Index
- 1) Marketing Tools
- 2) Payment Gateway
- 3) Analysis tools
- 4) Inventory management
- 5) Shipping and logistics
- 6) Chat and customer service
- 7) Product reviews
- 8) Remarketing and retargeting
- Conclusion
The ecommerce world is always evolving and competition, as we know, is relentless. Both to survive in this sector and to ensure online success, it is necessary not only to offer quality products, but also to use the right technologies and the most efficient integrations. Among the most widely used platforms, Shopify is certainly among the preferred options due to its ease of use, flexibility and scalability.
What, however, is the defining characteristic of an excellent shopping experience? The answer lies in integration. The word 'integration' refers to the process of connecting an online shop with various systems, applications, platforms and tools to optimise the operation, management and growth of the online business.
Integrations are critical because they increase the efficiency of business processes, ensure greater data consistency, improve customer engagement, create an omnichannel experience, allow for scalability and enable key business decision-making improvements.
In this article, we will explore a number of integrations that we consider to be essential for a Shopify ecommerce and that are able to maximise the potential of your online shop.
1) Marketing Tools
To make the most of your sales and promotions, it is important to integrate your shop with the best marketing tools that can cover a wide range of services: from email marketing to online advertising to social media, SEO and much more. Why is this important? To begin with, they allow you to automate your marketing activities, which leads to considerable time savings without losing the quality of the way you communicate with your customers. Furthermore, marketing tools focusing for instance on SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) can help you improve your online visibility to attract more qualified visitors to your site. Finally, you can segment your audience to create ad-hoc campaigns and monitor and analyse their performance.
So which marketing integrations are not to be missed?
Facebook & Instagram: the integration you need to sell on Facebook and Instagram and manage your business seamlessly from a single workspace in Shopify.
Google & Youtube: a simple but powerful integration for reaching people on Google and YouTube and launching targeted paid campaigns.
Instafeed: if you use Instagram, this tool is a must-have, as it allows you to embed engaging Instagram feeds into Shopify shops.
Klaviyo: an excellent automation tool, Klaviyo focuses on email and SMS marketing.
2) Payment Gateway
The right payment gateways allow your customers to perform transactions securely and efficiently. They enable you to offer your customers a smooth payment experience without redirects to other sites and advanced security measures. In addition, this way you can offer different payment options, which is very important for customers, and at the same time simplify the handling of transactions. Finally, it should be remembered that many gateways offer the possibility of international transactions, which translates into a potential expansion of your business abroad.
Here are the main payment gateways to consider:
Paypal: one of the most used payment methods internationally with a wide range of payment methods.
Stripe: a popular payment gateway that is easy to integrate with your Shopify shop and packed with advanced features.
Shopify Payments: available from 2019 is an internal Shopify payment system that allows customers to pay without being redirected to other pages.
Klarna: Klarna is one of those solutions that allows your customers to pay for their purchases in instalments. It is a service that is increasingly in demand.
Amazon Pay: an interesting option to consider as Amazon customers can directly use their Amazon account to make purchases.
3) Analysis tools
Analytics tools are essential for monitoring and optimising the performances of your online shop. They may concern collecting data, monitoring user behaviour on your site, analysing specific KPIs, dwell time on various pages and the effectiveness of the marketing strategies you are implementing. It is therefore clear that having these tools is a must if you want to manage your ecommerce in the best possible way. Here are a number of options not to be overlooked:
Google Analytics 4: Google Analytics is one of the leading web analytics platforms. If you are already familiar with the platform, remember that from 1 July 2023, Google Universal properties will no longer process data and you will have to use GA4.
Facebook Pixel: if you use social media to advertise yourself, you must install the Facebook pixel, i.e. a tracking code that, once integrated, allows you to create audience segments, generate dynamic ads and monitor the performance of your remarketing campaigns.
Hotjar: with Hotjar you can monitor a lot of data but also use heat maps to understand how users interact with your shop, identify any usability issues and optimise the user experience.
