nicotine, Taxman will automatically calculate and charge the correct excise tax for these product sales. You just need to define the geographic zone and tax rate, and Taxman takes care of the rest.
Benefits for Your Business
With help from Taxman, you’ll navigate an often-forgotten type of product sales tax. Even better, you’ll remain compliant with all applicable tax laws.
Social Media
With increased time on their hands, more people are browsing their social feeds, looking for something to buy. Toward that end, you should introduce compelling social media initiatives that will draw them to your eCommerce store.
Here are some BigCommerce apps that can help.
Instagram Feed by Elfsight
Elfsight Instagram Feed will blend your eye-catching Instagram content into your eCommerce store website. Use numerous customization options to match the app’s widget to your website style and color scheme.
Benefits for Your Business
Your Instagram-enhanced website will see increased audience engagement, and you’ll also get more Instagram followers. Most importantly, you’ll see a boost in your eCommerce website’s conversion rate.
ContentPlum
ContentPlum provides shoppers with multiple social feeds, and adds intriguing relevant content, to promote better social engagement and social trust. The app can be used for Shoppable Instagram Gallery, Social Hub, Social Wall, Social Contests, Social Campaigns, Media Buzz, and more.
Benefits for Your Business
By inviting viewers to engage with social media widgets on your store’s site, you’ll enhance social trust and build credibility. Because customers are more likely to buy from someone they know and trust, you’ll improve the likelihood that these visitors will turn into paying customers.
Promote your eCommerce store’s products on up to 14 social media networks without duplicating your efforts. The highly efficient Outfy app helps you to create visually appealing product videos, high-impact sales promotions, and automated posts designed for social media audiences.
Benefits for Your Business
Outfy’s broad social reach will help to attract more viewers to your eCommerce store. Over time, you’ll see an increase in your product sales.
Take advantage of free, customizable social sharing buttons for popular social media networks. You don’t need coding skills to build and load the mobile-friendly buttons. In addition, the installation process won’t slow down your store’s website.
Benefits for Your Business
By installing the social sharing buttons, you’ll see an increase in followers and social shares. This increased viewership gives you the opportunity to promote product specials and collect more emails for your marketing list.
Analytics
Generally speaking, retailers want to know what’s working and what hasn’t met their expectations. They want to maximize their revenue sources, solve their financial problems, and set themselves up for success. These powerful apps can play a key role in that ever-evolving process.
Build custom eCommerce website pages with Shogun’s versatile drag-and-drop page builder. Professionally designed home page, landing page, blog pages, and product pages templates are compatible with your existing theme. Compare completed pages for metrics’ results, and evaluate marketing campaigns with targeted analytics.
Benefits for Your Business
Your well-coordinated eCommerce website will enhance your business’ online credibility. Concurrently, you can compare the effectiveness of different pages and marketing campaigns. The comparisons’ results will help you make adjustments that can move your business forward.
Price2Spy
Monitor your competitors’ prices with the real-time Price2Spy app. Applicable to businesses of all sizes, this service enables online retailers to track competitors’ prices and price changes. Track multiple competitors’ websites for maximum benefit. Determine which of your eCommerce store’s products can vary in price, and easily make these price changes.
Benefits for Your Business
Price2Spy's comprehensive pricing reports will display incremental market changes. The reports will also show whether your competitors are ramping prices up or easing them down.
Lucky Orange provides insights into your'eCommerce store’s functionality. View visitor recordings of site transactions, and learn why some shoppers don’t make a purchase from your store. To change that, Lucky Orange helps you answer visitors’ questions through live chat and offers live view to co-browse with them to help them find the product they need.
Benefits for Your Business
When you learn why most site visitors don’t convert to paying customers, you can take steps to turn the situation around. By tweaking your eCommerce site, you’ll be well-positioned to increase your conversions and sales.
Customer Service
Top-notch customer service can help you rise above the competition and promote long-term customer loyalty. Adding the right communications tools to your eCommerce retailer’s toolkit can streamline the process and convert customer questions into sales.
To chat with shoppers while they visit your eCommerce store, install the LiveChat + Product Cards widget on your website. You can also provide product suggestions and assist customers through the buying process.
Benefits for Your Business
The LiveChat + Product Cards app enables you to interact with shoppers while they’re actively engaged on your eCommerce store’s site. When you answer their questions or provide other customer support, you increase your chances of making a sale.
Social messaging platforms, including Quick Facebook Chat, are fast becoming preferred communications venues. With Quick Facebook Chat, your customer can easily use Facebook Messenger to get product-related assistance and gain satisfaction.
