Shopify is an incredibly flexible e-commerce website solution. Basically anything you could want to do on your dropshipping site is possible. Shopify has its built-in features like product listings, analytics, SEO capabilities, theme designs, ordering and payment functionality, and much more.
On top of the built-in functionality is an entire ecosystem of Shopify apps that let you add and adjust your dropshipping store functionality so every site is completely unique. You can plug-and-play thousands of apps, making Shopify a modular platform for building a dropshipping store.
In fact, Shopify offers so many add-on apps that it can get really overwhelming really fast, especially if you’re not experienced creating websites. It’s a platform that’s best set up to find success with the dropshipping business model.
Among the thousands of Shopify apps, there’s one for just about anything you could every want. But here are 12 that every dropshipping store should have installed.
Note: Apps are often referred to as plugins (like on WordPress), so this article uses “app” and “plugin” interchangeably.
Table of Contents
1. Oberlo
Oberlo is the most well-known and used dropshipping app, hands down. It allows you to basically automate the entire dropshipping process, instead of importing products and manually submitting orders.
Some of the top time-saving things you can do with Oberlo are:
- Conduct detailed product research
- Import product details from Oberlo and AliExpress
- Set price markups automatically or manually
- View recommended prices
- View product price increases and decreases and adjust your price accordingly
- Track supplier inventory and remove out-of-stock items
- Push Shopify order information to AliExpress (this saves ~5 minutes per order)
- Update order status in Shopify to notify customers about shipping
Bonus: If you’re using Oberlo on Chrome, you’d be remiss not to install the Oberlo Chrome plugin. It lets you sync orders, add products to your store, and even see which products have epacket shipping—all right on Ali Express.
Oberlo is an absolute must-have for anyone dropshipping from AliExpress.
Price: Free up to 50 orders/month
2. Ali Reviews
Product reviews are an extremely important component for showing social proof and building trust for your store and your products. You have a few options for getting reviews on your dropshipping products:
- Make up fake product reviews (please don’t do this)
- Wait months and months for your own customers to add reviews
- Import genuine reviews from AliExpress listings
If you’re willing to wait for your own customers to submit reviews, you can use the free Product Reviews app. But getting reviews is kind of a catch-22. You need reviews to encourage people to buy, and you need people to buy before they can submit reviews.
So if you’re dropshipping from AliExpress, you can use the reviews that buyers have already posted. The Ali Reviews app pulls in reviews from the product’s AliExpress listing. You can choose to just show 4- and 5-star ratings, and pick whether or not you want text and/or images to display.
For social proof via product reviews, if you’re dropshipping from AliExpress, you’ll most definitely want the Ali Reviews app.
Price: Free up to 10 products and 5 reviews each
The top-tier plan is just $14.90/month, which is well worth the value you get and the time you’ll save.
3. Google Shopping
Whether or not you plan to place shopping ads on Google, you should still have your product feed synced to Google Merchant Center.
The Google Shopping app on Shopify is a free way to get your product feed in Google Merchant Center without having to do development. As you can see from the low ratings on the app, people have a lot of trouble getting the feed to work. Make sure you follow all of the install instructions, and once you have it installed, you’ll have to go into your product data and make the recommended updates.
It does take some time to get the product feed approved and implemented, but it’s an important step to take.
4. Facebook / Instagram Channels
By default, Shopify allows customers to purchase products directly on your website. By adding certain apps, you can quickly allow customers to buy through other platforms, specifically social media. The most popular and effective channels are:
To get your dropshipping store published on these platforms, you just install the corresponding app to your Shopify store and connect each one to your profile on that platform.
Once these channel apps are installed on your dropshipping site, customers will be able to purchase from you directly on Facebook and Instagram.
5. Privy
When customers visit your website, you want to capture their email address so you can follow up with them in case they don’t purchase on their first visit. There are so many opt-in tools to choose from, but our top recommendation is Privy. It’s easy to install, easy to use, and the free plan comes with all you’ll need to get started.
In Privy, you can build pop-up forms, a spin and win fly out, and more—all to collect visitors’ email addresses.
It’s a must-have app for building your email list.
6. Email Marketing App
Since you’ll be collecting emails through Privy, as well as those of your customers, you’ll want a way to market to them. When you’re choosing an email marketing tool, make sure it integrates with Shopify.
Two options that work well with Shopify and are simple to use are MailChimp and ConvertKit.
MailChimp is free up to 2,000 subscribers and it syncs directly with your Shopify store. As new customers are added to Shopify, they get imported into MailChimp as well. You can automatically pull in product images, descriptions, and prices directly into MailChimp email messages. You can also create abandoned cart emails to bring customers who don’t complete their purchase back to the site.
