7 Essential BigCommerce Apps for Your Ecommerce Store

June 06, 2017 - Josh

BigCommerce is a fantastic platform to build and run your eCommerce store. In addition to their powerful website builder, their fully-featured CMS has everything you need.

We’ve already introduced you to a number of ways to make your BigCommerce site amazing, but as your store grows, you will inevitably need to add tools and features that are not available to you out-of-the-box. BigCommerce apps allow you to do just that. To really supercharge and automate your store, you need to know which are the best apps to have installed.

With BigCommerce apps, you can:

Save hours per week with automated accounting integration,
Gain more insight into how customers are browsing your store, and
Improve your customer service to increase repeat customers

But, with over 350 apps available, it can be time-consuming and costly trying to choose the right one.

So this week, I have reviewed the BigCommerce app library to find you the 7 best BigCommerce apps for eCommerce.

1. OneSaas – Business Automation to Sync Your Sales Data

As the toolkit of software you use to run your business grows, so too will the amount of time you spend ensuring that your data is accurately synced between them all. OneSaas is a BigCommerce automation app that does the hard work for you by syncing data between your sales, CRM, and accounting platforms.

When an order arrives through your BigCommerce store, OneSaas will push the data onto all of your connected software automatically – creating shipping labels, adding contacts to your email marketing list, and much more. OneSaas also pulls data into BigCommerce, ensuring that when you update information in an accounting application such as Xero, that information is also synced to your BigCommerce store.

OneSaaS allows you automate your

Accounting
Fulfilment
Shipping
Inventory management, and
Marketing.

It will also scale with your business, becoming more valuable as your business grows. And it works with a wide range of software including Quickbooks Online, Saasu, Shipwire, and more.

2. Sweet Tooth – Loyalty Rewards to Incentivise Customers

[2021 Update: Sweet Tooth is now Smile.io]

Depending on how you look at it, acquiring a new customer can be 3 to 30 times more expensive than the cost of keeping an existing one. Are you doing enough to make sure new customers keep coming back?

If not, consider adding a loyalty program. Sweet Tooth is a BigCommerce app that lets you create a loyalty program customized for your store.

You choose how you would like to reward customers for actions like:

Creating an account
Sharing on social media
Social media referrals
And of course, Purchasing.

Source: Sweet Tooth

Sweet Tooth has been proven to increase both revenue and repeat sales. Their free plan has all the features you need to get started with your own loyalty program for up to 500 members. Their paid tiers let you further stylize your marketing, add more loyalty tiers, and create deeper integrations using their API.

3. Optimizely – Split Testing to Discover What Works

How can you be sure that every page of your BigCommerce store is optimized for sales? The secret is to test as many variations as possible over time to iterate towards what works.

Optimizely makes this possible by letting you easily test multiple A/B variations of your page.

Source: Optimizely

Using their graphical interface, you can create multiple versions of your page. Optimizely will show your users one of the variations to determine which has the biggest impact on conversions and revenue.

With Optimizely, you can:

Automatically create and track your most important goals,
Create simple but powerful reports based on your results, and
Test your pages in multiple different browsers like Chrome, Firefox, and mobile browsers.

Optimizely also publishes guides on how to implement a test with your BigCommerce store.

4. AfterShip – Shipment Tracking to Increase Your Credibility

It’s a mistake to assume that an order is not your concern once it has been dispatched. The period between an order leaving your store and arriving at the customer is perhaps the most opaque period of the whole transaction.

While the customer has paid for the product, its status remains in limbo until they have received it.

AfterShip looks to restore confidence and credibility to this transitionary period. This BigCommerce app increases shipping transparency by providing the customer with an automatically-generated tracking URL. They can then check on the status of their order with just one click.

On the admin side, AfterShip provides you with a bird’s-eye view of the status of all your orders so you can:

See which orders need attention immediately and
Analyze why and how often shipping-related issues are occurring.

Source: Aftership

5. Sellbrite – Multichannel Listing to Simplify Your Sales Management

If you aren’t selling your products on multiple channels outside of your BigCommerce store, you are leaving money on the table. And while it might have been easy to keep track of your listings when starting with just a few products across sites like Amazon and eBay, as you scale up in SKU’s and into new sales channels, you will need a tool like Sellbrite.

Sellbrite is a multichannel listing app that allows you to list, edit, and monitor your products across multiple sales channels. It is quick and easy to use, and lets you create listing templates and product variations.

Source: Sellbrite

But the real benefit of the Sellbrite BigCommerce app is its cloud-based approach that allows you to keep your product data centralised with Sellbrite. This means that you can

Update a product on any of your sales channels from just one dashboard, and
Receive granular reports conglomerated across all of your sales channels.

It’s an easy app to holistically examine your product sales across the spectrum of your web commerce.

It is also quick and easy to use, with the ability to create listing templates and product variations. It provides a central location to get granular reports across all of your sales channels.

6. Pixc – Photo Editing to Make Your Products Look Professional

Did you know that 67% of customers consider clear, high quality photos to be more important than product information and customer ratings?

While there are ways to improve your product photography, not everyone has the required editing skills or necessary software to create retail-ready photos. And even if you do, you know it can take hours to take and edit even a small batch of photos.

Thankfully, Pixc has created a content editing platform that takes your ordinary photos and sends you back high-quality, retail-ready photography in under 24 hours. And it does so at a fraction of the cost of hiring a professional photographer.

Source: Pixc

If you’re a BigCommerce customer, you’ll also get your first 10 images edited free of charge.

7. Yotpo – Using Customer Reviews to Promote Your Products

It’s no secret the impact that customer reviews can have on your eCommerce store. When a new customer sees positive reviews, the hesitation of buying from a new store drops away. Instead, they are now eagerly looking at the reviews to make sure this is the right product for them.

Yotpo is the leading provider of eCommerce review software. Not content with providing only the standard email review requests, Yotpo includes a suite of features including:

Full Google integration to ensure your reviews show up in search results as a rich snippet and in product listing ads,
Loyalty tools such as coupons and community Q & A,
Yotpo Ads to turn your positive reviews into paid ads on Facebook, and
Product recommendations.

Source: Yotpo

While Yotpo does have a free version, the premium features are really what makes the app stand out. Premium can be expensive, but with over 150,000 stores using Yotpo, they have the data and experience to provide the best product in the industry. Indeed, they boast a 9x improvement in product reviews when using their system.

Your Yotpo Reviews will display as Google Rich Snippets.

Bonus: Boost Sales – Upsell & cross-sell to increase AOV

Since its release in 2014, Boost Sales app has helped 15,730+ online stores increase their average order value (AOV) by over 45%. In a nutshell, Boost Sales allows store owners to upsell and cross-sell by offering their customers additional products when a specific item is viewed or bought.

The main focus of Boost Sales – the ability to quickly increase online sales – makes it one of the top BigCommerce apps in the marketplace:

The Amazing Dealz boosted their AOV by 437%, making €76,800 in sales using upsells with gamification techniques
Muddy Outdoors achieved $46,700 in sales in just 3 months of using Boost Sales.

Thanks to the user-friendly design, you can quickly create an upsell or cross-sell offer by choosing one of 10 pre-built themes.

Source: Beeketing

If you run your eCommerce store using BigCommerce, you know how important it is to find the right apps for the job. Implementing a new tool can cost both time and money, but it may be even more costly down the line if you grow dependent on a particular app, only to realise there is a better solution.