11 Must-Try BigCommerce Apps to Help Your Store Thrive

11 Must-Try BigCommerce Apps to Help Your Store Thrive
Charlene Boutin Charlene Boutin Aug 27, 2020 —  9 min read

Of course, you’ve heard of BigCommerce. They’re a popular alternative to the well-known Shopify platform.

With no transaction fees and several robust features available for a reasonable price, this platform is quickly becoming a new favorite for many ecommerce store owners.

But just like Shopify, the features BigCommerce comes with out of the box are just the beginning. Its marketplace is chock-full of versatile add-ons, from free to high end, that can help you at every step of your ecommerce.


To narrow down your choices, we’ve gathered 10 BigCommerce apps that can help you set up, create an amazing customer experience, market and scale your business. Keep reading or go straight to the one that piques your interest the most:

  1. Shogun – user-friendly ecommerce website builder with templates.
  2. Unbound – a professional mobile app built from scratch specifically for your store.
  3. Sellbrite – automated listing of your products on platforms like Amazon, eBay, Jet, and more.
  4. FavSEO – SEO add-on to help your website get discovered by customers on Google.
  5. S Loyalty – easy reward program implementation to encourage your customers to purchase more.
  6. ShipperHQ – automated shipping cost displayed to customers to reduce cart abandonment.
  7. Yotpo – next-level customer review reminders at checkout with built-in performance analytics.
  8. Klaviyo – a full-featured email marketing solution designed for ecommerce stores.
  9. Getsitecontrol – beautiful popups and forms to announce deals, collect emails, and prevent abandonment.
  10. Omnisend – full-featured marketing automation platform for ecommerce stores
  11. Affiliatly – custom affiliate program created for your store to scale your reach through bloggers.

Apps for BigCommerce store setup

Whether you’re starting completely from scratch or just want some help setting up your ecommerce store to make more sales, the following BigCommerce apps have you covered.

Design a beautiful store with Shogun

Creating a beautiful, user-friendly store has never been easier with a tool like Shogun.

This tool has everything you need to build out every section of your site to fit your vision. Because it’s drag-and-drop, it’s easy to use, even if you’ve never designed a site before!

Additionally, Shogun has you covered if you’re hitting a wall in terms of inspiration. They have several beautiful templates you can use so you don’t have to start completely from scratch.

Shogun dashboard helps to set up an ecommerce store

Unlike other drag-and-drop page builders, Shogun was built specifically with ecommerce in mind. This means it comes fully loaded with important features like product listings, sliders, accordions, and even countdown timers to create that FOMO feeling.

However, Shogun is more than just a BigCommerce website builder. It’s got some serious power with advanced features like:

  • A/B testing integrated directly in the page builder

  • Advanced analytics to help you learn what’s working and what’s not

  • Product sync between multiple stores

If you don’t ever want to touch a line of code and can’t afford a website designer, look no further.

Create a seamless mobile experience with Unbound Commerce

Granted, this app is not just a plugin. Unbound Commerce is essentially a development team that will collaborate with you to launch a mobile app from the ground up, specifically for your BigCommerce store.

If you think your store doesn’t need a mobile app, think again.

During last year’s holiday season, 40% of all ecommerce purchases were made on a smartphone.

Of course, customers can purchase from your store on mobile even if you don’t have an app. For example, if you’re using Shogun to design your site, they have a pretty neat mobile-responsive feature.

However, mobile apps make the buyer journey so much better. They’re designed especially for mobile platforms and make it easy to come back again and again without going through a more complex mobile browser experience.

The Unbound Commerce team can help you develop both an iOS and Android app at once, saving you tons of money in terms of development while getting your store on a wider market.

Unbound mobile app development for iOS

Plus, they integrate your app directly with Apple Pay, GooglePay, and Paypal. And as you probably know, the easier it is for customers to pay you, the more likely they’ll complete the checkout process! You can also get your app to contain other features like:

  • Push notifications to increase your sales

  • Flash sales and in-app messaging

  • A handy dashboard control panel

The bottom line: Unbound Commerce is more expensive than a simple mobile-responsive website but more affordable than hiring a development team. If you’re serious about making an impression on mobile, give them a go.

Become available everywhere with Sellbrite

When you start your business on BigCommerce, one important step you should always take is to make your inventory available elsewhere than on your BigCommerce store. There’s a huge pool of consumers that prefer to shop on bigger stores like eBay and Amazon. Why would you lose out on an opportunity to sell to them?

