There’s a lot to be said for BigCommerce.
At IWD, we’re big fans. We’ve been building BigCommerce sites for years.
However, as much as we love this platform, we’re also big advocates for making the most of them by using BigCommerce plugins.
The BigCommerce marketplace is full of options you can use to improve your site in countless ways.
It’s definitely worth checking out when you have a minute, but if you want to consider every option, you’ll probably need a week. Or two.
That’s why I put together this list of BigCommerce plugins that I consider absolutely essential no matter what kind of store you run, what audience you serve, or what market you’re in. The following five BigCommerce plugins will improve every step of your store’s conversion funnel to immediately increase revenue.
Many of these plugins are free, or at least have a free version you can get started with, too.
Let’s start with talking about that crucial step right before the sale, when the customer has a full cart and only needs to check out to put money right into your pocket.
Pop quiz: on average, how many shoppers abandon their cart?
Are you ready for this?
It's an absolutely brutal 70%.
This is why it’s so important that you prioritize reducing your cart abandonment rate. Otherwise, you’ll spend a lot of time and money on every other step of your conversion funnel only to see those efforts go to waste at the very end.
And while there are a lot of ways to do this, the simplest solution is using a BigCommerce checkout app called Dominate.
I'm not alone here, either.
This powerful app currently has well over 500 customer reviews that average 4.9 stars!
Dominate is also continuously optimizing their checkout extension to make sure you get the highest conversion possible for your BigCommerce store. This app only takes a few clicks to add it to your BigCommerce store and give you access a ton of features like:
It can even handle transactions in 100 different currencies through more than 100 different payment processors, so you can sell to customers all over the world.
But the best part may actually be the price tag.
The next BigCommerce app I want to cover is for search engine optimization, because if you can't get people to your website, the rest of the funnel really doesn't matter.
Unfortunately, SEO can be a bit of a headache. And I say that as the owner of a company that specializes in eCommerce SEO services.
But it’s true. Optimizing your BigCommerce site for organic traffic is almost always a hassle.
This is why I recommend FavSEO to clients.
This app takes a lot of the pain out of handling some of the most important tasks related to search engine optimization. For example, its SEO audit tool shows where the site needs the most help and what you need to do to make those improvements, so it’s easy to continually raise your rankings.
FavSEO also has a bulk editor tool to update your site's title tags and meta descriptions. This tool is especially helpful if you have a BigCommerce site with a lot of pages and a lot of products you have to go update on a regular basis, too.
Writing product descriptions that convert is already tough enough but trying to go through and update all of those products one-by-one can take hours, weeks, or even months.
You won’t need to find that kind of time if you take advantage of FavSEO.
And you won’t need a huge budget, either. FavSEO is very affordable at only $19.95 a month. This app is absolutely packed with features that you cannot afford to not have for your BigCommerce store.
One of the easiest places for store owners to optimize their site is by improving their store’s search functionality.
At this point, it goes without saying that everyone's used to going to Amazon or Google and going straight to their search to find what they need.
But what happens when those people go to an eCommerce store?
More often than not, they’re disappointed by the site’s search functionality – or lack thereof. Frustration quickly convinces them it’s best to go looking elsewhere.
Or, maybe even worse, a site’s search functionality seems to work, but it fails to bring the customer to the product they want. Maybe they used the wrong name or misspelled the right one. Either way, they decide the store must not have what they need and decide to check out a competitor.
Whatever the case, you just can’t take chances with your BigCommerce site’s search functionality.
Now, obviously, you probably don’t have Amazon money lying around to give your BigCommerce site the same exact type of search experience.
The good news is you don’t need that kind of budget to offer a profitable search experience.
Klevu will optimize your BigCommerce store’s search experience, but it doesn’t stop there.
It's not just a great search tool for getting customers from point A to point B. It also uses artificial intelligence to personalize recommendations to shoppers based on a number of different metrics. So, you get a better user experience and more conversions.
And that's not all, either.
Klevu comes with a bunch of other tools to help improve your BigCommerce site, such as merchandising strategies, conducting A/B tests, and some B2B features, as well.
Of course, making it effortless for customers to find the products they want is only half the battle.
What's the other half?
It's convincing them to actually go through with the purchase.
One of the most effective ways to do this is to show customers how many others have bought your products and how much they absolutely loved them.
Yotpo makes this incredibly easy to do.
This app will reach out to customers on your behalf to get their glowing reviews and automatically upload those to your site and the corresponding product pages. The company actually started off in the eCommerce space focusing on product reviews – and they really do kick ass at this – but they’ve since gone on to offer a lot more than that.
More than 150,000 eCommerce sites rely on this powerful app.
I’ll probably do another post that goes into more detail about Yotpo and some of its many features in the future.
However, in general, the major enhancements Klevu offers are:
So, adding this one plugin to your BigCommerce store is like putting it on steroids. It’s really an unfair advantage if your competitors don’t know about it.
Yotpo does offer a free version of their platform, but that’s for a teaser version and doesn't get you all the features I’. To get all of them, you’ll need to opt for the paid version.
Even with great product pages full of helpful content, detailed images, and rave reviews from customers, some of your shoppers are still going to need a little help getting them across the finishing line.
So, what happens then?
Well, if they don't find the help they need on your site, I have bad news: they're most likely going to go look somewhere else and they're probably never going to come back.
That's why just about every major eCommerce store out there now offers some kind of live chat support, so their staff can speak to customers directly while they're shopping. If a potential customer has a question before they buy, they get the answer right there and can then make their purchase.
LiveChat is a great app for this because it goes beyond just offering virtual conversations.
But I also love that it’s built for eCommerce, so you can send customers product cards and product recommendations directly through your chat.
This is a great feature that will absolutely help increase your conversion rate. If a customer clicks one of these cards, they'll be taken directly to the product page like a normal link.
But unlike a normal link, these cards look like mini product pages, so they're going to get a lot more clicks and help customers way more than just a link sent through chat.
LiveChat has other features that will also help your reps, such as showing them what's already in the customer’s shopping cart. That way, they can help make informed, personalized recommendations that will increase conversions and average order values.
Finally, once you have potential customers coming to your site and buying products, what’s left to do?
Continuing to make money from them by leveraging the power of email marketing.
To do that, you need a powerful email marketing app.
And for that, nothing compares to Klaviyo.
Klaviyo completely crushes it when it comes to email marketing for eCommerce stores. Their user interface is super intuitive and easy to use, which I love because a lot of our clients have never utilized one of these platforms before.
Furthermore, setting up all of your necessary email flows is simple, too. Just some examples of the types of campaigns you can run through Klaviyo include:
Klaviyo also has a lot more than just email marketing, too. This is another app that comes packed with features, like:
And if you need help with any of this, we’re here to help. Aside from email marketing, we’re also a full-service social media agency.
This is another Swiss army knife that will supercharge your BigCommerce store and help grow your business in a big way.
Alright, so those are my absolute favorite BigCommerce plugins and, again, they’re the ones we use when we build sites for our clients from scratch. I can’t recommend them enough. Add them to your BigCommerce site and watch your results explode.
And if you have any recommendations I didn’t cover, feel free to leave them in the comment section below.
