eCommerce website development continues to rise nowadays. Furthermore, organizations and even individuals looking to set up their eCommerce websites to keep up with the trends and the changes, there are a lot of platforms to build stores with, including the world-renowned platform, Shopify.
In terms of the numerous benefits of Shopify app development, experts in the eCommerce industry do not limit themselves to the platform’s in-built features. In the same way that inbound marketers use HubSpot integrations for running more advanced campaigns, the wizards of Shopify could use around five to ten tools from the App Store to gain more revenue from every customer.
Even though the shopping cart platform has existing solutions for the most common shop features, there are more third-party integrations that let you dive deeper into areas of high-impact than the standard out-of-the-box features. This is where the Shopify App Store plays a big part.
Shopify Integrations
A community of Shopify experts shares which tools they would recommend most for integration.
Development
Shopify is intended to ease store management instead of shooting up countless edge cases and dependencies. Tools for specialized development give developers of a Shopify development company a wonderful experience that translates to more affordable and quicker releases.
Tool value: It lets the development of local themes through source-code editors be more advanced, like VS Code.
Integration details: It looks out for theme files changes, syncing them with the Shopify server. This boosts development time quickly because the VS code has a liquid extension for highlighting syntax and intelli-sense.
Analytics
The tools enable the user experience and marketing teams to make more informed decisions. Today, just about any data point could be captured in Google Analytics for free, or in Google Tag Manager, or at an affordable $10 a month fee.
Tool value: Google Analytics let you comprehend where traffic is coming from and the content that visitors access on the website. You could check out your analytics and double down on what works to acquire more traffic.
Integration details: From the store preferences, Google Analytics could be turned on. All you need would be a free Google Analytics account. You could dig into the analytics to determine where traffic comes from, adjust marketing strategy, and focus on the most valuable channel.
Email Marketing
This covers a couple of emails, namely, transactional and nurturing emails. While there are lots of choices for integrating email marketing, the most popular by far is MailChimp.
Tool Value: MailChimp long has been a staple when it comes to email marketing, providing seamless ways of creating email capture forms, and creating subscriber lists. Extensive tracking enables easy tweaking and monitoring of campaigns. Furthermore, the automation emails mean that you could reach the right users at the right points.
Integration details: Integrating the tool to Shopify could add personalized recommendations of products to customers via making an analysis of their previous purchases.
Loyalty Programs
An independent eCommerce should first and foremost be in competition with Amazon, which is quite intimidating. One way of maintaining the attention of your customers is to use a loyalty program. Typically, it has a points system that gives rewards to re-purchases. One great tool example is Smile.io.
Tool value: The Smile.io Tool powers loyalty programs for internet brands worldwide. It’s an unbelievably powerful offering, yet getting started with it is extremely easy.
Integration detail: There’s an app that incorporates Shopify. As soon as the app is installed and configured, eCommerce stores will have an app that incorporates Shopify. As soon as the app is installed and configured, eCommerce stores will have a completely functional loyalty program enabled that could provide benefits to customers.
Five Reasons for Integrating Shopify with a back-end ERP/CRM System
Integration between two business systems today among businesses is extremely popular. Business integration not just integrates data, but the data integration platform could also set business processes. The following are reasons why you should integrate the online shopping platform into a CRM or ERP system.
1. Management of Inventory
With web store introduction, a customer must sync thousands of existing products in the web store. Also, if the customer builds any new product in the webshop that should be in sync with an ERP. Entering the products manually on the website and vice versa would be resource hungry, leading to high chances of error.
Besides, it’s critical to manage product inventory in Shopify a well as back-end ERP. Inventory in both should be updated with the actual product stock unit.
2. Customer management
Critical customer data should be matched between eCommerce and ERP systems. The process becomes more accurate and faster with an integration platform. Before, business owners managed data entry by entering them manually.
But with a webshop today, entering data manually has become something in the stone age. Since customers log in from a virtual environment and enter data, business owners should first collect data then enter it in the existing system.
3. Processing Orders
Managing the order cycle is a major part of any business. An order cycle typically is comprised of putting an order, invoicing, and delivery. Moreover, after delivery, stocks have to be managed. With an integrated platform, this could be done in just a few hours with 100 accuracy percentage.
Seamless business process
With an integration platform, business processes become seamless. Every business runs based on the processes that the business owner and stakeholders set. It further changes depending on the situation.
Without an integrated platform, then you have to train a manual entry operator, making the transition stage longer in case of big companies. The platform could be configured based on the changed requirement, and it should be changed in one place only if you use an integrated platform.
Use of Resources
Platform integration helps businesses use resources more efficiently. There would be no need for manual entry, thus less need for human resources.
Everything would be automated and the platform pretested for accuracy and lesser chances of data errors. Any changes would be quickly adapted to the system because there’s no training required.
Grow Your User Base with an Integrated App
To keep the user base growing, you must continue to grow your business. While you could try to create new campaigns, or utilize new marketing channels tactics, there’s another way of reaching an entire pool of prospective new users and this is targeting merchants who are using other Shopify apps already.
Here are Tips and Tricks to make it Happen
Find other apps that boost your offering
A lot of tasks take up the merchant’s time, including building product listings, inventory sourcing, product promotion, product image editing, tracking campaigns, building campaigns, and so on. Your application is likely to make one those tasks easier. However, it’s only one aspect of the grind.
Is it possible to integrate an app, which comes around at another phase, and even add more efficiencies? There are so many possible overlapping tasks between applications that could be made easier. Determine what app you want to be added to your own, but has no bandwidth to craft it.
Rather than stressing yourself, considering working together to make things better not only for you but also for the merchants who use your applications.
Create an API for your own application
As your application becomes more and more popular, you may discover that other developers want to create integrations for your product. Most probably, when creating integrations, they’ll mention your application on their app listing pages, which is a truly great free marketing for you.
Some examples of present Shopify applications having their own APIs include Refersion, Yotpo, and Klaviyo.
Make an integration and include in the app listing
When you have decided on the app that complements yours, consider creating integrations into their apps. For you to do this, find out if the application you want to connect possesses an open API. You could also send a direct message to the developer. The easier the apps work together, the more probability that merchants will adopt both.
An example of a couple of apps working together includes Klaviyo and Swell. Both help in acquiring and retaining customers, but with different tactics. Swell offers referral and reward functions, while Klaviyo helps merchants in running efficient email campaigns.
Through integrations, merchants could combine techniques and could directly include referral codes in the email campaigns. Upon making an integration, include the details in the application listing page, which is a great way to help users give the app a try.
Building together for App Users Growth
Hundreds and even thousands of app merchants are working towards growing their business on Shopify. In an attempt of reaching out to as many as possible, there’s no need for you to trudge on your own.
Consider working with other successful application developers to boost your business together. This helps everyone grow and succeed in their business endeavors.
Conclusion
Start your business with the Shopify eCommerce platform and you would never go wrong. Furthermore, you could Integrate Your Business with Various Platforms Using Shopify to further boost your offerings, processes, which leads of course to higher and better ROI.
