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Many people who use Shopify have a love hate relationship with the platform. They love that it is easy to setup and manage. They hate that it lacks some capabilities out of the box that should come as standard.

Most of the time, to fix some of these missing functionalities plugins are all you need.

Here is my list of recommended Shopify apps for smaller stores.

Order Printer

By default, Shopify does not allow you to easily print order sheets and packing slips. This app allows you to create custom printing labels for your orders.

It’s free too.

To set it up, just install the app. The default templates that come with the app will suffice to get you started. If you want to customise the templates even further, you’ll have to use your knowledge of HTML to add new lines or content.

Interestingly, the Order Printer plugin was developed by Shopify itself – so they seem to know about this issue. It is strange to me why they made it an app and not a regular function.

Product Reviews

If you are a reseller, you will probably want to offer the ability for customers to rate your products. Use the free Product Reviews app to allow customers to choose a star rating on your products.

This plugin, also created by Shopify, is free.

Integration is a little tricky. You will need to enter a line of script in your theme to make the stars show up on your category pages and for the feature to show on your product page.

Shopify provide in-depth instructions on how to install this app here.

Product Reviews Addon by Stamped.io

Collecting reviews is a hassle. Get this app as soon as you can and automate the review collection process.

The Product Reviews Addon lets you create and automate review request emails. What is unique about this app is that customers can create the review for their specific product within the email itself. They will only need to click once to submit.

This is different to other solutions where customers will need to click through to your site, find the product and then leave a review.

Of the other review plugins out there, this is the best I’ve found.

The customer service is also outstanding. I was able to reach them directly by email and one of the team members (Tommy) helped my client to manually setup a retroactive review request, beyond the usual settings allowed by the plugin.

The app is free for the basic features though I recommend you upgrade to at least basic for $15 a month to make use of the forms customisation.

Shop Protector

Your website is hosted with Shopify. That is great for your hosting security, but unfortunately this doesn’t protect your webforms from spam.

Shop Protector analyses user behaviour on your website to root out spam and malicious users. They also have great support which is not standard for most plugins.

If your forms are being spammed, this $5 a month plugin is well worth it.

AfterShip

What happens once you’ve dispatched your orders? Who knows?

AfterShip does. This app tracks all your tracking codes in one simple dashboard and flags any orders that have delivery problems.

You can set it to send you email alerts too. So you can pre-empt your customer service by notifying customers that they need to contact their courier.

AfterShip is free for their basic plan. For small stores, this is all you will need.

Returns Magic

Handling returns and exchanges is probably in the top 3 most important eCommerce activities. Sadly, Shopify doesn’t provide any strong options for this.

For awhile, there weren’t really any excellent returns management apps for Shopify either.

I am currently testing Returns Magic. It creates a section on your website where customers can search their order number and email, then submit a return through Return Magic’s easy interface.

This really is the main value of the app. Many Shopify apps skimp on the usability and design of the apps in favour of an ‘engineering solution’ – something slapped together to monetise a developer project on the platform. But this app gives your customers a good, smooth returns experience.

The plugin starts from $10 a month and scales in cost by number of returns.

MailChimp

If you want to collect email signups, or connect registered users to your MailChimp mailing list, you’ll need to use the MailChimp plugin for Shopify.

It is super simple to install. Just download the plugin from the app store and in the plugin settings, select which list you want subscribers to sync with.

It’s free.

GDPR Banner

If you do business with customers in Europe, generally you will need to comply with GDPR.

Not to get into anything too specific, but part of compliance means notifying users how and when you are collecting their data. Unfortunately, it seems the most common practice for this right now is by cookie notification bars.

Image Source: Upsell

Once installed the GDPR Banner plugin prompts you to choose the style, wording and destination link to create your own cookie notification bar.

A great thing about this particular plugin is that you can choose not to show the cookie notification bar to anyone outside of the EU.

It’s free.

Not recommended

There are a few apps that I am not entirely sure whether they are worth the effort. Either they are particularly buggy or they do not provide much value for their cost in both time and effort to implement.

Zoom apps

Yes I think product image zoom is a great feature. But I think these should come from the theme itself, if possible.

When trying to implement a variety of zoom plugins, I found most of these were buggy or did not look professional.

Ultimately, for one of my clients we implemented a zoom function ourselves from scratch into the theme and this has been much more reliable.

Facebook store

For one client, we have had the Facebook store function of Shopify active for years. And how many sales through this channel?

Almost none.

Creating another channel is probably just an unneeded maintenance task and a distraction for customers. Ultimately, the shopping experience on your website should be better than the tab on Facebook so it makes sense that you should channel customers to your own store.

Wishlist apps

Wishlists seem to be a common feature on many sites. The idea is that you can collect data on what items are most frequently wish listed. Perhaps, following brands like J. Crew you may want to push users to create an account and collect their email.

Unfortunately I haven’t found any apps that do either of these two things well.

And consider the alternative. If there is no wish list, shoppers are more likely just to use the cart as a wishlist where they add items of interest to then whittle them down before checking out.

That’s not so bad?

Wishlist apps tend to be a little buggy and require a lot of help to style correctly. I suggest you avoid these until your store is large enough to properly implement a more expensive solution and harvest the data.