Mixpanel: another analysis tool that gives you a complete view of the actions users take on your ecommerce.
4) Inventory management
Proper inventory management is absolutely important to have good stock control and manage your warehouse efficiently and avoid costly mistakes. Thanks to inventory management integrations, you can keep track of available products, quantities, variants and order information. So let's take a look at some interesting inventory management integrations:
Quickbooks: a powerful tool for managing inventory and orders that can be integrated directly with Shopify.
ShipBob: besides being famous for order processing, ShipBob also offers interesting inventory management.
Stocky: is a specially developed Shopify app to manage inventory in an informed way based on past performance and sales trends.
Back in Stock: another Shopify app that, however, allows you to manage item availability notifications.
5) Shipping and logistics
Integrating a Shopify shop with shipping and logistics tools is essential to optimise the shipping process of your products and offer a reliable delivery experience to your customers. These types of tools allow you to automate, simplify and monitor delivery operations. Here are the ones that might be of interest to you:
Shippo: a very good shipping management tool that integrates with Shopify and offers numerous functionalities.
Shippypro: shipping platform that helps in tracking, shipping and managing returns.
Aftership: a solution that allows you to track shipments in real time, providing tracking information to your customers and managing returns.
Katana MRP: software that can be integrated with Shopify for order and inventory management.
6) Chat and customer service
By integrating chat and customer support tools to your Shopify shop, you can offer instant, high-quality support to your customers, improving their shopping experience and increasing trust in your business. Providing real-time support makes a difference by helping customers quickly solve problems. You can also collect important feedback from users who use this service while allowing you to create lasting relationships with them. Let us therefore see what can be valid proposals:
Zendesk: customer support platform that allows managing tickets, real-time chat and social media interactions, as well as analysing performance metrics and obtaining customer feedback.
Livechat: real-time chat tool that allows you to communicate directly with visitors to your website.
Help Scout: customer service platform that simplifies the management of tickets and conversations with customers.
Gorgias: customer support platform that integrates directly with Shopify.
7) Product reviews
Products review tools play a critical role in influencing purchasing decisions and building the trust of potential buyers. Not only do reviews provide greater authenticity and credibility, they can also contain detailed information that other users are interested in, as well as valuable feedback for possible improvements. What are some of the best integrations you can make in this area?
Trustpilot: Trustpilot is a well-known online review platform with which you can collect and manage product reviews transparently.
Product Reviews: highlight what customers love about your products by adding ratings and reviews to your online shop.
Loox: a social proof solution that harnesses the power of reviews and referrals to strengthen trust in your brand
Judge.me: another tool to collect and display reviews and star ratings of products. building trust and increasing sales with social proof.
8) Remarketing and retargeting
By integrating a Shopify shop with remarketing and retargeting tools, you maximise the value of visitors to your online shop, boost conversions and thereby improve the return on investment (ROI) of your marketing campaigns. In doing so, you increase your chances of recovering your lost customers, personalise your offers by tailoring them to the interactions your visitors have made, optimise your advertising campaigns by increasing conversions and strengthen your brand. We have already talked about Google Analytics and Facebook Pixel in the previous sections, so let us proceed by mentioning other tools to consider:
Adroll Marketing & Advertising: remarketing platform that allows you to create customised ads and reach users who have already visited your website.
Criteo: advertising platform that makes it easy to launch, manage and measure advertising campaigns.
Blend: automates and scales ads on Meta, Bing, Google and Tik Tok to help e-commerce shops grow.
Conclusion
We've seen that integrations are fundamental to the success of a Shopify shop. From marketing means to payment solutions, from analysis to customer support, from product reviews to logistics, every integration plays an important role in making your shop more efficient.
If you're searching for a reliable partner for your Shopify integrations, we are here to help you. DevInterface is a team of experts with specialised skills in the development and integration of Shopify solutions. We are able to personalise and implement the necessary integrations to make your Shopify shop a success.
Contact us and schedule a non binding call to discover how we can help you improve and optimise your shop with essential integrations.