However, creating listings for every platform takes forever, and you’ve already got enough work with one store.

That’s where Sellbrite comes in.

This BigCommerce app automatically gives your store a wider outreach with less effort thanks to its multi-channel listing tool. You can easily import your BigCommerce products to eBay, Amazon, Jet, and even Walmart.

Sellbrite app for BigCommerce allows for submitting product listings on 3rd-party platforms

What’s more, if you’re starting your store from scratch, you can create your listings directly in Sellbrite. This automatically updates your BigCommerce store while listing your inventory on all the other platforms.

Additionally, you won’t need to keep a constant watch on your stock throughout all platforms – Sellbrite syncs up the inventory for you.

This is the most hands-off approach there is to inventory and listing management. You’ll expand your reach much faster with this tool in hand.

Boost your organic reach with FavSEO

Want your store to get found online without spending a ridiculous amount of money on pay-per-click advertising? You can ensure your BigCommerce site pops up in the appropriate keyword search results by optimizing for SEO.

Although you can technically do SEO without an app, it takes much longer to update all your data and keep track of your rankings.

With FavSEO, that won’t be a problem. Out of all SEO apps for BigCommerce, FavSEO is the top-rated add-on. You’ll soon see why.

It does everything you would expect an SEO tool to do:

  • Edit titles

  • Change meta descriptions and Alt tags

  • Submit your sitemap to Google

Beyond the basics, it also provides you with a handy bulk edit tool that makes it easy to edit existing product listings. The alternative is to go through each listing by hand to update them for SEO-optimized data.

FavSEO bulk editor optimizes an ecommerce store for search engines

It doesn’t end there – this app also helps you keep track of your SEO rankings! Thanks to this, you’ll know whether or not your hard work is paying off. And if you don’t know what keywords you should be trying to rank for, FavSEO will give you suggestions.

Create an amazing customer experience

Did you know that it costs 5 times more to attract new customers than to retain existing ones?

With this in mind, you want your BigCommerce store to retain clients. For that to work, you need to provide an amazing, convenient experience that will leave a positive impact on them.

That goes beyond what your products have to offer. Here are some tools that can take your customer experience to the next level and help to retain more paying customers.

Reward your loyal customers with S Loyalty

Your best marketers are your existing buyers.

Make the most of these customers by rewarding them for their loyalty! With S Loyalty, it’s easier than ever. The app allows you to implement a rewards program without having to program anything from scratch.

You can schedule timed campaigns, use a point system, add custom rewards in the case of special events – like birthdays – and make points expire to encourage more immediate shopping.

S Loyalty reward program examples

When you run a reward program like this, customers have one more reason to choose you over your latest competition. Plus, the platform is both optimized for desktop and mobile to create a seamless experience for everyone.

Reduce cart abandonment with ShipperHQ

The Baymard Institute documented an average of 69.57% for cart abandonment rates across several online platforms. That’s more than ⅔ of purchases, abandoned just before their completion!

Guess what the main cause of cart abandonment turns out to be.

Yup – extra costs like shipping. It stands at 55% of reasons for abandoning carts.

So how can you reduce the #1 reason for cart abandonment and automatically make more sales?

Enter ShipperHQ.

This BigCommerce app eliminates buyer friction by calculating shipping costs automatically and giving you more control.

ShipperHQ calculates shipping costs to prevent buyers from unpleasant surprises

Customers can instantly see shipping costs and don’t get surprised when they click on the checkout box. It also ensures you and your customer are both getting the best deals for shipping.

It’s a win-win!

Grow with smart marketing

Your store is set up and your buyers are happy. Now it’s time to grow. Here are the tools that will help you boost sales by acquiring more repetitive customers.

Supercharge social proof with Yotpo

BigCommerce comes ready with a customer review tool, but you can take it to the next level with Yotpo.

This tool notifies customers automatically when they check out and asks them for a review, thus increasing the likelihood they’ll actually take the time to write something about your product.

You can display rich snippets of these reviews in the on-site search bar, which makes your products much more attractive to those looking for a particular item. No one wants to be the first to buy something!

BigCommerce app by Yotpo encourages customers to leave a product review right away

Customers can also submit content like images and videos for display on the review. That way, new buyers can see a real-life representation of your products from real people.

The cherry on top? It comes with analytics to help you keep track of your store’s performance.