Conclusion

While it is a great solution, sadly Shopify does not come complete out of the box. Use great quality plugins to extend the power of your Shopify store and fill in any feature gaps.

There are some great plugins out there so be sure to read the reviews (like mine) before implementing. If you would like any help getting setup on Shopify, feel free to reach out.

Are there any great apps that you’ve tried? Please share your experiences in the comments below so that everyone can benefit!

Image Credit: Willian Justen de Vasconcellos

Magento community edition is not the most user-friendly option for smaller businesses or solos.

Shopify, on the other hand, is much easier for smaller operations to use and can scale to a very sizable business. I’ve heard of Shopify sites doing double-digit revenue without needing to upgrade to another eCommerce platform.

Unfortunately, you may have been setup on Magento first. Moving is not easy, also known as replatforming, can be a high stakes project given that if not done properly the design change can make conversion rates variable and SEO results suffer.

Design changes are a different discipline. However, I can share my process for replatforming a client’s site which lead to a smooth transition and an improvement of SEO and conversion rates.

To replatform from Magento Community Edition to Shopify, you will need to:

1. Download product, customer and order data
2. Create your Shopify site
3. Import product, customer and order data
4. Crawl your Magento site
5. Setup 301 redirects on Shopify
6. Backup your Magento site
7. Change DNS settings to your new Shopify site
8. Submit sitemap to Google

Here are the details.

Download your product, customer and order data

Before building your Shopify site, download your legacy data from Magento.

Make sure you export to excel all your data on:

• Order history
• Customer information
• Products

This will make the build on Shopify faster as you will have the data you need to import all ready to go when you go to record your order history and migrate customer profiles and products.

You may want to collect all your product images into one folder ahead of time and name them correctly.

Order history cannot be migrated however you may want to keep this excel document for reference.

Create your Shopify site

Now that you have your images and data, you can create your Shopify site.

Sign up for a trial or regular account on Shopify here and complete your:

1. General settings (payments, taxes, shipping)
2. Pages
3. Theme setup
4. Plugins

If you would like some suggestions on what plugins to use, I have written a post about my favourites here.

However, be sure to download the Easy Redirects plugin (Shopify plugin store) as you will need this later.

Import product and customer data

Now that your store is setup you can begin to import your customer and product data exports you found earlier.

To import customer data, go to the customer section and click the import customer function.

To import product data, go to the product section and click import products.

Note that Shopify provides .CSV templates for both imports. Be sure to use them correctly so that your data is transferred neatly.

At this point, your Shopify store should now be complete (after testing) and only requires configuration of your URL to go live and function.

However, if you change your DNS settings to push your Shopify store live at this point, you will have too many URL errors and broken links. The next steps will show you how to fix these before turning the site live.

Crawl your Magento site

In order make sure you do not have any broken URLs on your new Shopify site, you will need to map out your Magento domain’s URL structure so that all URLs can be redirected to their respective versions on Shopify.

To crawl your site:

1. Use a crawling service like Screaming Frog which can provide all the URL data in excel form.
2. Compare the results from these Crawlers to the pages which receive traffic in Google Search Console to make sure you have mapped out all the possible URLs.
3. Using both these data points, create a list of URLs in a spreadsheet and plan the new URL that you will redirect these to on Shopify.

Setup 301 redirects on Shopify

Now that your URLs are mapped, you can return to Shopify to setup your 301 redirects ahead of time.

Head back to your Shopify store and open the Redirection plugin. You will be able to enter the previous URL and destination URL in order to create a 301 redirect.

If you have carefully mapped out all your old URLs and new destinations in the previous step, you can upload these all at once in the Easy Redirects plugin. This can save you hours of work.

All all the redirections required and you will be ready to move onto the next step.

Backup your Magento site

As part of good practice, make sure you backup your old magento site.

You may have a few orders still being processed so it will be good to keep it live on a password protected subdomain set as non-indexable. This will give you the 1-2 week window to follow through those orders.

Change DNS settings to your new Shopify site

With your URLs properly redirected and your Magento site backed up, you will be ready to set your Shopify store live.

Before making the transition, you may want to plan to push the changeover at a low period of sales to lower and potential impact should there be any issues.

To push your store live:

1. Go to your Shopify store settings section and choose domains
2. Select connect with existing domain
3. Follow the prompts to enter your desired domain name
4. Change your DNS settings to Shopify’s name server details provided on that page

Congratulations! Once the DNS settings have been propagated your store will be live!

Submit sitemap to Google

As a final step, you should give Google notice of your new URL structure so that your new site can be properly indexed.

In Google console, submit a new sitemap from your Shopify store. Shopify automatically generates a sitemap for every store in their system which can be found at yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml

Once you have submitted your sitemap, monitor both Google Analytics and Search Console in case you need to spot any issues or errors in the coming days after the transition.

Conclusion

Follow the steps above to ensure the smoothest transition possible and you should be fine.

Be sure to pay special attention when you map out your URL redirections correctly in order to mitigate the short-term effects on SEO. Also, make sure you keep an accessible backup of your Magento site for a few weeks in case you need to reference any orders made before the change.

Migrating from one eCommerce platform is a great opportunity to move from a more resource intensive platform to a more user friendly one, like Shopify, so I wish you all the best with your transition.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me or punch in a question in the comments section below.