Benefits for Your Business
By using Quick Facebook Chat, you’ll avoid the need for third-party live chat agents. Customers can “Like” your store’s Facebook page from the chat window, which increases their engagement. These Messenger encounters can also help you to cross-sell products and introduce new items.
While you’re on the Slack communications platform, use the Live Chat for Slack app to chat with visitors. Customize the chat backdrop with your logo and other helpful visuals. Then, send visitors directly to your eCommerce store. While they’re browsing your site, convert them to email list subscribers and followers, and ideally to paying customers.
Benefits for Your Business
By putting Live Chat for Slack into your communications mix, you’ll save money on a third-party chat platform. You’ll also maintain better control of the customer conversion sequence, increasing your chances of turning visitors into paying customers.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
You may need to temporarily tighten advertising purse strings. To get customers to your eCommerce sites and brick-and-mortar stores, you must take steps to drive organic traffic to your business.
Let’s say you edit, optimize, and analyze your eCommerce store’s titles and meta descriptions for categories, products, and pages. FavSEO streamlines that process, enabling you to perform those operations at a single location. You’ll also uncover new keyword opportunities, track your keyword rankings in Google, and submit your sitemap for review.
Benefits for Your Business
FavSEO’s one-stop optimizing tool saves you valuable time, freeing you up for other important tasks. By tracking keyword rankings and getting an SEO audit, you’ll improve your SEO program’s effectiveness. In turn, this helps to increase your store’s visitor traffic.
ProSEOTracker
Optimizing your SEO metadata and content and managing your blog and SEO issues is easy with ProSEOTracker’s one-stop SEO hub. Monitoring your competitors, and working with Google Analytics or AdWords, are simpler tasks when you’re not visiting multiple websites.
Benefits for Your Business
With your SEO analysis and optimization resources in one place, completing SEO-related tasks will be a less laborious and time-consuming process. You’ll also realize increased efficiency by viewing the data from one location.
Search engines (including Google) often display extra features on your eCommerce store’s search results. These features, such as product prices, review stars, and availability, work together to make the search results more useful and increase clicks to your site.
Benefits for Your Business
With the SEO Rich Snippets App, you’ll be able to create FAQ pages, “How To” pages and Video structured data that combine to increase your site’s appeal. Over time, these features will bring extra traffic to your store, and should help to increase your sales.
Inventory Management & Order Fulfillment
With “stay at home” orders in place, consumers have plenty of time to browse and buy from eCommerce retailers. As such, you must have a reliable order fulfillment program so customers get their products on time.
Lightspeed
Manage your eCommerce + physical store’s inventory with Lightspeed’s cloud-based sales and inventory app. Edit product features in bulk, and reorder stock automatically. Lightspeed Retail also sheds light on key retail metrics in real time to help you make the best decisions.
Benefits for Your Business
Lightspeed’s one-stop POS, inventory, and retail management system puts an end to tedious product entry and tracking work. At the same time, you’ll have access to a powerful cloud-based sales and inventory tool that provides all the data you need to keep your physical shop and eCommerce store’s inventory under control.
The small business-friendly Sendle app enables affordable door-to-door package delivery. When Sendle integrates with your online store, you’ll receive live shipping rate quotes that you deliver to customers. Sendle also enables efficient order processing and tracking. Oh, and Sendle’s delivery service is 100 percent carbon neutral.
Benefits for Your Business
Sendle’s combined shipping rate quote, order processing, and package tracking services offer your customers an all-in-one shipping solution. Sendle is also a time saver, as you won’t have to wait for delayed shipping rate quotes that could delay order completion.
Endicia
If you regularly ship products via the United States Postal Service (USPS), the Endicia eCommerce integration offers several helpful services. With your no-fee Endicia account, you’ll save up to 51 percent compared to USPS Retail and USPS.com Click-N-Ship prices. Give your customers real-time USPS shipping quotes, and print shipping labels from your computer.
Benefits for Your Business
The Endicia eCommerce integration will save you money. In addition, offering real-time shipping quotes and printing shipping labels gives you control over each step in the process.
The Store Pickup + Delivery by Zapiet app invites customers to decide how they want to receive their purchased products. The customer can opt for traditional shipping, local delivery, or in-store pickup.
Benefits for Your Business
By offering the customer several product receipt options, you’ll likely be perceived as highly responsive to their needs. That favorable attribute can play a key role in building customer loyalty.
Your turn
Did we miss anything? What other BigCommerce are helping retailers through COVID-19? Let us know in the comments.