Nail your email marketing with Klaviyo

How do you encourage existing customers to purchase again and again?

Email marketing! This method of marketing alone has proven to generate $44 for every dollar you spend.

While there are plenty of email marketing tools out there, Klaviyo is built specifically for ecommerce. This is the one you want for your store.

Here’s a quick overview of what you can do with this BigCommerce app:

  • Create and launch cart abandonment sequences

  • Send targeted or general marketing emails

  • Insert powerful personalization

  • Create targeted split sequences

Apart from these basics, the tool allows you to track performance metrics as well as customer data and behavior. When you know what your customers are responding to, you can adapt your marketing techniques to scale your profits.

Klaviyo provides everything an ecommerce store owner needs to launch an email marketing campaign

But the best part is that you can start using Klaviyo for free. Up until you have built your email list to 250 contacts, there is no fee to use the tool. Email away!

Boost website conversions with Getsitecontrol

There are many solutions available on the market for opt-in forms and popups, but Getsitecontrol takes it a step further to ensure no customers fall down the cracks.

It brings a versatile popup and form builder with a variety of targeting settings. As an ecommerce store owner, you get a full set of tools for increasing customer engagement.

Here is what you can achieve with this app:

  • Design enticing email subscription forms to quickly grow your list

  • Create contact forms to make it easy for customers to get in touch with you

  • Display calls-to-action for timely deals based on specific on-page behaviors

  • Install exit-intent popups to prevent cart abandonment

  • Survey your store visitors to learn more about what they want

Getsitecontrol allows you to thoroughly design popups and set up their appearance to make them look coherent on your website. It also comes with real-time statistics and an A/B testing feature – meaning that you’ll be able to optimize popup performance by running several variations and comparing results.

Thanks to these features, you can collect more leads for future email marketing campaigns and get the best ROI from your store.

Automate your marketing efforts with Omnisend

Even if you have an established online store and it already brings sales, marketing is an ongoing process that never really ends. And ecommerce marketing can quickly become overwhelming, especially with a small team.

That’s when marketing automation software comes into play.

In that category of Bigcommerce apps, Omnisend is one of the most popular options. It helps you reach and convert customers via email, push notifications, Facebook Messenger, and sms. The biggest advantage of such an omnichannel approach is that you can replace multiple tools with a single platform.

Omnisend is an omnichannel marketing automation platform for Bigcommerce

Omnisend allows you to apply precise audience segmentation and personalize your messages based on customer data, campaign engagement, and shopping behavior. This way, you can have clear scenarios for abandoned carts, first-time customers, and cross-selling.

The best part? You don’t really need to create anything from scratch. Omnisend offers pre-built automation workflows, includes beautiful email newsletters designs and customizable templates to save your time.

Scale your reach

At some point in your scaling efforts, you’ll want to take it a step further. Here’s how you can market your BigCommerce store beyond your current reach.

Gather an army of marketers with Affiliatly

There are thousands of bloggers with a reach you’ll never have out there. Make the most out of their communities and expand your reach by using an affiliate program.

Create a team of affiliates with Affiliatly – they’ll talk about your products and send their audience over to you, without you having to pay them a direct salary. Affiliates earn commissions from the referrals they make, and you can set up exactly how those commissions work with this awesome BigCommerce app.

Affiliatly is a BigCommerce app to help you connect with affiliates from relevant niches

Affiliatly doesn’t just allow you to create an affiliate program – you can also market and track your entire operation.

  • Create. Set up commissions for each product, develop banners that your affiliates can use to promote your store, and choose how affiliate earnings will function.

  • Market. Add a popup at your checkout to entice customers to become affiliates.

  • Track. Keep a solid track of royalties, QR codes, coupon codes, and customer emails, plus delete inactive affiliates and compare stats between them.

Grow your ecommerce empire with these BigCommerce apps

We’ve just reviewed tools to help you at each stage of your marketing strategy: from store setup to reach expansion through affiliates. Go ahead and give one of them a try!

With the right combination of apps for Bigcommerce, you can turn your store into a full-blown business that scales efficiently.

Charlene Boutin is a freelance content writer & email marketing strategist for hire specializing in helping Ecommerce and SaaS businesses increase conversions by growing authentic relationships with their audience. She loves helping business owners tell their unique stories to capture the hearts of more customers.

You're reading Getsitecontrol blog where marketing experts share proven tactics to grow your online business. This article is a part of Ecommerce marketing section.

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