ConvertKit is not free, but it’s affordable and allows you to do everything MailChimp does, plus more advanced automation and activity triggers. If email is a core component of your marketing strategy, it’s best to jump in with a comprehensive platform like ConverKit.
Whatever tool you use, you can install the respective Shopify app.
7. Bundles / Bulk Discounts App
When a customer is shopping on your site, you want to show them products they care about. If a customer is looking at shoes, for example, maybe you want to upsell them some socks. This type of product pairing can apply in any niche.
An bundles app helps make the process of offering multi-product bundles to customers much easier. You can set up bundles and when a customer adds one of the products to their cart, you can upsell them to increase their order value (and earn you more money).
Along the same vein, there are incentives for buying more than one of a product. There’s a BOGO (buy one get one) approach, or the flat discount off a certain quantify (for example, 20% off when you buy 3 or more).
Implementing bundles and bulk discounts is almost guaranteed to increase your average order value, but you need to invest to get the functionality set up on your dropshipping store. Most of the apps that allow you to do this powerful marketing tool charge a monthly fee—they know how important bundles and bulk discounts are.
The most cost-effective bundles app is Unlimited Bundles & Discounts. It’s focused on bundles and not bulk discounts, but it’s the most affordable of the Shopify apps that accomplish this.
If you’re ready to invest and really stand out with bundles and bulk discounts, you’re going to want a more powerful app like those from Bold. Bold has a suite of Shopify apps that help dropshipping and e-commerce stores offer bundles, bulk discounts, memberships, upsells, wholesale pricing, and more. So if you want to look at new revenue models for your dropshipping store, Bold apps are where it’s at.
8. Trackify
You may not plan on investing a ton in Facebook ads right away, but you should definitely install the Facebook tracking pixel on your Shopify dropshipping store right when you launch. Then when you are ready to ramp up Facebook advertising, you’ll have historical data that Facebook can use to find the best audience and lower your costs.
You can add your Facebook pixel right in the Shopify admin dashboard. But an app like Trackify will make sure you have your pixel installed correctly and allow you to build custom audiences, track custom events, and more without needing development experience.
BONUS: Facebook Pixel Helper
To make sure you have your pixel set up correctly and that Facebook is seeing the right data on your site, grab the free Facebook Pixel Helper Chrome plugin.
9. Related Products App
When you shop on an e-commerce site (think about your Amazon experience), you’ll usually see products related to the one you’re viewing. This is on purpose. It’s proven to increase order value…plus, it’s helpful for your customers to see other options and products in your store.
By default, some Shopify themes include related products, but many don’t. That is, of course, where apps come in. The Globo Related Products app is a free plugin that works with most Shopify themes to add related products to the bottom of product pages.
If you want to get more advanced in your recommendations, AI Powered Related Products use intelligence to recommend additional products to customers. There’s a free trial and a limited free plan, and the paid plans are very affordable, especially knowing you’ll likely make more sales when they’re install.
10. Aftership
Whether you’re dropshipping from AliExpress and have long shipping times, or your US dropshipping suppliers provide fast shipping turnaround, your customers will want to be able to track their order status.
Shopify sends shipping notifications, but doesn’t include tracking information by default. Aftership is a Shopify app that allows you to send tracking notifications to customers, and it also allows customers to view the status of their order on your website.
When customers can see their order information in real time, it cuts down on support requests and improves customer satisfaction.
11. Free Shipping Bar
A great way to increase order value is to offer free shipping on orders above a certain amount. For example, free shipping on orders over $45. When you offer that type of promo, customers need to know about it and be reminded of it.
Free Shipping Bar is a Shopify app that adds a notification bar to the top of your site that promotes your free shipping deal. It also updates as customers add more to their cart and get closer to the minimum order requirement. This encourages them to add more products to their cart because everyone loves free shipping
Note: this app isn’t as effective for dropshipping stores offering free shipping on all orders, but it’s still a great way to promote that there’s site-wide free shipping.
12. AMP
Search engines (especially Google) want your website to load fast. Your customers want that too. On mobile devices, one way to make sure your pages load fast is implementing AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages).
Creating AMP pages and functionality from scratch requires in-depth development experience, so most dropshippers can’t just build that from scratch. So of course there’s a plugin to make it easy. The AMP Shopify app helps speed up your site and apply AMP pages so search engines are more likely to show your site in search results.
If customers might shop on your store on their phone (they will), you’ll want AMP implemented, and this app is the easiest way to accomplish that.
Price: Robust free plan available
Those are the top 12 recommended apps for Shopify dropshipping stores. Many are free, and those that have paid plans are well worth it to improve sales and save time.