What is the BigCommerce App Marketplace?

You're a BigCommerce merchant and you've been looking for more ways to grow your business. You may have heard about the BigCommerce App Marketplace, which is now open to all merchants, not just those with Enterprise plans, and offers thousands of apps for you to choose from.

As a BigCommerce store owner, you know the importance of finding and installing apps to help your business grow. Apps on the BigCommerce marketplace are vetted by their team so that they meet strict security standards and can be trusted with your data.

What is the BigCommerce Marketplace?

The BigCommerce App Marketplace is an integrated app store that features over a 1000 apps that help you create and launch your store with ease. These apps can aid merchants with a wide variety of tasks spanning from analytics and SEO to product sourcing and shipping.

In addition, BigCommerce continuously updates these apps to provide you access to high-quality apps and innovations.

Benefits of BigCommerce Marketplace for Merchants

The BigCommerce Marketplace allows merchants convenience and ease. Not only is the marketplace easy to interact with but offers apps to help improve all major aspects of your BigCommerce store, which allows you to focus less on every detail and more on growing and scaling your business.

While BigCommerce has many integrated features, apps allow you to further customize your store, improving audience trust and conversion rates.

The Perils of too Many Apps

It may be tempting to dive right in and purchase as many apps as necessary, but you need to keep in mind that having too many apps can hinder your store’s speed and performance. Specifically, it can create the following issues:

• Slow load times: Like everything else on your store, apps require loading resources such as stylesheets, scripts, images, and more. These extra resources increase your store’s load time and the more apps you have, the more noticeable this load time is to your audience, decreasing their interest in your product.
• Apps interfering with other apps: After installing an app, you may find that another app's functionalities don’t work because the new app’s functions affect the older ones.
• Complicating troubleshooting issues: All apps add resources to your site that may stay even after uninstalling. As you can imagine, this increases the amount of work you have to do when troubleshooting.

Therefore, make sure you do your research before installing an app to ensure that it doesn’t hinder your storefront.

Top 12 BigCommerce Apps to Boost Your Online Store

To help your research, we’ve created a list of the top 12 apps on the BigCommerce Marketplace. We then separated these apps into four major categories: Customer experience (CX), SEO, Marketing, and Analytics.

Customer Experience

Building great customer experience is vital for merchants looking to scale their eCommerce business. It builds customer trust and loyalty, which improves your conversion rate and encourages customers to return.

BigCommerce offers several apps to ensure that your store has great customer experience.

Klaviyo

Klaviyo offers online store owners the ability to create memorable experiences for customers. It enables you to personalize marketing channels such as email, SMS, and website notifications by using customer metrics such as location, age, and more.

In addition, Klaviyo has dozens of pre-built templates ready to use making it easy for merchants to quickly personalize their store.

Price: Free for the first 250 contacts.

Pros

• Easy to use
• Pre-made templates
• SMS customization

Cons

• Slow customer service
• Expensive if you have over 250 contacts

LiveChat

LiveChat allows online store owners to answer incoming customer questions as quickly as they arrive, improving customers’ trust. You can then see the customer’s history and metrics in order to help them and to suggest products to them.

When you go offline, Livechat stores any messages so you don’t miss a question.

Price: 14-day free trial and then $16 per month

Pros

• Access customer’s order history
• Send product recommendations to customers
• Stores messages when you are offline

Cons

• Time zone issues
• Larger stores may find it hard to keep up with questions
• May feel impersonal to customers

Trustpilot Reviews

Trustpilot, powered by 70 million reviewers, lets you gain customer insight on your products by triggering service and product review invitations. It also allows you to drag and drop a widget on your site using the Trustbox tool to encourage customers to review.  

Trustpilot showcases these reviews on your website and Google, as well as improving both your store’s SERP standing and conversion rate.

Price: Free

Pros

• Encourages customers to write reviews
• Showcases reviews on Google
• Have product ratings
• Flag fake reviews which Trustpilot’s teams will investigate.

Cons

• Unable to contact customers with bad reviews
• Slow customer service
• Remove fraudulent reviews slowly

Order Fulfilment

Order fulfillment is the backbone of your BigCommerce store. It spans all the processes from sourcing, storing, and shipping your inventory. You can see how this is the last thing you want to be slow and unorganized.

The BigCommerce App Marketplace features many apps to improve your order fulfillment. We recommend looking at the following three:

ShipperHQ

ShipperHQ makes customizing shipping stress-free for merchants. It handles displaying location-based delivery options, accurate delivery dates, tax-calculations, and in-store pickup options to make the checkout process convenient to customers.

Price: 15-day free trial and then $50 per month

Pros

• Handles all shipping requirements
• Location-based delivery options shown to customers
• Makes shipping more convenient for you and your customers
• Great customer support

Cons

• Tricky navigation
• Doesn’t allow shipping management, like printing labels

Aftership

With Aftership, you are receiving two apps in one: Aftership and Aftership’s Return center. Both work on improving your post-purchase process from supporting shipment and tracking for over 700 carriers to automating pre-paid labels, tacking updates, and creating a self-service returns portal to simplify the returns process.

