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How 10 Shopify apps have impacted my sales

I have installed 15 apps from the Shopify store since launching My Wedding Decor in late April. Here I examine the impact of 10 of those apps on my sales.

Quantity Breaks ($16.99 per month) lets you provide tiered discounts. With a minimum order of 10 items, my customers receive a 5 percent discount for 11 to 20 items, a 10 percent discount for an order of more than 21 items, and so on.

However I unwittingly ruined many potential sales by including the minimum order quantity in the product title, such as “Product X Set of 10.” This made most shoppers think that a $10 unit price with a minimum set of 10 meant it cost $100 for 100 products, when it actually cost $100 for 10 items.

I removed all “quantity” phrases from the product titles on July 5 to help customers better understand the pricing levels. You can see the impact on sales conversions in the table below.

Before July 5:

  • 3.85 percent added to cart.
  • 0.73 percent reached checkout.
  • 0.22 percent purchased.

After July 5:

  • 2.67 percent added to cart.
  • 0.78 percent reached checkout.
  • 0.33 percent purchased.

Product Options ($9.99 per month) allows you to create product variations, such as colors, sizes, and flavors.

While I believed it would save customers time to enter their product preferences and wedding details with their orders, most felt overwhelmed being asked for such information up front.

Clearly, this was a big barrier to making the sale; I needed a way to let them progress straight to checkout.

Product Options’ premium level includes conditional questions that display or hide fields and options based on what customers select in a previous field. But it’s not easy to program: I had to ask Product Options’ customer support how to apply the question, “Enter your wedding information now?” with a “Yes” radio button answer that would reveal the required fields below for over 160 products and their variations.

Installing the conditional question on July 19 greatly improved sales conversions as you can see from the table below.

Before July 19:

  • 4.12 percent added to cart.
  • 0.78 percent reached checkout.
  • 0.19 percent purchased.

After July 19:

  • 3.25 percent added to cart.
  • 1.78 percent reached checkout.
  • 0.89 percent purchased.

Lucky Orange ($10 per month) allows you to watch in real-time your visitors’ clicks and moves and offer live chat. By June I could see most customers didn’t understand pricing and that they had to enter the product page information to reach checkout. I installed the Product Options’ conditional question to speed their progress on July 19.

Store Locator (free for one location) provides customers with a Google map to find your storefront. This app ties in with Google+ so local visitors are more likely to find your website in results. Traffic from organic search has increased from 24 percent of the total to 43 percent after installing Store Locator on July 19.

Before July 19:

  • Direct 39 percent.
  • Referrals 37 percent.
  • Search 24 percent.

After July 19:

  • Search 43 percent.
  • Direct 35 percent.
  • Social 13 percent.
  • Referrals 8 percent.

Abandonment Protector ($8 per month) allows you to send a series of emails to shoppers who have abandoned their carts.  This app has helped recover 16.6 percent of abandoned carts since I installed it on July 3.

Instant Search ($9.99 per month) shows shoppers the closest matching products in a site search. Ten percent of searches on my site thus far have related to one color. It is probably no coincidence that 25 percent of sales have included products with this color since I installed Instant Search on June 19.

Gleam’s Competition app ($39 per month) facilitates contests or giveaways, for shoppers to sign up, follow, comment, or participate in return for prizes. This app helped grow my newsletter list.

The Pop-up Window app (free), enables you to entice consumers to sign up for your newsletter with a simple pop-up with one field for their email address.

I have tested the delay before this newsletter pop-up appears, from 150 seconds to 60 seconds to find its “sweet spot.” So far, the pop-up window has not proved as successful as Gleam’s competitions in driving newsletter signups.

The Pop-up Window includes just 20 characters for its email address button, which also limits what I can say to prospective subscribers.

Kit ($10 per month for fewer than 10,000 Facebook fans) runs automated, customized ads on Facebook, to promote, for example, your latest products, best sellers, or slow moving inventory. Kit draws in 10 percent of my site’s visitors but has not yet produced any sales.

McAfee’s security logo is free for your first 500 visitors per month. There has been no drop in sales when the McAfee logo disappears each month after the 500th visitor. In fact, 75 percent of my sales occur after the 15th (and after 500 visitors for that month) — so I won’t be paying to upgrade this app just yet.

Elizabeth Hollingsworth
Elizabeth Hollingsworth
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