Altogether, this app streamlines the post-purchase process.

Price: Free and has paid tiers

Pros

• SMS, email, and Facebook notifications
• Reduces costs by having discounted USPS return labels
• Supported by over 700 carriers across the globe

Cons

• Tricky navigation
• Doesn’t provide parcels or an exact ETA

ShipStation

ShipStation makes it easy to manage all aspects of your orders, importing, managing and shipping, from one platform. It advertises automating every step of the shipping process. It enables ease of access by having an intuitive dashboard and interfaces for optimal workflow.

In addition, the app offers features such as printing hundreds of shipping labels, location based shipping and delivering, and marketing tools such as tracking pages, emails, and branded labels and packing slips.

Price: 60-day free trial and then $9 a month

Pros

• Automates most shipping processes
• Easy to set up
• Allows you to create branded labels and packing slips

Cons

• Doesn’t collect customer data
• Paid tiers required for most customization options

SEO

SEO aims at increasing the amount of free traffic your store receives simply through ranking higher on the SERP. This allows customers to be able to reach your store by one click. Therefore, SEO is imperative for any BigCommerce store to gain more customers.

These are the apps we recommend to improve SEO:

FavSEO

FavSEO helps BigCommerce store owners in all parts of the SEO process from researching to editing to testing. With FavSEO, merchants can connect to Google Webmaster tools to submit their sitemap to discover crawling errors as well as to discover new keywords. You are able to edit, analyze, and optimize titles, meta description and pages all while seeing your SEO score and the factors that affect it.

Price: 10-day free trial and then $19.95

Pros

• Easy SEO research and testing
• Bulk editor for changing the title of all products at once
• See which factors are affecting the SEO of your store

Cons

• Steep learning curve
• Hard for non-technical users

ReloadSEO

Having analyzed the SEO of over 10 million products, ReloadSEO provides you with feedback and suggestions regarding your website text. It checks your content by using an algorithm aimed at indicating how SEO-friendly your content is.

The app also offers flexibility when it comes to Google algorithm updates so that you have up-to-date SEO information.

Price: Based on how many products your store has but starts with a 14-day free trial then $9.95 a month.

Pros

• Make your product catalog fully search-engine friendly
• Immediate feedback with specific product-level suggestions
• More free search engine traffic

Cons

• Costly for larger stores
• Can be tricky to use
• No way to test SEO

SEOKart

SEOKart aims at fixing the SEO basics of your BigCommerce store. It enables you to learn about how your and competitor’s keywords rank on Google by sending you either a weekly or monthly report. The platform lets you edit Rich Snippets, Images' optimization feature and URLs.  

Price: Free

Pros

• Easy to use
• Provides ranking and reporting up to 25 keywords
• Free SEO consultancy
• Optimize up to 200 images
• Provides SEO statistics by integrating with Google Analytics

Cons

• Not suitable for large eCommerce stores looking to optimize over 200 images

Marketing

To grow your eCommerce store, you need to drive traffic to your website and SEO puts the right gears in motion. A good marketing strategy helps customers find you and buy your product.

Take a look at these apps dedicated to converting traffic to sales.

Mailchimp

Mailchimp is an all-in-one marketing platform with so many features it would be tedious to list them all. It boils down to a platform aimed at helping you communicate and build relationships with customers and research campaign performance and customer behavior.

Plus, the platform helps you create targeted ads across social media platforms.

Price: Free

Pros

• Numerous functionalities
• Social media marketing
• Analyze how your customer interaction affects marketing

Cons

• Hard to use interface
• Lack of notification personalization
• Slow customer service
• Hard to segment and organize audience

Google Analytics

Trusted by enterprise companies, Google Analytics is a powerful marketing solution that provides online store owners insights on their store’s traffic and effectiveness. It features in-depth data to better help you adjust and modify your ads and marketing initiatives, improving your store’s conversion rate.

Price: Free

Pros

• Cross channel and multimedia tracking
• Data visualization
• Customized reporting

Cons

• Steep learning curve
• Not for the non-technical user

Hotjar

Hotjar enables you to better understand your customers. It offers detailed customer behavior analytics and feedback powered by tools, such as Heatmaps and Recordings, to allow you to get insight on how customers interact with each page on your store.

Price: Free and paid plans

Pros

• Easy set up
• Includes on-page widget to ask questions to users
• See the performance of individual site pages
• See recordings of user sessions

Cons

• Offers little in the free tier

Build the Storefront of your Dreams with Salsita

Salsita has eCommerce experts that provide services in the major categories prevalent to your BigCommerce store such as product discovery, UX research and design, and more. As well as technical aspects like frontend and backend development and quality assurance.

They offer a team specialized in eCommerce that can audit and assess your store in order to provide your details on how to better improve your store’s performance. With Salsita, you can be confident in your store’s ability to gain customers, convert sales to traffic, and continue growing.
Read more about our job for eCommerce stores here: eCommerce: Salsita Software.